The Versatile Blue Mail Box

This was Christmas 1975, our first Christmas with Lynda.  She was four years old and had been with us since January 22nd.  In that year, she had gained weight, gotten her immunizations that she'd never had as a baby and as you can see in this picture become a happy little girl.  Never in a million years would we have guessed that this plastic mailbox with the blue bottom and red top would be so versatile and loved by Lynda.  Obviously, it was great for getting into.  That was the first thing she used it for.  Then it was equally fun to put other things into and then pour them out and do it again.

 Lynda, her blue box when she was seven and her favorite guy...Billy Reynolds who was my dear friend and Lynda's teacher at OCDC, Jan Reynold's son. He babysat for Lynda which was not a job to be taken lightly and we rarely had babysitters due to Lynda's seizures.  I imagine he was saying all of her "words" to her and she was repeating them back and vice versa.  This was right before Kevin was born in September, 1979.  Billy Reynolds is now a full-bird colonel in the USAF.


Soon she learned that it could be turned upside down and used as a chair and it was this function that she used for years to come.  At some point, several years later we decided to get a second one and see what she would do with two of them.  She did the same thing with two as she had done with one.  If she was sitting on one, she turned the other one over to match.  If she was inside one or putting toys into one, she would put toys into the other.  This was one of her all time favorite toys through the years.  The picture here is when she was about eight and a half years old when Kevin was about six months old. You can tell by the swinging hair that she had been rocking the box back and forth and having major fun.  The red tops to the mailboxes were not useful to Lynda.  They were always over in the corner somewhere but the blue boxes...always a new adventure waiting to happen.