Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I too have been waiting for the forum to catch up with recent shows, but in the meantime I'll offer a few suggestions for when Grant's son is just a few years older (and those whose kids are already at the appropriate ages can use the references right away):

• Seven books, beginning with Half Magic, by Edward Eager. Each book concerns a different group of children who stumble across some kind of magical charm or spell, and have adventures while dealing with the fact that the magic is just a little bit "off" (e.g., in Half Magic, the magic coin grants exactly half of what is wished for, so if a child wishes the group to be in Paris, the coin may send them to the middle of the Atlantic, or may send just half the group there, or maybe drop them off in some place with a name that's just half of the word "Paris"). If you follow the whole series, you stumble across scenes where the current set of characters meet up briefly with the kids from the other books.
  I've been told that the style of Eager's books is very similar to Evelyn Nesbit
• The Diamond Cave Mystery by Troy Nesbit (no relation to Evelyn as far as I'm aware). There are undoubtedly others in the series, but I vividly remember reading this Hardy Boys-like story where the young heroes try to find a stash of diamonds by solving riddle-like clues discovered in and around an old Bible.
• The "Alvin Fernald" series by Clifford B Hicks. Alvin's a boy genius along the general lines of Encyclopedia Brown, and it's Alvin's Secret Code that first sparked my interest in cryptography when I was very young.

Others will undoubtedly occur to me, but I thought of all three of the above while listening to the segment that inspired this thread.