The goo balls on your cake were appropriate, as you’re obsessed with video games. Every night you ask what video games we’re going to play (the current answer: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP). A while back you volunteered your own money to buy Angry Birds Rio for mom’s iPad so you could play it. The greatest day of your life was when we gave you your mom’s old iPod touch. You filled it with games and play it whenever you can. When you realized that it would play music too you looked at it as if to say, “If you could also create chicken nuggets I wouldn’t need those two adults to take care of me any more.”

You actually like games of all sorts. A month ago you went through a two-week obsession with chess. I have a set that your uncle Andrew and aunt Joy gave me years ago that sits in our bedroom collecting dust because chess is not nearly as fun as shooting zombies in the head. You’d occasionally asked to “play chess” before, but this time you were deadly serious. We pulled the chess set down and I explained how to play and why I was making the moves I was making. I won, of course. Even though I’m a terrible chess player, I’m still better than an eight-year-old who’s never played before, and there’s no enjoyment quite like beating such a worthy foe so completely. But you kept wanting to play more, and with every game we played you got better. We checked chess books out of the library to help you improve and found online versions so you could practice when I wasn’t home. Then, as quickly as your storm of excitement arose, it dissipated, thankfully before you got good enough to beat me.

Then there are board games. We’ve spent many nights playing Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne (“Meeples! Let’s play Meeples!”), and especially Forbidden Island, which uncle Andrew and aunt Joy got you. Forbidden Island is especially great because it’s a cooperative game, and let me tell you, cooperative games are so much better than the ones around when I was a child. Forbidden Island is a lot like Pandemic except that, if you lose the game, you don’t feel as if you’ve doomed the entire planet to death or, worse, to playing bit parts in a Stephen Soderbergh movie.

It echoes when I played board game with my dad. I remember being ferociously upset with him when he kept beating me at Monopoly, a game that is designed to grind down all players but the winner. May was in the kitchen and, hearing my weeping, called out to Pop: “You need to let him win!” “No!” Pop replied. “That’s giving him a false victory. It won’t encourage him to do better.” Now I’m in his position, playing chess against you and teaching you how to play while walking the narrow path between giving you false victories and crushing your desire to play.

In many ways you’re a typical eight-year-old boy. Your taste in food is terrible. You’re still on the “no carb left behind” diet, eating all of the bread and chips you can find, but you also eat chicken nuggets and peanut-butter-and-Nutella sandwitches and not much else. I have to remind myself that I survived my 9th-grade year lunch diet of peanut butter, baloney, cheese, and raisin sandwiches, and if I’m going to throw stones at your eating habits I’ll shatter the glass Jif jar I lived in.

You also like a lot of things that your friends like. You dressed up as a ninja for Halloween, just like your friend Josh and one of his friends. Even your cousin Sam dressed up as a ninja in Kansas City. We spent all Halloween night desperately trying to keep track of you in your black costume. At one point we discovered that we’d somehow added another ninja we didn’t know about to our herd of kids, as if there is some law of attraction involving ninjas that’s reminiscent of how political opinions on Facebook attract arguments.

In other ways you’re very much your own person. You, your mom and Liza recently wrote on our giant bathroom mirror with dry erase markers. Your mom wrote a Bible verse that’s related to her new ministry. Liza drew a dog and wrote “UNOST” underneath it, for reasons known only to her. But you? You wrote “BLOODY MARY” three times on the mirror right where I look when I shave in the mornings.

Your music tastes run to ’80s-style rock, bands in the genre that your mom dismissively calls “chicks with guitars”, and electronic dance music. You’ve discovered the Tron: Legacy soundtrack and can’t stop listening to it. One day you were supposed to go to school dressed as your favorite rock star. Your mom and I couldn’t figure out how to make you look like either Daft or Punk.

You’re still a big ham, completely unlike me. Whenever we pull out a camera you begin mugging for it. You have your quiet, contemplative moments, but when you know you’re being observed you tend to put on a show. Part of this grows out of your interest in people and your desire to entertain them. Like me, you’re a people-pleaser at heart. You want everyone to like you and are puzzled when they don’t. I hope you don’t lose that love of people as you grow older and have to deal with more of them who don’t care for you for whatever reason.

School continues to load you down with homework. You have words you have to learn how to spell, practice sentences you have to write, books to read, Accelerated Reader tests you have to take on the books you’ve read, math homework, and short stories that you must read as quickly as possible before answering comprehension questions about it. Thankfully you still love reading. Books have been my constant companion. Just now I looked through the list of Newbery medal winners and had a rush of nostalgia about many of the books I read when I was your age. I hope you have a love of reading and books that survives your schooling. Fortunately you realize the real purpose of school: to pick up all kinds of random thrown-away or lost detritus, like hair clips and pennies, and proudly show them off when you get home. Every day I ask, “How was school today?” and you tell me about the things you found on the ground and the games you played in P.E.

When you’re not at school or doing homework you’re playing with Liza. The two of you continue to feed off of one another, at once simultaneously unable to do without the other and unable to stand the sight of the other. You’re adept at pushing her buttons, making her angry when she doesn’t do what you want, but you also watch out for her and protect her. And you are often lost without her. Liza occasionally creeps into your mom’s and my bed early in the morning to snuggle, something you can’t do because sleeping with you is like sleeping with an angry messenger bike running at full tilt. One morning when she was sleeping with us you wandered into our room, plaintively calling, “Liza? Where are you?” When she’s not around you mope.

Your independence is growing in leaps and bounds. You had your first sleep-over the night before Liza had early-morning surgery. Shortly after your seventh birthday we were eating at a restaurant with friends. I realized with a start that you were getting back in your seat after having gotten up, gone to the bathroom, and returned. This sounds mundane and stupid, I know, but it was a glimpse into the future when you will no longer need my day-to-day care. I no longer drive you to school; instead, you ride the bus. Some mornings you run out to wait for it without remembering to tell any of us goodbye.

The challenge for me now is to let you grow into your own person while providing guidance to shape the person you’ll become. I see a lot of myself in you, and I wish I could save you from the mistakes you’re going to make. You, like me, find a lot of things easy to do, so you don’t want to do things you’re not good at the first time. Talent is fine and necessary, but work and perseverance are far more important in the long run. You rush through your schoolwork to get to play time faster, making silly mistakes in the process. You’re going to have to learn the hard way that, while success involves a lot of luck, it also requires a lot of time spent honing your skills. You’ll also have to learn that a lot of what’s worth doing requires you to push past discouragement and pain.

You’re getting there, though. You love the ocean; when we go to the beach for Thanksgiving you’d spend the entire time in the Gulf if possible. I’ve had to nearly drag you from the water, your lips blue and limbs trembling from the cold. This Thanksgiving you tangled with a jellyfish. Its tendrils wrapped around your arm, leaving welts that stung terribly. As we ran from the beach to the house tears streamed down your face. “I’m never going to get in the ocean again,” you sobbed. But thirty minutes later you told me, “You know, I think I’ll be okay, even if another jellyfish stings me.” The next day you waded fearlessly back out into the water.

For me now, parenting is like being part of a convoy as it drives through fog. I can’t see the road ahead and I have only hazy memories of the miles we’ve traveled, and sometimes I can’t see everyone who’s on this journey with us. It’s part of why I write these letters. I am a lepidopterist of memories, capturing them and preserving them carefully in words and sentences and paragraphs. We are the stories we tell ourselves and each other. I want your stories to be as true as they can be, and for you to know who you were when you were still learning yourself.

I don’t quite have the giant walrus mustache that Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters has, but it’s as close as I could get without driving myself crazy. Besides, who wouldn’t want to wear a costume that has your co-workers encouraging you to blow stuff up?

We spent the evening trick-or-treating with some friends in their neighborhood since our neighborhood has been vaccinated against the Halloween spirit. Our friends’ neighborhood appears to have been lifted wholesale from the movie E.T., complete with decorated houses and hordes of kids roaming the neighborhood and attacking anyone with a bowl of candy. At one point in the evening we passed a compact front-end loader pulling a flat-bed trailer filled with trick-or-treaters and a smoke machine. In its front scoop was a flashing pumpkin that made it look like it had plowed through some poor church’s pumpkin patch and perhaps a high-voltage line.

Early on Eli declared he wanted to be a ninja. In hindsight, us letting him dress as a ninja was like an unregulated credit default swap: good in theory, bad in practice. Not only was he wearing a black costume that encouraged him to hide in the shadows, but every fifth boy was dressed as a ninja. We had three kids dressed as ninjas in our group alone. Even his cousin Sam in Kansas City was a ninja. Liza, on the other hand, just wanted to wear a random dress over her warm clothes. She ended up with a mermaid dress that her friend Kate had.

We had between seven and nine ninjas, mermaids, and Angry Birds in our party. The kids quickly divided into three groups. The older boys would run ahead, with Liza running pell-mell in their midst. Liza’s friend Kate would follow behind at a more stately pace, with Kate’s younger brother Jordan trailing behind. Keeping the kids together was like keeping spilled marbles from rolling everywhere. We parents eventually adopted small squad tactics. One parent would run to the first house on the block, the next parent would take the second house, and so on until we were strung out along the street and ready to intercept our mob of candy-crazed kids. As the kids would leave one house, the parent at that house would send the kids to the next parent before running ahead of all the other parents to keep the train going. All we were missing were SWAT vests and shouts of “GO! GO! GO!”

The two Angry-Bird-suited kids eventually tired of wearing their costumes, so I inherited one of them to wear until we got back to the house. This led to a combination costume of Jamie Hyneman and Angry Birds that I can only call Angry Beret.

While Eli and Liza were mainly excited to run from house to house shouting, “Trick or treat!”, caring little for what candy they got, they ended up with a huge haul of candy. We split it into five gallon-sized Ziploc bags: two for the kids, one for Eli’s classroom, one for me, and one for work.

In conclusion, this is how I developed adult-onset diabetes.

Your more traditional birthday celebrations were spread out over three weeks. On your actual birthday you had donuts at school. Later that week mom and I took you to Red Robin. Two weekends later my parents showed up and took you and your friends Kate, Josh and Jordan to Chuck-E-Cheese. Sadly I was on a business trip and so missed you communing with Chuck and his scary animatronic band.

You talk far more than I ever expected you to. When I was young I talked a lot — completely unlike now — and so your uncle Andrew never got to talk much. Based on that I assumed that you’d have the same experience, since Eli talks slightly more than he breathes. Instead you also talk a lot, so that often our house sounds like we’ve got two radio station DJs competing for our attention. With practice, you’re leaving your cute toddler speech behind. It wasn’t too long ago that you were calling crayons “crayawns” and talking about your favorite restaurant “Phil Sandobal’s”. At one point you heard your mom bemoaning yet another fly buzzing around our kitchen. “There’s our usual house pet, a fly,” she said, which led you to call every fly from then on a “usually fly pet”.

Speaking of flies, you’re still enamored with bugs. This summer the red-eyed 13-year cicadas hatched and our friend Renee brought some over for you to see. You put them in your bug catcher and carried them around the house while petting them. In fact, you have no real sense that some bugs are evil, even those without scary red eyes. Just a few weeks ago you picked up a small sweat bee that stung you. Undaunted, you later picked up a big fuzzy bumblebee “because he wanted to be friends.” Fortunately, most of your bug encounters have gone much better. You’ve played with praying mantises, beetles, cockroaches, and more without being harmed. One of your favorite Christmas presents was the ant farm we got you, even though we couldn’t get the ants for it at the time because it was too cold. The ants finally arrived in April, as I found when I came home from work and you ran to meet me at the door. “Guess what I got! Guess what I got!” you said. “ANTS!”

You have a gift for naming things. There have been endless Needles the beetle, which you delight in finding and showing us at 6:30 in the morning. You’ve added to your stuffed animal menagerie: you now have Lips the fish and Turtle Turtle Not the turtle. Your scooter is Pixie the scooter. One of your many stuffed dogs is Special the dog.

As you’ve grown, so has your imagination. You have two invisible friends, Poodie and Jai Alai. They are electric monsters shaped like dogs who eat bones and are invisible. Sometimes they shoot electricity. There are also ice robots who follow the car and alternate between protecting the car and chasing it. To you, the large electrical towers that dot our landscape are robots, though it’s possible that’s due to your brother’s influence.

This has been a year of extreme weather. In January we had our first real snowstorm since your birth. You got to tromp around in the snow and make snow angels. A month ago a series of tornadoes tore through our community. We spent the afternoon huddled in a hallway filled with quilts and pillows. You and Eli played on iPads and iPhones; your mom and I fretted. The next day, as the extent of the devastation became clear, we ran to Arkansas, where we were promptly hemmed in by floods. At one point we walked from Pop Don’s house to a section of road that was underwater. “Why is there water on the road?” you said, pitching rocks in to see them sink to the asphalt below.

Last year I wrote that, if we were lucky, you’d become potty trained without us having to work hard. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. The transition from you wearing diapers to you being potty trained was so smooth that we almost didn’t realize it had happened. Not so with your pacifier, which required a lot of bribing and crossed fingers. “Put them on the table and the binkie fairy will take them away and leave quarters,” we told you. Hint: it wasn’t the binkie fairy, it was me. I put them in the top drawer of my dresser in case you were absolutely unable to go to sleep without a pacifier. I had a whole story about the binkie fairy feeling bad for you if I had to trade them for sleep.

You’re still not the greatest sleeper, though your sleep habits have improved noticeably. Your brother sleeps so soundly that I could tie him to the car bumper and drag him around without him waking up, while the sound of moonlight sometimes interrupts your sleep. When we were visiting with my family during Thanksgiving, we put you to sleep in one bed and then moved you to another. The first night when I lifted you and you stayed asleep, I nearly passed out myself. Most nights aren’t that smooth, though. Putting you to bed stimulates your procrastination gland. “I need to go to the baaaaathroom,” you tell us. “There are shadows in my room. Who’s out there? Can I have some water? There’s a monster in my room. Can you cover me up?” The best of your excuses play on our parenting impulses. “I want you to hug me,” you’ll say. When we do, you say, “Now hug me for a while.” Just last night we went in to find that you’d been playing, dressed yourself in your fairy wings, and only then fallen asleep.

The most exciting thing you did all year was fall and poke one of your teeth through your upper lip. You got to have stitches, which sent you into hysterics throughout the process. Lest anyone think you were so upset because you’re a frilly little girl, I’ll point out that, two days later, the stitches were bothering you so you went ahead and pulled them out.

Eli is your best friend and dearest enemy. Sometimes you two fight; five minutes later, you’re sad that Eli won’t play with you. Every morning you wake up and go play with him until he pushes you or you hit him, at which point you wake up your mom and me either by complaining about what Eli did or screeching like an angry owl. Screeching is how you let people in neighboring states know that you’re angry. I’m afraid you inherited my temper. If so, I hope you learn to control it sooner than I did.

These days are so hot that we’ve been spending a lot of it in friends’ pools. You splash around excitedly, holding onto two pool noodles while you kick. After a while you tire out and want to be carried through the water while clinging tightly to my neck. I treasure those moments because, as excited as I am about your growing independence, it’s still wonderful to have you holding on.

Every story starts the same: “Happy birthday, Robot!” From there players take turns being the Storyteller. When you’re the Storyteller you roll dice, keeping some and giving others to the players on your left and right. You then write a sentence to keep the story going. You can write as many words as you have dice, but you get the word “Robot” (or “Robot’s”) for free. The player to your right then adds to your sentence using the same rules, only they get the word “and” for free. Then the player to your left adds even more to the sentence, their free word being “but”.

It’s both very silly and very entertaining. As an example, here’s the story Eli, Misty and I created last night.

Happy birthday, Robot!

Robot went flying and had fun but zoomed down quickly.

As he fell, Robot began to sing and dance but landed on a trampoline.

Robot bounced up into the sky and broke apart into tinier robots.

One tiny robot commanded the others and yelled, “Back to the sky, buddies!”

Tiny robots raced skyward (and how!) but one crashed into an eagle.

And that robot fell down into a trampoline pit.

Robot broke through the trampoline and fell to the hot lava below.

Robot buddies raced down and fished him out of the lava but one fell down.

The other robots helped him out but the hook came off.

All the robots became best friends.

Fun times had by robots!

(The hook that came off, in case you’re wondering, was evidently from where the other robots fished the one robot out of the lava.)

You can get a PDF of the game for $10 or a beautiful booklet of it for $25. If Happy Birthday, Robot! sounds a little too child-like for you because your heart is shriveled, you should instead take a look at Solis’s Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. Solis is raising the funds to publish the game, and if you donate you can get all kinds of cool stuff plus the warm feeling of having helped something cool come into being.

It’s been a year of medical stuff, culminating in you getting stitches in your forehead. You ran out of Liza’s room, blood dripping down your face, and sobbed, “I hit my head!” It turned out you’d jumped off of her bed and over her Dora dollhouse only to bang your forehead on her dresser. After that emergency trip, you getting after-market ear tubes was a breeze.

It’s also been a year of snow. When we missed Huntsville’s white Christmas, instead having a rainy Arkansas Christmas, I thought you’d never get to see large amounts of snow. The universe set out to prove me wrong, dumping around a foot of snow on our yard in January and more in February. You didn’t have any snow boots, so we outfitted you with multiple pairs of socks covered by plastic Ziploc bags held on with rubber bands. Let no one say your mom and I have forgotten our redneck Arkansas roots. We made a snowman, but you were more interested in eating every bit of snow to see if it tasted different than every other bit of snow. You also had a good time throwing snowballs at me, though you were less excited when I threw snowballs back. We wandered up and down the snowy streets while I convinced you and Liza that the gray snow from car tires should not be eaten.

You’re still in love with videogames. You’ve done so well with your Didj that this year we upgraded you to a Nintendo DS. Now you don’t have to solve math problems to keep playing a game! You’re a big fan of Plants vs Zombies and Kirby’s Epic Yarn. The big change is that this year you’re more interested in playing games yourself instead of watching me play. It’s not just videogames, though. You got a copy of the card game Uno as a birthday gift, and ever since you’ve been beating your mom and me at the game.

Last year we were lucky that your kindergarten teacher was great. This year we’ve been lucky that your first grade teacher is also great. Good teachers aren’t a given, so enjoy the ones you have. School has piled homework on your head. You spend about a half hour a day working on assignments to improve your writing, reading, and comprehension skills. They also have us tracking everything you’re reading, which makes reading into a chore with external rewards instead of something you do because you enjoy it. As you might guess, I’m not a fan of this approach. The schoolwork is only going to increase from here, and it makes me worried that you won’t have time to mess around and do things because you find them interesting, a key component in being a kid and becoming a functioning adult.

At seven years old, you’re a combination of loving and thoughtless in the way that young boys often are. You fight with Liza and then are sad because you’ve hurt her feelings. Our friends started a fund raiser to buy an iPad for their autistic son. When you heard about it, you said, “I want to give some of my money for it,” and counted out $3 in change to contribute to the fund.

Your relationship with Liza continues to deepen. She’s teaching you how to negotiate and get along with others, a skill which will come in handy later. You and she get up early in the morning and play together in her room, letting your mom and me sleep in like the awesome parents we are. For Halloween the two of you dressed up as skeletons, you in black and her in pink. You’re like binary stars who orbit around each other in complex ways.

Your creativity continues to astound me. You still love making things out of Legos. You saw a TARDIS, went to your drawer of random Lego parts, and returned with a Lego TARDIS. You made a Lego version of Mario and a bad guy from Super Mario Galaxy and then told a long and complex story about how Mario beat the bad guy. You made a Lego version of Perry the Platypus from Phineas and Ferb, your all-time favorite TV show. I expect to come home from work one day to discover that you’ve made a Lego version of your sister and shooed the real Liza out the door.

A lot of your creativity is centered on videogames. You’ve made up countless new plants and zombies for the eponymous Plants vs Zombies. “I have a new plant. It’s like a jah-lah-pah-no only it burns all the zombies at once.” You made a paper peashooter and zombie and acted out various PvZ levels. Once, before I left on a business trip, you made me a paper Super Meat Boy. “He can go with you,” you said.

You’ve even harnessed your creativity for capitalist ends. One day you came home from school with a big plastic helicopter. “Where’d you get that?” your mom asked. “Oh, I got one of my friends to trade it to me.” You’d traded him for a two-page comic you’d made of robots fighting. You mis-interpreted your mom’s bemused expression and hastened to re-assure her: “It’s okay. I can make another comic.”

The time with you passes all too quickly these days. Yesterday you were born; today you are seven. I have trouble believing that it’s been seven years already, as I at once see you as the newborn baby you were and the boy you are now. That temporal double-vision is only going to get worse as we shelve more birthdays between the bookends of my memory of your birth and the reality of now. But when I page through those books and spread them out before me, what I see in my memories reminds me of how good we’ve had it and makes me excited for the future of who you will become.