Dear Connor,
When you were an infant, I would write one of these Dear Connor blog entries every month, to record your milestones and capture the moments that I knew would go by so fast. After you turned three, I started only writing these entries twice a year, on your birthday and on your half-birthday. Once you turned seven, the updates became yearly; and once the pandemic happened, they kind of stopped entirely.
Which is really too bad, because you certainly haven’t stopped changing.
I wouldn’t normally post a Dear Connor letter for your half-birthday… but I didn’t post one for your ninth birthday, and 2020 was definitely NOT a normal year, so I don’t want to just skip it.
I suspect that someday, when you’re older and you look back on being eight years old, Second Grade will seem like a big blur of video games and remote schooling, with the occasional, “Wait, that happened when I was eight, too?”
I can remember pretty clearly being eight and nine years old, and it’s weird thinking about how I perceived myself when I was your age, versus how I see you now. You have a lot of the same curiosity and know-it-all attitude as I did, but you’re way crazier and more outgoing.
In the fall, you took a test that qualified you for the gifted program at school. You said that the 90 minutes of testing was a “nightmare,” which amused the teacher who was administering the test. It was a standard, old-school Scantron multiple choice test… but you’re used to tests on the computer, and you’re NOT used to testing for a couple of hours straight.
Now that you’re in GATE, you wish you weren’t, and you want to quit. You see it as busywork that takes you away from the things you’d rather be doing, like being social with your classmates. Luckily, once you qualify, you’re never disqualified; even if we decide that the enrichment activities in the elementary grades aren’t for you, you’ll still be able to enroll in the accelerated classes later on — and that’s really what matters to me. I wish they offered accelerated classes in the elementary grades, like I had at your age, but the program is what it is.
You have a very defined hierarchy of Things You’d Rather Be Doing. Most of those involve television or video games. Eating is pretty far down the list, but riding bikes with Dad used to be on the list (until you wore out your training wheels).
Reading for pleasure is something you only do when you have no other options: before bed, or during your scheduled reading time in the afternoon. This is completely foreign to me, as I read voraciously when I was as a kid — to be fair, though, I did love going to my best friend’s house to play Atari, and I would have done more gaming if I’d had my own console.
I know I tell you this a lot, but I’m really proud of you. You’ve stuck with karate for 2½ years. You always want to make people laugh. You’re secure in who you are.
You’re still only 9½, of course, so you still have a lot of growing and maturing to do… but you’re pretty awesome, all things considered.
Dear Connor,
I’m going to be honest with you: it’s kind of rough being your Mom lately.
Except when it’s not, of course.
I guess I’ve been putting off finishing this post because, while I want to document and remember everything, your behavior and our reactions to it have been at the forefront of my mind lately, and I don’t want to taint this entire missive with my current frustration level. Overall, it’s been a really good year — it’s just in the past couple of months that things have kind of tanked, and I think I can see a light at the end of this behavior tunnel.
Dear Connor,
Now that you’re old enough to read, I’ve let you read some of the Dear Connor blog entries I wrote when you were younger, for you to read later on. This one, I’m writing for you to read now.
It never ceases to amaze me how much can change in just half a year. Since you started kindergarten, you’ve changed so much already.
