To Alex, with Love

I know I have been AWOL for almost two months. I have been so caught up in keeping up with my life that I haven't stopped to keep you posted on the many marvelous happenings at the House of Phogles. Of course, I fully intend to atone for this and do some major catch-up blogging over the next week or so, but we all know where we end up when we take the road paved with good intentions...

Having said that, I just have to put this one up for you. A few weeks back, my daughter got a letter in the mail from a friend in Arizona. They are occasional pen pals, and it is fun to write and receive letters in the mailbox.

Watching my girl be so excited about mail (and her sisters all jealous because they didn't get any), I began to wax nostalgic as I remembered my own pen pal days (you know, before blogging and facebook and e-mail and text messaging and cheap long distance?) and the hours my sisters and I spent at my mother's kitchen table writing letters and making envelopes. We would shamelessly hack up past issues of National Geographic and Time magazine and other glossy periodicals, make their pages into envelopes, and have the coolest out-going mail in the ZIP code.

So I asked my girls if they wanted to learn how to make the coolest envelopes ever. Of course they did! We dug through past issues we had on hand, found the most fabulous full-page photos, and got to work.

O! the joy! O! the ecstasy! Hours of pouring over magazines and selecting pages - and getting lost temporarily reading articles missed the first time around. Glue and scissors and labels and intense satisfaction over the final product. Three days later, we had a huge stack of envelopes begging to be used...right beside a huge stack of gutted magazines ready for paper recycling.

But who could we write? Gabba wrote her friend in Arizona, and a letter to her uncle on a mission. Lucy wrote a friend, and the same uncle. Eliza wrote the Elder uncle, and a little galpal in Oregon. Poor Yvy. She wanted so much to be in on the postal fun. So I helped her write a letter to her beloved Alex.

Alex is my nephew, and he and Yvy are the best of Best Friends. They are nine months apart, and they live for the times when they get to be together and hang out and be four-year-olds together. It is a very sweet thing. The letter Yvy wrote was heavily prompted by me (but I only wrote what she actually said) and corrected for grammar. She picked out an envelope with lemurs on the front, and happily posted it. The next week, there was a letter in the mail for Yvy from her beloved Alex. It was a thing of pure little boy imagination. Our entire family read it and laughed and read it again. Yvy wrote back quickly, and had me read Alex's letter to her over and over. Tragically, it got wet on the kitchen counter, and the ink ran, so it is lost forever. Yvy asked every day when the mailman would remember to bring her another letter from Alex.

Today was the day. Alex wrote:

Dear Yvy,

I like going underwater. I plug my nose, that's what I do when I go underwater, but I like little water. When I get bigger like Daddy I'll go under bigger water that's too deep.

Fireworks pop in the sky & I have sparklers! We get to buy some and make them pop when it gets too dark.

I like sleeping on the trampoline. My mommy let me last night a lot of times. I sleep in a sleeping bag because the bugs aren't supposed to bite me. Biting is mean.

I want to name my kitty Crystal. My mommy says it's not a kitty name, but I like it for my kitty.

Airplanes are really nice. I got to see some baby ones that were right next to Osborn at the little airport. There were a lot a lot! My mommy took me and my brother and my so beautiful baby sister to see them at the little airport. I saw them take off, flying around, and even almost crashed, but really they were just landing. It was soooo cool! Airplanes drop bombs on submarines.

My mommy's necklace looks like a silver lasso. But I'm not supposed to.

Do you know fishes are swimming in the ocean? Sharks eat slugs, because I flush them in the toilet and the go to the ocean. Sharks LOVE slugs, they think they are yummy.

I can't wait to see you at Nana's!

Alex

And Yvette promptly replied:

Dear Alex, Tuesday, June 29, 2010

That was a wonderful letter. Thank you for the stickers and the star stickers and the race car stickers and going to Mozingo. And I want to put one of my princess stickers on your letter. I want you to send my letter case back. And I like going to Mozingo a lot times and I wish that I could go these times (holds up seven fingers) again, and I want to go a lot at Grandma’s house.

I want to give you a letter which is nice and I like talking on the phone with you on the phone and I like talking to Grandma and Nana and my Great-Grandma, and her turn on earth is over and I am happy for her. I eat a lots of food and I eat healthy food which is good for you.

I asked to go to the Willises but now this day I didn’t, and I’m grounded to the house. The Willises live up the alley and they have a lot of property so they can go to our house a lot of times.

I go-ed out to the Garden and I have new boots and I have new garden gloves. The boots are muck boots and my gloves are called garden gloves and you can’t play with them anymore. You can get peas, which are round like a circle and they are balls. We went to Orchelns for our boots and our gloves and we got Schleich animals and I got the hedgehog. There were baby chicks and baby bunnies and I getted to pet them, and I almost grabbed one that George could pet one. We got a bag of sours candy and we all had to share it and it was all gone when we were home and Daddy was home.

I likeded to go to the, I wanted to go at the family pictures when I got them, too. And that’s all. And I like going to Grandma’s house and we leave and we sleep down in the basement and Daddy was building a tree house.

My mom cut some pants for me because they had holes in it and she cut them into cutoff shorts and I like them very much and I liked their thingies.

Uh, Hyrum got chocolate candy called Yerk pieces, and we got line thingies called Mike N ipes and we got banana candy and it wasn’t really a banana it was just a banana candy and it came from the store and Gabba got weeses pieces chocolate and I want some more of these because the line thingies are all gone.

I named my hedgehog Tallisa because I wanted her to name her that because it’s a mother hedgehog. I know it’s a girl because it is, because it has little tiny eyes and tiny ears. I liked getting my hedgehog and the cat but I didn’t want a cat but I am getting another one when this one is old when it gets broken I am going to get the new one at the store when we got to the Orchelns store.

Love,

Yvy