Dear Matteo, 73 Months Old

Every generation has its set of games that strike like lightning. In the past, that’s been Pogs and Pokemon. For you, it seems Beyblades have reached that level of enthusiasm.

You wake up thinking about Beyblades. You make beds for them at night. We watch the Beyblade TV shows in their multiple derivatives. We talk about how many Beyblades your friends have, and you’ve introduced them to some friends, too. You use voice commands on my phone (because you can’t spell or type much yet) to search for Beyblades and add them to your shopping list. “I want all the Beyblades on my list to come on Christmas, Dad.”

Of course, these aren’t just collectibles. You “fight” with them in your Beystadium. Using a “ripper” you set the tops and battle me or a friend with the countdown: “3, 2, 1. Let it rip!” The ceremony of it all is as consistent as Catholic mass. The tops spin around and bump into each other until one of them stops first and we have a still-spinning winner.

The Beyblades look fairly similar but have different designs on top and some different heights and weights, so far as I can tell. The retailer in me says this sensation of plastic tops has a helluva mark-up. Thankfully, your ever-thrifty Mom found another mom dumping a set of Beyblades in Puyallup and doubled your collection just yesterday for the low cost of $30.

This all is a natural way of discovering and exploring your identity. Hobbies come and go, and they’re a way of growing and exploring yourself. Ghostbusters and then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the worlds that I explored and played in as a kid. Adults aren’t so different. I’m learning how to fish salmon and that’s a world of customs and language to learn unto itself. Some adults get too busy to have hobbies or claim not to have them. That’s the result of giving too much time to responsibilites or forgetting the importance of trying something new.

We’ll go all in on Beyblades until we go all in on the next thing. As it should be. Let it rip.

Love, Dad

Dear Eliza, 93 Months Old

Your Mom just texted me that you “survived” a roundtrip 1.8-mile, flat hike while I’m hanging back on a work day. Sometimes when we push you on hikes or other physical activities you complain that you’re “too tired” and your body can’t do it. As if that same body didn’t walk for 20 miles a day just a couple of months ago in Europe.

Of course, you also tell us you want to climb Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier. Sister, let me tell you that those are longer, tougher hikes. And you’ll be able to do them. The body is an amazing vessel that can do whatever the mind tells it. We just have to make sure your mind is in a “let’s do this” mode when it counts.

Some fun, mind you is, Type 2 fun. That’s to say that it’s not all fun in the moment but fun to remember in retrospect. That’s not as fun as Type 1 fun, which is fun in the moment, but way better than Type 3 fun, which is never really fun in the moment or memory. We can thank writer Kelly Cordes for the fun scale to measure activities by.

Your Mom and I experienced a mix of Type 1 and Type 2 this past weekend when we went on a couple’s trip to fish the Kenai River in Alaska. Neither of us had been to Alaska in the summer, and it was your Mom’s first visit to the 49th state in the union. You and Matteo hung back with Grandma Vicki to have your own fun at the Hartstene Pointe pool and beaches.

So much our Type 1 fun was just being together without distraction (no offense). Like I say, “marriage first.” Everything goes and grows from that baseline. You and Matteo have a lot to say, so the quietness of the river was nice and the times we caught our Sockeye was the real fun part. Your Mom definitely reeled in the bigger, frisky fish and it was fun to watch and help her net them. Now we have a full freezer and a great dinner menu for the rest of summer. Mission accomplished.

We had so much Type 1 and Type 2 fun that we’ve been discussing if we’ll bring you and Matteo next year. You don’t have to work hard or even walk much for the activity, but fishing requires patience. We want to make sure that repitious casting (a method called flossing) doesn’t creep into boring and Type 3 fun for you. We’ll see.

Love, Dad

Dear Matteo, 72 Months Old

“Dad, is shit a bad word?”

“Yes, it is a bad word, a very bad one.”

“Well, the other day I accidentally said, ‘Holy shit’ but I didn’t really know what I was saying.”

“Yeah, let’s try not to say it.”

That exchange this morning represents a lot of our conversations these days: you navigating what’s appropriate, funny, or interesting. You are talking and asking questions constantly prefaced by “Dada!” to get my attention.

This is age 6. Happy birthday, bello.

As it goes every year, your birthday is sucked into the Fourth of July wormhole, largely to your benefit. We spent most of the long weekend (the holiday was on a Tuesday, weird) at Harstine Island and hosted rotating friends and family. I got the boat working just in time — a simple flush port plug was out — and we cruised Puget Sound in the evenings after our daytime beach and pool time. We joined the Harstene Pointe parade on the actual holiday. While you were running around with friends I enjoyed serving as judge for the apple pie contest until the inevitable stomach discomfort arrived between pies #8 and #9. There were 12 pies. Wince.

A couple of days later we hosted a neighborhood birthday party. We got the local ice cream truck to come by and otherwise you ran around throwing water balloons with friends and opening presents. Not to brag, but I got you the best present of the year, a VTech KidiStar DJ Mixer. It comes with a lot of presets and Bluetooth so we could play your favorite tracks off of Spotify. You can also record your own vocal samples. Every time you play with it, you act like a DJ in front of a Coachella crowd and play your vocal samples over the beats like “Let’s go!,” “DJ Matteo!” and “Poopy pants!”

Holy shit, you’re a six-year-old now.

Love, Dad

Dear Eliza, 92 Months Old

Welcome to summer break, kiddo. I know it’s not always as exciting as the bill. You shift from getting to hang out with friends at school for hours a day to hanging with family around the house and yard, albeit in much nicer weather. Of course, you’ll see friends and get your play dates, too. We won’t be as entertaining as your first grade class was this past year, but we’ll try!

Oh my gosh, you are going to be in second grade this fall! That’s the earliest grade I can remember. I had Mrs. Reilly and my homeroom was called Nehalem. It’s all coming back to me.

To help up the ante on the home front, we bought a family boat. Ahem, a family project. The boat is a wonderful, 17-foot Triumph with a center console and 70 horsepower Suzuki engine. I bought it from a motel owner in Federal Way who, by all means, was honest and fair in how he listed the boat and communicated with me throughout the sale process.

All that said, the engine overheated on our first outing and I haven’t been able to fix the problem yet. I’ve had a few buddies over to help with fixes. Like cars, boats can be expensive to fix in the shop. After replacing an impeller (circulates water into the engine to cool it) and now a thermostat (helps regulate the temperature), I’m hoping we solved it so we can proceed with a dreamy boating summer. Oh, and I also had to fix the plugs because we were taking on quite a bit of water. Like I said, it’s a boat but it’s also a project. But I’m learning a lot!

I appreciate, by the way, how patient you’ve been with the boat project and the gazebo project before it. Typing that, I have signed up for a lot of projects already this summer! These things take Dad time away from play time and I’m sensitive to that. The point of these things is to keep us more together, but sometimes you have to build things to enjoy them.

We are going to have an awesome summer, I promise. You have some camps that Mom signed up for and we’ll spend plenty of time at the pool and beaches at Harstine Island and hopefully spending some time on the boat.

Love, Dad

Dear Matteo, 71 Months Old

Today is career day at school where you dress as the profession you want to do. Eliza dressed up as an artist, which she claims will be her “forever” career. She told me last night that she knows some people change careers, but she doesn’t think that she will ever stop being an artist. I think she’s right.

As for you, you dressed up as a DJ. I’m not sure where you saw this the first time, but sometime recently you saw a DJ scratching records and thought it was the coolest thing that you have ever seen. Since then, we’ve watched some DJing videos on YouTube and you’ve asked to listen to songs with DJ scratches. Because of that, we’ve been listening to a lot of the Beastie Boys, and put “Three MC’s and One DJ” on repeat.

I did not expect one of the great joys of parenting to be listening to the Beastie Boys with you, but I’m not mad about it.

So for this career day, you were wearing a backwards Star Wars hat and some streetwear-looking t-shirt, shorts, and Adidas high tops. It’s a flex. We also drew a DJ controller and cut out circular records to take to school so you could spin in front of your friends.

Little do you know that for your birthday next month, I bought you a kid-friendly DJ set. We’ll see what you can do on the real ones and twos.

This is all fun and games, of course. It’s hard to say how fruitful that will be in terms of a creer, but it could be a great way to have a fun job to get things started and be the center of the party. Drop the beat, son.

Love, Dad