Dear Matteo, 92 Months Old

We’ve been talking a lot about skiing, but we’ve reserved our Saturdays for another sport: basketball.

Although I love coaching your soccer team in the fall, basketball has to be the most fun spectator sport. To start, I’m not coaching basketball, so I get to enjoy watching you and the game. Being indoors, we also don’t have to worry about the weather. Most of all, it’s a fast-paced game with a lot of action.

Like with soccer, you’re most energized on defense. You do a great job chasing down the opponent you’ve marked and smothering them when they have the ball. On offense, you seem to care as much about evading your defender with slashing moves and quick tricks. That’s all good, except you seem to forget that you’re trying to get the ball and score. You don’t really follow where the ball is going or care to get it in your hands. The fun seems to be in escaping your opponent in a game of chase.

On the occasion you do get the ball, sometimes because you’re bringing it up the court, you’ve surprised us by dribbling mostly with your left hand. All this time, we’ve known you to be left-footed and right-handed. I think that’s still true, and I won’t deter you from getting better at a sport with your weak hand.

You let me know that basketball is your favorite “ball sport” (skiing takes top prize across all sports) and will be the sport you play the most in the near term:

“I might play basketball for three to five years and then baseball for two years and then soccer the rest of the time.”

Good news: sports have seasons, and you’ll get to play a few each year. I just got the email from the soccer club to confirm the team for fall, so that’s coming up. We missed baseball sign-ups, and your mom regrets that we won’t get to see how you could excel in that sport with your superb eye-hand coordination and strong arm (the right one).

We got to be a fan at a Tacoma Stars game that we attended with Nonno and Julie. Nonno knows everyone in the area soccer community and coaches alongside some of the players on the Stars. You and Eliza loved the atmosphere of the game. Indoor soccer is just as fast as basketball, so there’s a lot of excitement. After the game, you got jerseys signed by the players.

I’m glad you’re enjoying so many sports. We’ll let you get into as many of them as possible. There’s no rush to focus on just one sport yet.

Love, Dad

Dear Eliza, 112 Months Old

We have been on a nice rotation of ski days and island cabin days.

The snow days have been super fun with you and Matteo cruising through the trees and side hits. We’ve been up to Crystal almost every weekend this past month. I’m especially impressed by how you’ve been carrying your own skis from the truck up to the ski lifts. This may sound like no big deal, but I feel major relief now that I don’t have to awkwardly carry 2-3 pairs of skis! You’ve also had a great attitude throughout the day, negotiating which runs we ski next and encouraging Matteo on his jumps. Your Mom and I also got wiser, keeping gummy worms on hand at all times to prevent future meltdowns.

At the island, it’s all about bundled-up beach walks and movie nights in the winter. You have an incredible imagination when you're out in nature—creating fairy castles, crab pools, and little shops where you sell all the treasures you’ve collected. Even when it’s in the 40s, we spend hours on the beach because we’re having so much fun. Back at the cabin, you keep busy drawing what you saw at the beach or what’s in your mind. We spend time working on puzzles and bracelets, too. You rediscovered Bluey recently, and after getting into the soundtrack on our long car rides, we started playing “keepy uppy” in the cabin. It’s funny how, with all the toys and screens around, a simple balloon can bring just as much fun as anything else.

Now, we’re heading into mid-winter break, and I expect we’ll keep up our rotation from the mountains to the sound. Before the break, you had your choir performance with other elementary schools at Gig Harbor High School. Your Mom and I sat among the proud parents in the bleachers, watching you sing with so much energy. I was amazed by how many songs you memorized, though you told us afterward that you forgot the lyrics to one and just hummed along. Smooth move. Choir has been a challenge with those early morning practices on Tuesdays and Fridays—you are not a fan of waking up that early. But now that the concert is over, we can all celebrate the end of those early alarms. I bet you’ll sing even sweeter with more sleep for the rest of the school year.

Through all these little adventures—carrying your own skis, leading beachside games, singing on stage—I see you growing in confidence, creativity, and independence. No matter where we go next, I know you’ll keep impressing us.

Love, Dad

Dear Matteo, 91 Months Old

This was supposed to happen years ago and never did, until this week: you cut your own hair.

I shouldn’t be surprised, given that you are your mom’s son, and she cuts her hair consistently. Every few months, I’ll walk into the bathroom and find your mom following a YouTube video, cutting inches off her hair. She leaves up to half a foot of hair she couldn’t reach in the back, which I help clean up. This is all based on her humble upbringing and unwillingness to spend more than $100 for a good haircut, which she can mostly do herself.

After you took a bath, I found the aftermath of your scissor experimentation. You cut your wet hair straight across, leaving bangs resembling Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb & Dumber. You were proud of yourself initially because, well, you did it. You cut your hair. Unfortunately, you didn’t think through cutting wet hair, which sits longer, and how your hair would look drier and shorter. This is also in the context that you’ve been growing out your hair, especially on the sides and back, so the rest of your hair was quite a bit longer than your new bangs.

After cycling through some mixed emotions about the ordeal, we agreed that I could get you into my barber to “finish” the haircut a couple of days later. You’ve been to barbers many times before but not this particular barber that I’ve been seeing since we’ve lived in Gig Harbor.

I took some classic, fatherly pride in taking you to my barber. The barber for some men is almost like church. There’s a community and trust there. It’s where you take your stories and hear stories. Your motivations were more elemental. The barbershop has a pet squirrel named Amanda that they hand-feed when it comes by for a snack. Although we arrived in the 7 a.m. hour on a cold February morning, the squirrel arrived for her morning snack, and you got to enjoy the wildlife while the head barber and shop owner, Mark, took care of shaping your mane. We left a little “party in the back” at your request, and you got a lollipop when the job was done.

Like I told you on the car ride home, seeing a barber is part of taking care of yourself. You’ll want to see him or her every 4-6 weeks, plan to pay cash, and know that your mom will always be excited to see your fresh look. Maybe you’ll inspire her to see a hairdresser regularly, too.

Love,
Dad

Dear Eliza, 111 Months Old

Everyone is sick.

Thankfully, this isn’t one of those pandemic moments where the world feels like it’s shutting down. No, this is your classic “everyone-has-the-same-bug” week, and we’re about halfway through the family cycle. The symptoms haven’t been too bad—just fevers and runny noses—but it’s surprising how much these little bugs can take over. Our home has been full of call-and-response sneezes and coughs lately.

You and Matteo have both been trading “sick days” from school. Of course, “sick days” in our house are code for all-day screentime, books, and popsicles—not a bad deal if you ask me! Your mom, on the other hand, has had it rough with a fever that lasted several days and body aches. She’s been so desperate for relief she’ll take a massage from anyone, including Matteo’s karate chop style. As for me, the earaches are annoying, but I’ve probably fared the best. Mostly, I’m just tired with all the activity at work, teaching, and trying to help everyone around the house as much as I can.

You’ve definitely earned some rest. The holidays were busy, and weekends have been full of skiing. On top of that, you’ve been preparing for your school choir program and waking up early on Wednesdays and Fridays to make it to practice before school. Honestly, I’m not a fan of before-school activities at your age—you need your sleep! And you’ve made sure we remember that with your dinosaur roars and scowls on those choir mornings.

Even with everyone feeling under the weather, we’ve managed to find ways to pass the time. We’ve gone skiing a few times (you can’t get anyone sick out on those open-air runs), watched family movies, built puzzles, and spent some evenings out at the cabin. One highlight was our first family Scrabble night. Now that you and Matteo can spell enough words to play, it was a lot of fun—though we had to allow proper nouns and names to make it work. It worked, though!

I expect we’ll all be back on our feet by next week. Until then, enjoy the quiet and downtime. You need it to feel your best—and I’ll do my best to help keep things peaceful.

Love, Dad

Dear Matteo, 90 Months Old

We are off to a great start this ski season. You are bombing down the hill and chasing down anyone you know, friends your age and adults alike.

We got a good early season snowpack and skied at Crystal Mountain right after Thanksgiving. The first morning, you were hesitant being on new, longer skis and didn’t have confidence. We left some friends go to ski on their own so we could refocus on our form and speed. By that afternoon, you were back where you left off last season. That happens to most of us. We have such long breaks between seasons that we need to get our legs fit again and remember good technique. You’re not alone!

After a few more days at Crystal Mountain, we went to Whistler before Christmas and you were able to ski everywhere. Mom and I have to really work to keep up! We skied a day with our friends Joe and Kim and their children around your age. That family skis a lot more than we do and spend weeks at Whistler, but you were able to keep up on the terrain, no problem. The more you pushed it the more you seemed to have fun and expressed yourself with hoots and hollers as you popped off small jumps and ripped through the trees off piste.

Back at Crystal Mountain, you and Eliza are insistent on skiing the Magoos run as much as possible. There’s a nice kicker before the chair lift — hence a persistent audience — and you two like to fly off the jump to occassional applause from above.

You brag back on the chair lift to Eliza: “That was a three-footer!” alluding to how much vertical air you got. Like most of us, you double the actual airtime because it feels so big. I don’t go much bigger, to be clear.

Mom and I convince you to ski more of the mountain, so we’ll scoot around the tree hits off of the infamous Queen’s Run and around Lucky Shot. We fuel you on gummy worms while we wait for the next chair at the bottom of the runs.Y

ou know there’s more to ski and asked me if you could ski Powder Bowl this season, which is off the higher and most technical Chair 6. In the right conditions, you’ll be ready soon enough. For now, enjoy the bumps and kickers and keep working on those parallel turns.

Love,
Dad