Dear Jaka,
What a lot has happened since your last birthday! We've survived a year of the COVID pandemic, and life is tentatively getting back to normal - you've been back at school full time for a few months now and you're deep into baseball season (more on that later). You've moved on from Pokemon to Harry Potter, mainly inspired by your mother who started reading the books with you and Sophie back in January (I think?), which has meant that your entire birthday Lego collections have been Harry Potter themed, and your cat, coming next week, will be called Patronus. It's also meant that we've been watching the movies after each book, and you have such a great understanding and recall of how all these complex storylines weave together (and the desire to cast the Avada Kedavra curse on any of the bad characters).
Looking back, it's been great to see you become more confident in yourself this year. You're much more able to handle disappointment and frustration, and you just seem happier embracing the things that you love and enjoy. You're mastering that golden lesson that life sometimes isn't fair; like today, when we made you go to the plant store (which you HATE), you found the silver lining in bringing your Hogwarts Express train and hanging out with me as we shopped for this year's vegetables. You share just about everything with your sister, and while you and she can sometimes squabble, you most of the time spend your weekends giggling with her and reveling in the fact that she finds potty humor funny with you now.
You continue your ever inquisitive nature. Every car journey, no matter how long or short, turns into a discussion about whatever's on your mind (or whatever Momma and I are talking about). This means you end up thinking about abortion, adoption, Black Lives Matters, the state of American politics and physics amongst a whole raft of things, and you never seem to run out of questions. You clearly store everything away; the weekend when we found that Nana was really sick and Momma was really sad and spent a lot of time with Papa, you didn't say anything, but when we told you what was going on, you turned round and said "that makes sense, there's been a lot of weird things recently".
Your approach to sports continues to fascinate me. Deep down, you're still a homebody, so even though you talk to me about wanting to practice more on the drive home from each game or practice, you'll always default to playing Splatoon, Roblox, Legos or with your sister given the choice of how to spend your time. We will always follow your lead on this and will never push you, especially as you report out that you really enjoy playing the games, and you definitely like to watch and commentate (especially with something from the snack shack, which you're trying to sample everything from this year).
You're developing a good sense of value of the world around you. While you've always been shrewd with your money (and your sister's!), putting you in charge of the spending for your birthday and for Christmas has helped you be more realistic about the value of things. For example, you understood that spending more money on your drone this year would result in less actual things on your birthday, but also a better quality product that would last a long time (as long as we don't lose it in Nana and Papa's woods again or trap it in Sophie's hair!). You do like spending money on Roblox, and it's been interesting watching your desire for money battle against your desire not to do boring chores which we pay you to do. There's definitely some thinking going about how much effort you need to put in versus how much money you get paid, and long may that critical thinking continue!
I can't promise what this next year will look like. I do know that you'll see more of your friends outside of school (we've already got two big hikes planned with Jack and Judah aka the J brothers), and I do know that we'll spend plenty of time around our house and Nana and Papa's this summer because that's what you love to do, and I do know that we will continue to be your biggest cheerleaders and supporters no matter what.
Love you big kid,
Dada
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