First, we would like to extend our greetings for the very special occassion of your birthday on Nov. 25th, Mom! We hope you have a very enjoyable celebration with the relatives you will be visiting. HAPPY BIRTBDAY ! Robin would like to add his greeting. (He likes typewriters, but his choice of keys is generally rather random. Lets see how he does if I tell him what letters to push).
HI                     ???? """""GRMNBVFGT¢%$#@!+??????"""::....LLLOO) ) )__++''''''////
It seems that finding letters on a typewriter is not as much fun as pushing keys at random.

We took Robin to the Barneveld School last week to pick up one of the desks they were selling. In the school office he pointed at a magnetic letter on the wall and said "purple H! Robin have green H." The woman running the office was very impressed that he got both the letter and the color right. And when we got home we found that the "H" in Robin's set of magnetic letters was indeed green.

Letters and numbers 1-10 (he has trouble with "5's") are kind of old hat to him now, however. His current passion is birds. He spends time almost every day looking at our "Birds of North America" and has one story book with several pages of bird drawings where he can name ~all the birds, includmg a Toucan. So when I showed him the picture of the Toucan you sent and asked him what it was, he immediately named it correctly (even though the bill was not colored like the one in his story book). Thank you much for the pictures Dad.

Debbie has been going to a class on Parenting in Dodgeville on Wednesday afternoons and combining the trip with a trip to the Dodgeville library. Last time she took out two bird books for Robin.

...

Thank you so much for the T-shirt and card you sent for Robin's birthday. The event was celebrated with a party here with two children from up the road and their mother. I was at work and Debbie was too busy most of the time to take any pictures, but some were taken later in the day (which are on the roll still in the camera). The pictures enclosed are from last spring as indicated on their backs. The goat kid competing with Robin for the lawn chair is one of those born in May which was being bottle fed. The enlargement of Robin and the chickens is our favorite from the last roll of film. I hope you like it too. I didn't know whether you would want to keep it loose, put it in an album, frame it or have it mounted. If I send you scenery enlargements this size should they be dry-mounted on heavy cardboard? I thought I'd better check since there is always the danger that I might send you more pictures than you would want to have out at one time, and unmounted enlargements are easier to store.

How are Warren's cassette letters working out? I thought I might get a cassette-type tape recorder like yous so that we could send you samples of the current sounds of Robin talking or singing. You might also hear from us more often if I didn't have to write out the letters. Next to picture books of birds I think Robin's favorite things are records with nursery rhymes or animal songs. "Old MacDonald" has long been one of his favorite songs (though I think he was better at imitating animal sounds before he learned to talk) and he is learning the verses to so many songs we have trouble keeping up.