I went shopping on eBay today. I
normally avoid that place like the plague, but I've started writing to Bri
and Lacie every week. And it can't just be a simple letter. I
have to make a production out of it.
I used to send them each a simple couple of
sentences and include stickers for them to use, but now that Bri is learning
to read, I've taken to writing her longer letters. I've rewritten
stories like Johnny Appleseed, and then found several stories from the
infamous "red books" that I so looked forward to reading to my children, but
somehow got lost in our move to Davis. But a couple of the stories I
remembered turned out to be on the Internet and I've re-written simplified
versions of those stories them.
Recently the girls called me about a joke Bri
told ("what is tall and thin when it's young and short and fat when it is
old?" The answer is a candle, but when they asked that joke to Lacie,
she said "grandma." Harumph. How did she know?) I went
searching for jokes for kids and found a bunch and sent those.
Last week I wrote to Bri about Cristal, the
girl from Guatemala I just added to my correspondence kids. I sent her
picture because she and Bri are about the same age, giving her a taste of
children her age living in poverty in other countries. It's getting
easier to write to Brianna now, but it's still a challenge to figure out
what to write to Lacie. Usually it's just a sentence or two, but as
she gets older, I can write longer letters to her too.
I include a little something for each of them
each time. Mostly it's stickers, but occasionally I find some other
little thing I think they'll like. Someone on Swap Bot recently sent
me a whole bag of little plastic bunny bags -- I guess the idea is to fill
them with jelly beans and give them out at Easter. The bags are cute
and about 5" long. I thought they might find something to do with
them.
But the letter inside isn't the only thing in
this project. In fact it's the easy part. I like to decorate the
envelope too.
When we went to the Paul Picnic recently I
took a good picture of a ladybug to print on the letter. Ladybugs have
been big in their house so I looked up a whole bunch of facts about
ladybugs. Then I decorated the envelopes with ladybugs and even made
return address labels for myself with a ladybug on it.
I also decorate the envelope with washi tape.
If you aren't familiar with washi tape, it feels like masking tape, but has
very nice designs, everything from abstract graphics to something specific
like Hello Kitty or Disney princesses. The nice thing about washi tape
is that when you decorate something, it's easy to remove, so if you screw
up, just take it off and put it back down again.
Sometimes I decorate the whole envelope, and
sometimes I just run tape down the outside flap of the envelope, from corner
to corner and then find a sticker to put at the V of the flap--usually
something having to do with either the design of the tape, or whatever is in
the letter.
And then there is the stamp. I kept
buying Pixar design stamps from the post office until they stopped carrying
them.
The girls are big fans of Nemo and Toy Story
so I was happy to have a lot of these on hand.
But after I couldn't get them through the
post office any more, I got the idea to check eBay and low and behold, I
could get them there. Cost more, of course, but I could continue to
use the stamps that had characters the kids liked. Today I decided to
check eBay for other similar stamps and found some 42 cent stamps with
Disney characters.
It means I have to add 7 cents postage on
each letter, so back to the USPS site to get 5 cent and 2 cent stamps so I
can continue to have cute postage stamps.
Saturday is my day to write to the kids and
it becomes a huge project that takes a couple of hours to complete by the
time each envelope is ready to go into the mailbox, but I'm having a good
time with it, and it's the best I can do to keep me in their lives when I
can't get down there myself.
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