March 2026

Dear Ennio,

The past few weeks, we have been watching you want things. Really want them — with your whole body, with a kind of urgency that has no patience for the distance between you and the world. You have always been like this: curious and jolly and so full of reach. You came into this chapter of your life pressing forward, straining toward everything just slightly out of range.

For a while, you seemed to know that crawling was possible — you just hadn't decided to commit. You'd lie on your stomach and flail with great determination, knowing that the flailing alone would eventually summon one of us to carry you somewhere more interesting. It worked, too. But we could see the frustration building underneath it, the gap between what you wanted to do and what you knew your body would let you do. You have always loved to stand. You lock your legs and beam like you've conquered the world.

And then, almost overnight, you crawled. You were chasing a cylindrical pillow. Your mom and I were both watching, though we didn't know the other was there. We've learned to hide around corners when you play, peering in from the edges of rooms so you don't notice us and get distracted. Sometimes we spy on you from just around the corner as you play so as to watch you without distracting you. We want you to have the experience, not the audience. So there we were, separately, each thinking we were the only witness.

I was so excited I could barely contain it. I was also late for a meeting. I was desperate to stay, to celebrate the moment. But it probably would've just distracted you from your accomplishment, and you were already busy. You were somewhere new. So I watched a moment longer than I should have, and carried it with me the whole rest of the day.

And everything changed.

Now you are all over the place. Everywhere at once, it seems. Every corner of a room becomes an expedition, every object a mystery worth holding up and inspecting from multiple angles. You are meticulous about it, in the way that only someone seeing things for the very first time can be. We watch you and feel something almost like envy — the privilege of a world that is entirely new.

One thing we have learned: no matter how carefully we sweep before you, you will find the one tiny leaf we missed. And into the mouth it goes. We trust you'll eventually decide oak leaves aren't for eating. Until then, we sweep twice.

Just two days after you learned to crawl, you were on the porch with me while your mama was inside watching a show with friends. You spotted your favorite pot — the one you love to bang on — sitting out in the afternoon sun. You made straight for it. I didn't think. The moment your hands hit the metal, you screamed, startled and stung by the heat. You didn't burn yourself, but those little hands are so sensitive, so new to the world's temperatures and edges and surprises.

I held you while you cried and felt the particular guilt of a parent who should have seen it coming. And afterward I found myself wondering: how does anyone actually learn this? Heat from a flame makes a kind of sense; you can see it, feel the air around it change. But residual heat, the sun warming a dark surface over hours, metal holding onto something invisible — that's almost a philosophical problem. How do you teach a person about something that leaves no visible trace? You have to be told, or you have to find out. You found out. I'm sorry, but it's also the only way it was ever going to be.

But once you calmed down, I brought the pot to you, cool now, and showed you it was still itself. You looked at it for a moment. You considered. And then you banged it, and you smiled.

I want you to remember that — even though you won't. The way you went back and tried again.

The public pools haven't opened yet and won't until summer, but we didn't want to wait to give you water. So we took your bath base outside and made a little pool on the porch. You splashed and kicked and had the time of your life. Your favorite part, it turned out, was drinking from the hose. Not the pool. The hose. You are very specifically yourself.

We also took you on your first bike ride around the block. You were a good sport about the helmet. A little grumpy at first, but you didn't cry during the ride itself — only when we stopped to talk to each other, which felt pointed. Like you wanted motion. You wanted to keep going. We can work with that.

Your mama sees you as outgoing, a natural conversationalist already, cautious in your own way, and wonderfully capable of entertaining yourself — while also possessing what she describes, with great affection, as a fat little belly. She is not wrong on any count.

I see you as careful and jolly and so deeply curious that it almost glows off of you. And so much fun to be around. That last part I cannot say enough times.

What I want you to know, from this particular moment, is this: you have been reaching for the world since before you could get to it. And now you can get to it. And you go — toward the pillow, toward the pot, toward the leaf, toward the hose, toward the next block, toward whatever is just out of frame. You go with such joy. And when the world surprises you, when it stings, when it doesn't behave the way you expected, you recover, and you keep going.

We watch from our corners. We try not to interfere. We try to let you have the experience rather than the audience. But I want you to know we are always there, your mom and I, separately holding our breath, together in the ways that matter. The world will keep teaching you things the hard way — about heat, about gravity, about how surfaces remember the sun long after it moves on. We can't protect you from all of it. We wouldn't, even if we could. Some lessons have to be learned by trial and error and come with pain. That's just the way it is.