Dear Eliza, 64 Months Old

It snowed! Your Mom loves true seasons. She’s disappointed when the moderate Pacific Northwest doesn’t provide hot summers and snowy winters. Well, this is your time, Amanda!

We’ve spent the past couple of days frolicking around the yard and neighborhood, enjoying all that is magical about snow in the lowlands. After the first dump of nearly half a foot, we got out in the morning for sledding (you kids and Mom) and skiing (me). I skied North 29th Street hill a few times and even got a neighborhood shuttle back up for a final run. The community really comes out with the snow hits.

We stopped at Nicole and Caleb’s on the way back so you could play with your school pod friends. The next day, Zach and Holly came over with their kids for an outdoor firepit hangout. It’s nice to see more friends (outside) where the pandemic has otherwise left us inside and keeping to ourselves.

Oh, we also had some work to do shoveling snow. That’s the thing about snow in town. It’s hard play and hard work. You and Matteo were all in on the shoveling though. It wasn’t super effective, but I appreciated the effort.

You have been totally elated by the snow days. I should also mention you wished for the snow in advance, upon seeing the forecasts on the local news, and credit yourself for making the snow happen. I guess I should say thanks! You so believe this dynamic that you also convined Matteo that you hold the power to all weather. You two were in a scuffle later and he said something about how you need to stop wishing for snow so he can play baseball outside. It was one of those moments as a parent when you break up a fight while holding a laugh.

In between all the snow play and celebration, you’ve been playing a lot of pretend: acting like a cat or setting up mouse traps with building blocks and baskets. You have the food chain in the right order.

I should also mention it’s been a celebration-filled week. We enjoyed a very low key Valentine’s Day (Dad excuse: snow), which was the same day as Greta’s 7th birthday. Your Mom only remembered in the final hours. I wasn’t too concerned about disappointing her. A snowy birthday is inherently the best birthday. Your Grandma Vicki also turned the big 6-0 and is celebrating in style in Lake Chelan.

Despite a generally chill winter (pun intended), it’s nice to have a few calendar days to celebrate and look forward to. Of course, I get to celebrate being your Dad every day.

Love, Dad

Dear Matteo, 43 Months Old

We’re still living in the hybrid-imaginary world of Gita and Gata. Most mornings wake up and tell us about the island they live on, their blue house and meanderings that I assume to be dreams from the previous night. I tried to throw you off the other day by telling you I was going to visit them. Unphased, you asked if you could come and penciled out a map for how to get to their house in 10 hours. I decided that was too long to drive.

You are becoming very animated in your communications. A lot of body language. Very Italian. When you agree to something you enthusiastically say, “Yessah!” The rise in the “ah” at the end is a dialect of your own creation. You also continue to keep a song in your heart and created your own song the other day for Greta. You sang over and over, “Sweetie, I love you. Sweetie, I love you.” It’s February and you must be feeling those Valentine’s vibes already.

Despite your serenade to Greta, you continue to be a little too rough with the dog. You give her a lot of body check, a hard fur tug or just directly try to stick your fingers in her eyes, ears and nose. I get in your own face when I see it. I need no further evidence that dog is an angel because she has not once showed her teeth to warn you off. She sometimes groans out of annoyance and scurries away, but that’s it. And you persist. I wish I had the same patience as Greta because walking away and removing attention from bad behavior is the “right” way to change it. This also proves that Greta is older, in dog years, and much more mature than I am.

Despite some pet misbehavior, you have told us that you want to be an animal doctor when you grow up, and I can see it. You do love Greta and all animals. When I was your age I enjoyed digging up and collecting (read: killing) bugs in a bin and even remember playing animal hospital, turning stuffed animals into patients. That obviously didn’t become my calling later in life, but it did instill a real love and empathy for animals. It’s simply true that no one will be excited to see you after an hour or a week away than a dog. As with most relationships, the more you give, the more you get back.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Gita and Gata.

Love, Dad

Dear Eliza, 63 Months Old

“I got lipstick on my mask,” you said yesterday in the car.

Yep, that’s the time we’re living in. Even if my “mature” 5-year-old wants to wear make-up, I don’t have to be the lame Dad forbidding it. COVID-19 simply makes it impractical.

We took a trip to Chelan last week for a change of scenery. Although it was stormy for a couple of days (with wind gusts that knocked out power for a short time), we got a little time in a heated pool and a lot of time on the cold beach. My daily activity was building a “real” fire in the condo living room, which kept me busy more than I expected. I shouldn’t be surprised that wood burns, well, fast.

We also got one day of a nice snow, and you got to build snowmen and get some sledding in. There’s something magical about playing in the snow near the beach.

Unfortunately, while we were in Chelan we heard that your Grandma Vicki and Poppa Steve contracted COVID-19 and have not been feeling great. I dropped Greta off at their house ahead of our trip and during a window of time when they had COVID but didn’t know it yet. As a result, we were a little nervous we had COVID, too, but a quick, uncomfortable test up the nose for me and your Mom gave us a negative result.

We’re really doing our best, trying to balance keeping safe whiel keeping some sanity. You are doing a really great job keeping entertained, playing with your BFF Matteo and still growing and learning in spite of the lack of school and friend group. You don’t know any different, but I wish you did.

To help deflect the stress of it all, we’re watching a new, mindless show as a family: The Masked Singer and its spinoff, The Masked Dancer. The show is a bunch of post-prime celebrities, who you’ve certainly never heard of, entertaining judges and crowd in costumes. There’s not much more of a premise. It’s just a silly competition show that gets our minds off of things and that we can all enjoy together.

Ironincally, we’re all “masked” these days. Maybe it’s not so silly afterall.

Love, Dad

Dear Matteo, 42 Months Old

I’m never sure if my imaginary doppleganger is “Gita” or “Gata” in your mind. These are the names of your “other parents” that you first conjured months ago but have increasingly talked about. They sound eerily familiar to your Mom and me, but with some elements of dream-like fiction. For example, you sometimes reference how they live in an all-blue house, have a swimming pool or ice skating rink (depending on the season, naturally) and own exotic animals. I’ve heard of imaginary friends but have never imaginary parents. You always take things a step further.

I don’t know what Gita and Gata got you for Christmas but your Mom and I hooked you up. In a very Star Wars-themed holiday season, you and Eliza each got two Grogu (Baby Yoda) dolls along with baby beds that Aunt Courtney made. Greta also got her own Grogu chew toy. The highlights from Santa included a Paw Patrol tower (I always get these confused with PJ Masks) and more than a dozen monster trucks. Santa got your sister a (second-hand) Barbie Dream House. The unexpected highlight were robotic baby finger monkeys that are quite interactive with more than 60 different sounds and expressions. You and Eliza like to play caretakers of animals so the monkeys were a real hit. You’ve expressed that you’d like to be an animal doctor one day, and that’d suit you well being so fearless but also caring. You just need to stop petting Greta in the eyes. You’re not going to pass a veternarian school getting pleasure out of poking animals in the eyes. C’mon dude.

As is always the case, Christmas toys kept you totally entertained for about 36 hours and then we were back to the usual swing of life restricted by the pandemic. You and Eliza have become best friends by combination of force and actually liking each other. You play chase, act like kittens and brutally wrestle most of the day. All action, some harmony but little peace. You have also gotten into some games of hide and seek. Unfortunately you’ve chosen to hide in my closet shelves — causing them to crash — as well as in the downstairs bathtub — causing the curtain to nearly come off the ceilng. It wouldn’t be toddler fun without household casualties.

You have so much energy and can barely wind it down. Most kids have a body clock that shuts down on a usual daily schedule and usual bedtime but you refuse to end the day most of the week, often going to bed at 9 p.m. and totally exhausting us the final hours of the day. This eventually catches up to you, as it did yesterday when you went to bed early at 6:45 p.m. and didn’t wake up until 7:30 am. this morning. That’s your cycle, not enough sleep, resulting big swings between excitement and crankiness six days a week. On the seventh day, you rest. I suppose you are creating your own little world and just doing it by the book.

Love, Dad

Dear Eliza, 62 Months Old

“How many sleeps until we ski?”

These are the questions dreams are made of.

You and your brother have embraced the wonder of snow and joy of skiing. I couldn’t be happier.

We don’t get a lot of snow in the sea-level lowlands, maybe a few days a year at most. When I was your age, I dreamt of snow days in the neighborhood. I watched the evening news in the wintertime and let KOMO’s Steve Pool dangle out weather forecast promises about snow falls as thick as his mustache. More often than not, I’d wake up to a morning of disappoinment when snow never came or turned to rain faster than I could zip up a jacket. That just made the big snow days that much sweeter.

You are much further ahead in mountain and snow experiences. You’re skiing confidently at age 5, whereas I wasn’t there until age 25, finally giving into Uncle Scott’s insistance to get on skis the previous 15 years. You could say I made the decision far too late, and my skiing technique still suffers from that delayed learning. I can get down any hill, just not always pretty.

Your confidence clicked like bindings just last week you finally put together the “pizza and french fry” technique. A new direction I gave you to “push your heels out” to make a pizza was all you needed to go from holding onto me and your Mom to get down a hill to jumping out ahead of us off a chairlift with famous last words: “Try to catch me.”

You accelerated so much that I graduated you from the Discovery bunny hill chair at Crystal Mountain up to the Chinook base chair that gets you mid-mountain. Mom wasn’t looking when we did this, of course. She wouldn’t have objected but had her hands full with Matteo who was mid-tantrum, mid-run back on Discovery.

That was a special experience getting you on those “bigger runs.” I skied you down the steeper parts of Tinkerbell, a green run, and let you ski the rest of the way. No falls, just big smiles and big pizzas. You crushed it! We celebrated the achievement with Cup O’Noodle in the parking lot and told Mom about the big adventure. You’ll have so many more to come.

Love, Dad