An epistolary moment

Dear Abe,

You are six and a half months old. Pushing seven, let's say. I have seen it as my job to feed you on demand. But it is time to renegotiate what demand really means, adorable fellow. There is no possible way that you need to be feeding as often if not more often than a newborn - or are you plotting some growth spurt the likes of which we have never before seen? You've already got a couple pounds on your brother at this age, you are SOLID, and you are solidly into 9 month clothes.

Tonight I let you cry a little when I detached you from the boob and put you back in your crib. Then I went back, rinsed, lathered, repeated, and still you cried. What gives? You sobbed and screamed and roared the whole time Daddy was with you (now I begin to understand why the sitter was so rattled while trying to put you down for a nap last week), and when I came back you nursed desperately, exhausted from your exertion, then conked out flat on your back, arms above your head in a pose of surrender. I came out of the room and realized that I can't really keep doing this. It's time for some training to come your way, much as we hate to ponder it, much as it seems logistically impossible, since you sleep in our room and since your brother needs to try to get some sleep in his. We let Jonah go until a year before we sleep trained - while I increasingly lost my mind every time he peeped in the night. I still remember stalking out of the apartment on a freezing night before his first birthday, sitting on a bench in a dark plaza, wondering when my lost mind would return. The training took all of three nights.

Abe, can we admit this? You don't need the midnight snack anymore. You don't need the 3 a.m. top-up or the 5 a.m. happy meal. What you need, my little friend of the long eyelashes, is solid food (yes, I have noticed the face you make when we give it to you - we'll work with you until we find out what you like), and uninterrupted sleep. What I need is the very same (perhaps even the same portion sizes of the solid food, and the same amount of uninterrupted sleep).

To sum up: Things are going to suck. But ultimately they will get better. For all of us.

Love,
Mama

Dear Jonah,

Are you about to learn to read?!?!?! I am dumbfounded by your very sudden and obsessive interest in not just letters and words (which has been with you for ages) but sounds and spelling and figuring things out. I have been anticipating this magic moment since you were born, and the idea that it might not be far off (thanks to your amazing new teacher at school) fills me with indescribable joy. As I told Daddy tonight, "Once you can read, they can't keep secrets from you."

On the other hand, once you can read, you'll have to choose to read with us rather than on your own. I hope you'll keep reading with us. I can't wait to read Alice in Wonderland with you, a page each, every night, like I did with my dad when I was a kid. I can't wait to take you to the library and have you choose books because you like not just their pictures, but their contents. I can't wait for you to type your first email to Saba and Savta. Your budding literacy is blowing my mind. Please don't let kids at school with behavior problems distract you from this incredible achievement. And please don't let the humorless & borderline mean assistant teacher who is back this year get you down.

Love,
Mama

Dear Boys,

Keep making each other shriek with laughter please. This is the best stuff. I hope it continues forever.