We played with magnetic letters this morning (they make great imprints on the magna-doodle, by the way). Calvin is engrossed by letters lately and has been spelling things for some time now, such as "train" spelled "pqrifds", so when he came running into the kitchen while I was making lunch saying that he had spelled "zoo" and I should come look, I expected nothing less than his usual wonderful and creative spelling exploits. Imagine my surprise.
I realize that we can't say he wrote his first word today–his letter writing still closely resembles an abstract of a tumbleweed–but we'll forever say that on this day in history he spelled his first word. All by himself. Seeing how excited that made his mom, he then asked how to spell more things, of course, so I started with cat and he went to work on that one, too.
Sponges. They are quite definitely little sponges at this age.