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

Dear Eliza, 91 Months Old

We returned from a fantastic trip to London, Loire Valley, Paris, and Reykjavik.

I wrote about most of the London trip in Matteo’s letter and should write a bit in your letter about the rest of it.

We were supposed to leave London by train, taking the “Chunnel” under the English Channel into Paris, and then take a train from there to meet Uncle Sergio and Riley in Loire Valley for a few days. Upon deeper inspection I realized that would take too much time and money, so I booked a last minute flight for us to fly into Paris Orly and from there we rented a car to drive the rest of the way. We stopped at a McDonald’s close to our destination, so all was right.

Now, this Loire Valley stretch was unlike I imagined. I knew we’d see French castles and stay in rooms carved into caves. I just didn’t know how majestic the castles would be and how deep those caves were. In addition to the exotic scenery, it was just fun exploring them with Sergio. I hope that you and Matteo travel together as adults, too. Sergio and I made a trip to New Zealand more than a decade ago, and it’s easily a lifetime highlight in large part because we did it together.

We eventually parted ways, Sergio and Riley south toward Marseille, and we back north to Paris. We found ourselves in a recently renovated apartment in the 11th arrondisement (neighborhood) that had so much to do aside from the main attractions. Paris felt like a much larger city that London and I’m glad we spent more time to take it all in. Before we got started with proper city exploring, we surprised you with a trip to Disneyland Paris. We’ve never gone to a theme park or Disney park for that matter, so I figured why not start with one out of the country and where Buzz Lightyear speaks French? That’s my kind of sense of humor. I ponied up for a fast pass so we got to skip lines for all the major attractions. We made a nearly catastrophic mistake going on Hyperspace Mountain early in the day and may have caused some minor trauma, but aside from that we experienced all of the Disney magic. Pirates of the Carribean was your favorite ride, and you rode it twice.

Back to our regular French programming: We went to see the Eiffel Tower a couple of times, ate well at several restaurants and just walked the streets. We pushed ourselvles a little too hard going to the Louvre, but you got to see Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa. Not bad.

We ended our trip in Iceland, which is just so different and exotic that we had to return after your Mom and I visited there 8 years ago. We went from the plane to the Blue Lagoon, which you and Matteo naturally loved because it’s a naturally gigantic hot tub. After that soak, we went to our retro-chic apartment in Reykjavik and prepared for a long day traveling the sights of the Golden Circle. We were pretty much on the lookout for Icelandic horses and stopped at an idyllic hotel, Héraðsskólinn Historic Guesthouse, and then spent a couple of hours at Laugarvatn Fontana for more geothermal hot tubbing. We ended our trip walking the streets of Reykjavik and eating local fare.

None of the above is really as interesting to me as your chronicle of it. We asked you to journal the trip for school, and I’ll provide that verbatim. Paragraph breaks indicate a new page, and I kept your spelling:

I went on my trip.

I got ice cream that looked like a rose.

The next day we went to a mewseam. Thar we also saw a trisarotops.

After that , we went to a stor. We bot a London hat, it is read.

Then we went to a park. Thar is alot of hiden plasos. The disine is pirot ship.

Next it started to rein. we went back to my hotel. we slept good.

We went on a train to a pales. We wocht the changing of the Gards.

We had to walk alot. After that we went on a river croos. We got off. We walked to a pond we saw baby ducs

and we saw swons. I saw a man peting a swon. it was like a zoo!!!

We went to the piret ship park agen. a helacopter laned. it was the King Chales helacoptor!

We went to whold foods. We got stuk in a rain storm.

after the rain storm we went back to are hotell. we went to slep.

In the midel of the nigh Matteo had a bad dream. he wock up cring and conit find his eye mass and

toy hors. In the moning Matteo felt like he was gouing to throw up. He sed it over and over agen.

finaly, in the moning, we went on a train to the areport. we went to a tiny shop. we bot a stuffy. It as a yooHoo Bush baby. I named mine

Diana red Matteo named his jim, jong, jude. mine has a little scirt and a little hat.

Matteo’s has a blew shirt and blew pants. It also has a little top hat!

after that, we slept for a while befor we got on the arplane. After the nap we got on the arplan.

We were on the arplan for about 3 howrs. wen we got off we went on a train.

We got off of the train. We got a rentl car. We drov to a cave. We went inside. We slept thar. We stad for 2 nights.

The next day, we went to a swiming inside the cave! my dad wasint siport to get his har wet, but I got his har socing wet!

The next day, we went to paris. We un pact. In the moning we went to the mewsom It was a motern art mewsam.

at lunch, we got hart shap pizza. It had peso and mosrrela.

the next moning my parons spiusd me weth going to Disnyland paros. My Dad cept the Tices for 2 monts!

we went on star wors, busliter, pirots of the carabean. I sow capten jack sparo hideing in a barl.

on the last day we sew the mona lisa at the Louvre. after that we went to the park and sow the Ifle towr and threw

paper arplans. after that thar was a light show, the Ifle towr lit up!

the next day we went en 2 arplans on the same day!

we lened in Icaland. We went to are apartment. The next day we went to a gisr. It expoled 2 times in a roow!

Wen we wort back to owr rentl car it was frising cold. wen we drov back we sow Icelandic horses.

we went to the Blue Lagoon it was achly blue! the Blue Lagood was bigr than 2 artendals!

the next day we went to foatana Hot springs. it was like a hot tubs! the next day we left and aet

clam chowder we went to slep the next moning I had choclit it was a fun trip!

That account, my dear, is worth it all.

Love, Dad