When Pey­ton and I go out for walks around the neigh­bor­hood (which has become more and more fre­quent since I’ve started work­ing from home) he notices lots of things. He likes to talk to Twister, the horse that lives across the street, and he likes to yell, “RUN!” and then run, and he likes to play with leaves. His great­est obses­sion though started prob­a­bly a year ago, while watch­ing “Blues Clues”.

Pey­ton really grew to love the show. I like it too, as any­one who has read this blog before can attest to, and I’ve got my favorite char­ac­ters on the show, but Peyton’s has become Mail­box, who shows up rarely more than once a show after Steve/Joe have sang their mail song and always deliv­ers “a let­ter from our friends”. Mail­box wants to be a standup come­dian some­day but he’s rooted in place in the front yard, so it will prob­a­bly be hard for him to travel.

But Pey­ton loves the guy (or girl, it’s hard to dis­tin­guish, since his voice has a strange tim­ber to it) and always sings along to the mail-retrieving songs that Steve/Joe sings. And this love has trans­lated into our every­day lives as well now. So while we’re out Pey­ton will now want to look inside of the mail­box when we leave on our walk and also on our return to the house. And he likes the van­ity mail­boxes, like the mail­box that looks like a dog at the end of the street or the stone one that has vines grow­ing on it. But he loves all of them pretty equally.

So the next time if we show up at your house with Pey­ton and he has a pile of your mail in his hands, you’ll know why.