Apparently driving your cargo bike to the farmer’s market two times a week for organic milk in glass bottles will not help you avoid being called into the 3rd grade teacher’s office to talk about how your 8-year-old is starting puberty.

Remember those ridiculously leaky silicone lids for the metal bottles that we used so that our precious babies would never touch yucky hormone-wrecking plastic? Ha ha ha.

I want a do-over. I want to trade in my anti-plastic sanctimony for a couple more minutes with my little kid. I want to give little 3-year-old Frida a bowl haircut instead of a smooth bob.

I know that this Christmas is hard with all of us in COVID lockdown, but I am so glad to have Frida and Max get to have all this time together. I’m worried that next year she’ll have grown out of playing with him, but right now she’s his very best friend. They sleep in the same bed on the weekends, whispering until they fall asleep. They wake up with plans and stories. She spends hours helping him read his first book. Their in-jokes and dance routines are too sweet for words right now, even if she wants time to herself in the afternoon to read her books about puberty.

As usual, parenting comes with largely-unfounded-but-crushing guilt and largely-unfounded-but-joyful pride. She’s growing into such a neat person, just faster than I thought.