Fragmented conversation

I have made contact with the Kato's!  After some confusion with emails I was able to talk to Yoshiyuki.  There was only a couple sentences and the English was fragmented, but I could still understand him.  I replied in Japanese at some length, the quality of which I am still curious about.  The next day Yoshiyuki replied confirming that the current email he was using is the working one.  Then wrote about how it has been cold in Obu, therefore he was sitting under the こたつ (kotatsu). A kotatsu is a table that has a blanket skirt around the sides and heater underneath.  I also found out that they have a dog named Ruby (the dog was under the blanket as well).  Before I could reply I received an email from Yukie, my host mother.  Which gave a brief description of the family.  It was interesting to hear about the family also her English was much better than Yoshiyuki's, with only a few minor errors.  In return I replied in Japanese, which I now regret.  After I hit the send button I read what I had actually written, which leaves me to wonder what I really did learn in those 3 years of Japanese.  My verbs and sentence structure was odd and I even used the wrong post-fix on a verb that strictly is not suppose to have a post-fix.  When I was writing I used a Japanese dictionary I had received for Christmas and so I was worrying about my vocab rather than the actual Japanese I was writing.  I would like to think that I was still understandable however it must have made a bad impression.  Since then I haven't received a reply.

Here is a picture of a Kotatsu for those who don't know what I meant.