The Daddy Chronicles returns! Starring a 9.5-year-old off to sleepaway camp after a spring filled with travel hoops, and a 6.5 year old who loves 1980s hard rock and writing fan letters to athletes

Hello readers, and happy summer! I know for most of you summer has been rolling for a few weeks now, but for our family, summer officially begins when school is out and camp has begun.

And that’s where we are on this Friday, with both our boys having finished elementary school for the year, and camp begins. So as always it seems like a good time for a new edition of the Daddy Chronicles. As always, my small humans give me no shortage of material to work with!

— Let’s start this DC edition with the little guy. Theo just finished first grade and seems to be thriving there; he had a terrific teacher this year, Mr. Atkinson, who being a sports nut had plenty to talk to Theo about.
One of the big things he encouraged Theo (and the whole class) to do was to write letters, and my kid wrote more letters this year than a homesick teenager missing his girlfriend. At first, the letter writing was mostly confined to his friends in class, and they’d write back to him, with “Dear Austin, you are my second best friend in the class, you’re the best, Love Theo,” that kind of thing.

Then Theo decided to take it up a notch, and wrote this letter to New York Rangers rookie Matt Rempe:

We thought it was cute, so we mailed it to the Rangers. Then he started writing more letters. To every single player on the Rangers, signing each “your No. 1 fan, Theo.” I explained that it was kinda hard to be everyone’s No.1 fan, but he was undeterred.
What was hilarious was my child was a little mean in some of the letters; to star defenseman Adam Fox, he wrote “you’re not playing the best in the playoffs, hopefully your teammates can help you win the Stanley Cup.”

So OK, he wrote to all the Rangers, hockey is our/his favorite obsession these days, and I thought that was it. But no, he kept writing. He wrote to some of the Knicks players, he wrote to Carlos Alcaraz after winning the French Open, and he just keeps on writing. A year ago he barely wanted to write his name on his homework, now he’s Martin Luther King from a Birmingham jail!

Hey, anything that gets a kid writing is fine by me.

— Theo’s love of music has happily been influenced by his parents, and yes I’m super proud of his recent love of Bon Jovi. He loves at least half of the “Slippery When Wet” classic album from them, and recent new song favorites include “Hotel California,” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Closer to Fine,” which Shelley and I used to sing to him as a baby in the bathtub.
His playlist is now something like 50 songs long.

— His love of playing hockey has continued strongly, and he’s not thrilled it has ended for the season. We’re putting him in a kids “league” in the fall, his first time playing real games, so we’ll see how he likes that. I have to say, when other parents compliment his skating ability, I beam with pride.
Theo also just passed another taekwondo belt test, he’s up to “high orange” now, and he was super proud of that.

— OK, on to the big boy. Nate, amazingly, is just a few months away from turning 10. Last Sunday we put him on the bus for his second summer at Chestnut Lake sleepaway camp. Last year he went for four weeks and loved it, so this year we’re trying to whole shebang, all seven weeks. He seemed excited and not at all nervous at the idea of spending that much time away from us, which is good. There were no tears, no nerves, nothing when he got on the bus Sunday, and so far all seems well! We haven’t talked to him yet (we get a 10-minute call on Saturday), but some photos from the camp’s Instagram and Facebook pages have showed him smiling, so that’s good!

Beyond all the benefits of going to a great sleepaway camp (learning some independence, trying new things), I think it’s healthy for the boys to be apart from each other for a while. The last few weeks before Nate left, he and Theo were fighting quite a lot more than usual. This break will do ALL of us some good.

 — In other Nate news, I think I mentioned he was playing travel basketball this spring, and the season was a success for him. Sure, the team lost nearly every game they played (some by comically bad scores like 42-10, and 36-14), but he got lots of playing time, bonded with some nice boys, and has a good base to build on as he hopefully plays travel ball in the fall.

— Sometimes it’s the little life moments that sneak up on you. So every year at the end of the year at our elementary school there’s a carnival on school grounds. It’s always fun, there are bouncy castles, a gaga pit, cotton candy and pizza, the whole works.

And the first year we went was when Nate was in first grade, and he and his buddies were just about the smallest kids there.
A couple of weeks ago at the carnival, I looked around and my son and his friends were pretty much the biggest kids there.

Life moves pretty fast when you’re not looking.