Hard to believe it is 2026. The Boy is now 12.5 and in the middle of 7th grade and middle school. He’s doing well in school and is getting a better grip on the middle school homework load. A teacher gave him some great feedback a couple of weeks ago, “Thank you, The Boy, for demonstrating kindness to your peers, whether or not it is convenient or advantageous to you.” That’s about the best compliment I could have imagined, and was a very proud moment.
He has a solid group of friends and in the past several months has become much more social, connecting with them via text groups and phone calls, the latter usually happening concurrently with a video game. They don’t really do things in person outside of the occasional birthday or something like Halloween. I’m sure this is partly due to them being COVID kids who only had online interactions for several years of their development, but it’s also a continuation of a trend I noticed with The Girl long before lockdown, where the ease of remote socialization obviated the need for in person connection. People may argue about how healthy that is, but on the bright side he can socialize when and with whomever he wants, and is not limited by geography or parental schedules.
For some temporal color, he can make pancakes now, and made them for me twice on my birthday weekend. One of those times was Monday morning, and he had to get up at 6am to make them for me before he went to school. We also started playing It Takes Two a couple of days ago. It’s a cooperative video game that he and his mother played through a few years ago, and it’s pretty great. We have all started playing the NYT Crossplay scrabble app and he hasn’t beaten me yet, but it won’t be long.
