“Nicks,” I said, “I’m having trouble reading your letter to Santa Claus. Will you help me, please?” Together we puzzled out all but one of the words:

Dear Santa Closs [Claus], thank you for Boniss [bunnies]. I like the bonis [bunnies]. thay are quwot [cute]. the colr is [of] Zack’s Bonie [bunny] wus white. Moy [My] Bonie wus sivr [silver]. But my Dad is uligck [allergic] and my uncle is uligick to my Buniss. but my Dad boed [bought] fishishs [fishes]. farest [First] my Dad boed fish tank. we Set the tank forest [first] thing. thin [Then] my Dad boed [bought] fish. I lik [like] fishishs but I like Bonis ber [better] thin [than] inithin [unknown word]. Love, Nicky.

“Good letter, Nickers,” I said. “Santa will be happy. I’m sorry the bunny thing didn’t work out.”

“I really liked my bunny, Daddy.”

“I know, Nickers.”

I’d given the boys bunnies for Christmas. In a complicated plot designed to confuse everyone involved, the boys had picked out a bunny cage, thinking it would be used at Christmas to hold a lobster for Uncle Steve. Uncle Steve was going to get a live lobster, but didn’t know it, and certainly wouldn’t get it in a bunny cage. It worked out so that everyone was surprised, and the look on Nicky and Zack’s faces Christmas morning was worth all the work.

We named the rabbits “Lunch” and “Dinner,” after the two meals we expected Gozer to make of them. The boys called them “Lunch Bunny” and “Dinner Bunny,” and fell in love immediately.

When I was a boy, just about Nicky’s age, my parents got me a guinea pig for Christmas. My mother picked it up from the neighbors down the street, put in a box, and gave it to me after all the other presents had been opened. I was enthralled. My father was allergic. He wheezed, turned red in the face, gasped for air, flailed his arms, and ran out of the room. I’d seen him have asthma attacks before, but never one like that. My mother gently explained that we wouldn’t be able to keep the guinea pig.

I was devastated. I tried bargaining—what if I kept the guinea pig out in the garage? No, the guinea pig would freeze to death, and my father couldn’t avoid going in the garage. What if I kept him in my room? No, the dander from the guinea pig would stick to my clothes, my hands, the carpet, and the walls. What if we took him back, but I still called him my guinea pig and went to visit him occasionally? My mother, seeing my increasing desperation, said the only thing she could: “Honey, when you’re all grown up and have your own house, you may keep whatever animals you want.”

I never forgot that guinea pig, and I vowed I would never do something that mean (however unintentional and unavoidable) to my own children. When I was arranging to get the bunnies for Nicky and Zack, I told my guinea pig story to everyone who would listen, and made sure I handled the bunnies a lot to be sure I wasn’t allergic before giving them to the boys.

In the bizarre way fate turns us into our parents without our knowledge or consent, I ended up doing the same thing to my kids that my parents did to me. Handling the bunnies didn’t cause a problem, but having them in the house did. I’m not sure if it was the accumulation of bunny fur, or something in their cages, but as the days went by, it became clear that, like my father but not as violently, I was allergic to the bunnies. My neck and chest turned red, my arms itched, my eyes ran, and I got a rash in the middle of my back. Uncle Dan had the same kind of reaction.

The bunnies had to go. The boys understood, somewhat, and although it wasn’t critical to get rid of the bunnies immediately, I figured sooner was better than later. I’d been hoping that the boys would start getting bored with the bunnies and not care very much, but with each passing day they became more enamored with Lunch and Dinner. So I made the fateful phone call, feeling like the world’s nastiest villain, and arranged to have the bunnies picked up.

The boys cried, then got over it, and I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that all my careful explanations (I made sure to tell the boys about my guinea pig) had helped them avoid trauma.

No such luck, as both kids informed me in a multitude of ways. First there was Nicky’s letter to Santa. Then, at school they had to name their favorite things—and for animals, guess what they picked? It went on and on, with the boys wistfully talking about bunnies, dreaming about bunnies, asking about bunnies, writing stories and letters about bunnies, telling relatives and friends about bunnies, and drawing crayon pictures of bunnies.

Not once did they accuse me of being mean, or show any sort of resentment. They were just sad and wistful. I wanted to buy them knives, show them how to insert them and twist, but then realized the effort would be redundant.

“Guilty!” I screamed inside every time anyone mentioned a bunny. “It’s true, I’m the worst father in the world.”

So I got them fish as a consolation prize. Big whoop. Fish aren’t cute. Fish aren’t soft and fuzzy. Fish don’t hop crazily, twitch their ears, and nibble carrots from your fingers. Fish aren’t mammals. They’re no fun at all. Fish have exactly one saving grace: They stay in their tank and don’t disperse dander throughout the house.

Actually, the fish were kind of interesting. We got a crab, some snails, and a bunch of different kinds of fish. We made a big deal out of selecting all the equipment, setting everything up, and learning how to take care of the fish. I taught the boys how to make trumpet noises and sing Taps as we flushed dead fish down the toilet. If we couldn’t have bunnies, at least we could sing together as a family.

“I really liked my bunny, Daddy,” said Nicky again, waving the Santa letter at me.

I blinked at him. “Hmmn? Did you?” Ha! I briefly considered telling Nicky my guinea pig story again, but then Zack came back from playing with the dog and wanted to read Nicky’s letter, too.

“But, Zack,” I said reasonably, “you can’t read.”

“I can read!”

“Okay, then. Go ahead.”

He looked at the letter, shook his head, and said, “I don’t know.”

No, he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even know his ABC’s. At the start of Kindergarten, he recognized 75 percent of the letters with good accuracy, the rest either spottily or not at all. By Christmas, the spotty ones had turned correct, and the remainder might as well be cuneiform. He couldn’t recite the ABC’s from memory, either; he consistently got lost around “L” and again around “R.” Looking at them while reciting didn’t help.

So I got him some magnetic alphabet letters, and we started practicing with small groups of letters. By early February 2006, he crossed his personal Rubicon and entered the land of beginning literacy. He could now recite the ABC’s perfectly every time, and sight-recognized all of the letters with near-100 percent accuracy.

Zack learns everything in set, invariant stages.

Stage 1: He has no idea. This stage lasts one to three days.

Stage 2: He understands he needs to learn something, but has no idea what. This stage lasts one to three weeks.

Stage 3: He knows he doesn’t know something, and refuses to try to learn it. This stage lasts anywhere from a week to six months.

Stage 4: He’s always known it, and can’t believe anyone would suggest he hasn’t.

The transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4 can happen literally overnight, and I’ve yet to discover a trigger mechanism. It’s not a short-term versus long-term memory issue, because when he’s at Stage 2 or Stage 3, he can’t even repeat parts of the lesson while being taught. In Stage 2, he’s mystified; in Stage 3, he’s stubborn. But then he goes from “I don’t know” to “I know!” via some mystical process, and it’s as if the earlier stages never happened.

So he had the ABC’s now, but unfortunately, his pronunciation was slipping again. We’d quit private speech therapy at Callier Center in December because he was doing so well, and was getting therapy from the school. My hope was that he’d continue progressing at the same speed. Alas, the opposite happened. In just six weeks, by early-February, it was obvious that he was regressing. His /S/ was becoming /ZCH/ again, his other consonants were slipping, and it was getting hard to understand him again. I spent more time saying, “What? What?” to him than anything else.

I got in touch with Tasha at Callier, and she worked us into the schedule. Within a few weeks, Zack had regained the lost ground and started moving forward again. Although I’m the first to admit that Tasha is a miracle-worker, I don’t think she did anything particularly brilliant or intuitive. I’m convinced that the key to Zack’s progress was the cost of the private therapy. Knowing that I was paying for Zack to spend time with Tasha twice a week, I made it a point to practice letters and sounds with him daily. More important, I paid attention to his everyday speech, and made a conscious effort to model correct sounds clearly.

Or maybe it was all Tasha’s miracles. We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that without Callier he lost ground. With Callier, he made progress. I’m sure that the therapy he got in school, plus his teacher’s ministrations and my work, all contributed to his success with pronunciation.

Alas, he wasn’t making similar progress with other memorization tasks. He recognized the days of the week, but could not say them in order, or even say which one came next right after being told:

“Zack, first there’s Sunday, then Monday. Sunday, Monday. Sunday, Monday. What day comes after Sunday?”

“Friday?”

“No, it’s Sunday, then Monday. Sunday, then…?”

“Wednesday!”

“Sunday, then Monday. Sunday, then Monday. Sunday, then…?”

“Friday?”

“No, it’s Monday. Say ‘Monday.’”

“Monday.”

“What day comes after Sunday?”

“Monday.”

“Perfect! Let’s try again. Sunday, then…?”

“Saturday!”

And so on. Some days he did better than others, but overall the sequence of days was a mystery to him. He understood the concept, and could point to the days on the calendar as they were being named, even correcting the speaker if the days were named in the wrong order. But he couldn’t name them himself, with or without the calendar. We’d tried blocks, magnetic letters, clay, candy, colored drawings—things he could touch, things he could move, things he could see, and things he could taste. We’d tried all seven at once, two at once, and three at once. He just couldn’t do it…until the day that I lost my patience with him, sat him down at the table, and told him he was going to learn the days of the week before getting up again.

He went from 10 percent accuracy to 95 percent accuracy within an hour.

On the other hand, he’d made absolutely fantastic progress with numbers. I noticed back in December that although he could recite numbers sequentially, he couldn’t enumerate objects. The two kinds of counting are developmentally distinct tasks, although no one who’s mastered both thinks of them as separate.

“Zack, what comes after three?”

“Four.”

“Great! Now count these oranges.”

“One, two, three, five!”

“No, what comes after three?”

“Four.”

“Okay, count the oranges again.”

“One, two, three, seven!”

So we started playing “Sorry” and other games that require both enumeration and counting. For almost a month, we played a game like that every day. Instead of correcting him when he made a mistake, I told him to start over. At the beginning, I had to model how to enumerate – move the piece while counting aloud – but thereafter, he understood the process and just needed to match one type of counting with the other.

As with all other tasks, Zack moved through the stages in order, and suddenly could count, could always have counted, and couldn’t understand why it was such a big deal.

Well, little Z, it’s not such a big deal. Just wait until you encounter the multiplication tables.

Since clothes are a big deal for the boys, I’ve created a couple of family traditions centered around clothing. When we go on trips, they get new shirts. They get them a week or two before the trip (if possible), and get to wear them for the first time on the first day of the trip. For Christmas, they get new pajamas. They get them a week or two before Christmas, but can’t wear them for the first time until Christmas Eve. This year I was able to find footie jammies big enough for Zack, but Nicky had grown too big.

The live Christmas tree tradition lasted exactly one year. For our second Christmas, we got a plastic tree. We went through all the same motions decorating it and putting it up, but then after Christmas we stuck the tree – still fully decorated – in an upstairs closet. Next year, we’ll haul it down and be finished with decorating in about five minutes.

The big presents this year (not including the bunnies) were Batman paraphernalia (dolls, cars, weapons, and so forth) and play shaving kits from Grandma. We also got a five-foot animated singing Santa because…well, just because.

This is the paragraph where I’m supposed to draw all the different threads of this report together, and show you how they’re all woven into some magnificent tapestry that only becomes apparent when you look at it from the right angle. This is the place where I’m supposed to make some wry and poignant observation about how the joy of the Christmas season mirrors the joy we feel every day just by being a family together. Optionally, at this point I say something just sappy enough to bring a small tear to your eye and make you realize how lucky the boys and I are to have found each other.

Well, it’s not going to happen. The tapestry is visible from any angle, and it’s called life. We’re busy living it, and loving every moment. The threads are all tangled, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. I don’t have any poignant observations to make, except that the joy of the Christmas season does mirror the joy we feel every day just by being a family together. And if that isn’t enough to bring a small tear to your eye and make you realize how lucky the boys and I are to have found each other, check your pulse: you may already be dead.