Post Card Exchange

At Hannah's last birthday in April she received a package from her older sister Amber who still lives in Southern California with her husband.  Hannah misses her terribly and was so excited when the present was a box full of stationary, stickers and stamps for them to write each other by "snail mail".

Hannah set to work right away with her letters and is so excited whenever she gets one in the mail.

So, when a woman on a Facebook group of families who've adopted from China asked if anyone might be interested in a postcard exchange for the kids, I talked with the girls and both were enthusiastic about participating.  With so much time on computer or some other electronic form of communication or play this "old fashioned" form of communication is fun for it's novelty.  Now Hannah loves to read and write, and for Lauren despite her age of 8 she's only in her 2cd year of schooling so the writing process is more challenging and needs a lot of assistance, still she's wanting to get her cards done so she can hear from the kids on the list she has.

A more typical part of entertainment and education : )

Each girl has almost 20 kids names and addresses on their lists with no duplicates, but some have a sibling at a similar address.  We had to make a trip to a souvenir store near Orlando to find postcards
for our project.  With a stack of 40 we are set for our first round in this exchange.

Both girls spent quite awhile crafting their first cards to be mailed off.  We got stamps on the ones for the US addresses and placed them in our mail box, but are saving the ones with out of country addresses to take at one time to the post office.  A bit of that initial enthusiasm was lost as their hands got tired writing over and over similar messages on each card.  So we decided to break our writing up into groups to be done over the course of a few days.

Then yesterday the first two cards for them arrived in the mail.  Sadly I didn't have my camera available to catch the moment, but their reactions were a bit like this:

Both have a renewed excitement to write some more so they assure themselves of receiving more as well.  The homeschool mom in me doesn't miss the opportunity for a geography lesson as we locate on our maps the locations of the kids they're writing to (smile).

We'll have to make some decorative boxes to hold these novel treasures of theirs.

Lynda