Before we get into this week’s newsletter, I have to give a shout out to my virtual pal Gareth Wall who publishes the great

You can read my letter here. Thanks daddyo!

This weekend, after a few days spent racing bikes at their first-ever BMX Nationals race at the world-class BMX Supercross facility in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Emily and I took our kids to Carowinds, the expansive amusement park that straddles the North and South Carolina state lines.

As we walking through the park, my wife and I both spotted a trio of young teenagers, ambling around and trying to look as cool as humanly possible. One of them was holding a stuffed animal that he won. Maybe he was going to give it to a girl. Maybe he was going to stick it in his closet with his other stuffies, which, until very recently, served a very real purpose of gaving him comfort through the night.

I mentioned to Emily how much I remembered that phase in my life, when I so desperately wanted to be cool, to be grown, to be a man. But inside, I still grasped at the ever-fading strains of my childhood.

I’d get home from daylong adventures spent with my buddies exploring the woods, trying weed, and looking at the porno mags we had stashed in secret spots all over town only to play with my G.I. Joes in secret and watch the cartoons I loved since I was a little boy. I had a circle of friends who were into teenaged shit and a circle who still wanted to play army. And those circles never overlapped. If I won a stuffy at Great Adventure, I would be in the same conundrum I imagined that boy at Carowinds was going through: to give it a cute girl or to keep it for myself.

It was a weird era but it was a magical one, with one foot dipped in two very distinct phases of my development. Back then, I held on to those bastions of childhood because I think I knew that once that door closed, it could never be reopened. There comes a day when you put your G.I. Joes or your Hot Wheels away for the last time and never play with them again (though, so many of mine still live on my bookshelves and all around our home).

Though he’s not quite at the same precipice of young adulthood as those boys in the amusement park, my son is at a similar place, and my favorite phase yet of his development.

It’s a phase I call “The Between.”

Right now, at seven, he’s very much a little boy. But he’s also kind of a baby. And yet, he’s somehow showing signs of being a pre-teen.

To wit, immediately after his heats at the BMX race, where he went elbow-to-elbow with some of the best young bike racers in America, my son dashed back to our team’s tent to play with a small bin of Paw Patrol toys ones of his teammate’s younger sister brought.

Even at Carowinds, my little boy lived in The Between.

After bravely taking on an ancient wooden roller coaster, he told me he wanted to try his first loop-de-loop. Emily checked the park’s app, found the one inverted coaster he was tall enough for, and off we went. After two full loops and two complete corkscrews, we told our son it was time to prioritize his three-year-old sister, as she’d been waiting patiently all morning while he dared more and more boldly.

And so, by mid-morning, we made our way to Camp Snoopy, the area in the park dedicated to the five-and-under set.

There, our son had just as much fun on the kiddie rides as he did on some of the biggest coasters in the park. He squeezed himself into a tiny Jeep that wound around a short track, his armed wrapped tight around his sister. He rode the smaller version of the old carousel swings (the big version of which he had ridden earlier in the day), which don’t go more than three or four feet off the ground, a wide smile splashed across his face the entire time.

As we watched our kids on the tiny ride, laughing and screaming and hooting and hollering, I mentioned The Between to Emily, pointing out how his newfound love of massive, inverted roller coasters was supplanted by a ride he last rode when he was two-years-old.

After taking our daughter on a small balloon ride that rose up in the air fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, we told our kids it was about time to get back to Chapel Hill.

“Just one more, daddy?” my son asked, pleading, after an hour spent reliving his post-toddler days, for one more go at the loop-de-loop; for one more chance to be a big kid.