I received a letter in the mail yesterday. it was from my nephew, and he addressed it himself (okay, his mom supplied the zip codes), backwards letters and all.→[More:]

He's quite a writer. His words meander a bit across the envelope, and he's an atrocious speller, but he's four; he does that adorable kid thing where W and N get mixed up -- if it weren't for his editor, the letter might have ended up in Wyoming instead of New York.

Inside the envelope was a single sheet of white paper. Along the 11" edge are the words "NEW WOOD FLOOR." There are four lines drawn the length of the page, as if some industrious little man had traced the seams in the new wood floor onto the page. On the 8½" side is the word, "STRIR." Next to it is a drawn right angle, perhaps a tracing of a stair. The page came carefully folded along the floor lines.

While at my parents' house for the last month of the summer (in part to get him out of the way while his parents installed NEW WOOD FLOORS at their home), the boy started sending "emails" to various members of the household, in the form of notes passed under doors or through the gap where two rooms share one window frame upstairs (a consruction I've never quite understood). Usually it's a drawing of a car, though sometimes it'll be a word or two, like "LUNCH TIME" or "IMPALA." He also likes to write electronic emails on the computer, but those require some collusion from an adult and can't be written while he should be napping.