Pick Up Your Pen

when i was in elementary school i was in a girl's only church program called "calvinettes" with a few of my school friends.  one of the badges we could earn had something to do with having a penpal and through a christian kids magazine we used to get i picked a name off a "penpals" list and started writing letters to a girl named christie in michigan.  we wrote back and forth for years, stopped for awhile, and then started back up again in late highschool.  she was a nice girl with a really good attitude who went through some really hard times, and we lost touch.  i'd always wondered what had happened to her, and then one day i found her on facebook, and we became friends once again, and wrote each other long emails to find out what had happened in those missing years.  she's married with two little girls and lives in a gorgeous house, still in michigan.  her oldest daughter, anna, just turned 3, just a couple months after elliott did, so i thought it might be cute to start them as penpals.  we sent a little birthday card, a picture elliott coloured, and some stickers, and a few weeks later got back a christmas card and a really cute homemade christmas decoration from anna.  i'm really excited about elliott learning what it's like to be a penpal with a girl his age on the other side of the continent.

anna with the card elliott made for her

elliott with the decoration anna made for him

i've been having fun coming up with new things to send.  the latest is a survey for each kid to fill out to learn a little bit more about each other!  here's elliott's:

i'm sharing them here with you, if you want to print them out for your kids it's a fun way of taking note what kinds of things they liked when they were this age.  you can tuck it away somewhere and look back on it when they're older.  the first is a canadian one (with a "u" in favourite and a "u" in colour, and "province" rather than "state") and the second is american (because elliott's penpal is from the states).  click on it to open & print.

canadian version

american version

do you have a penpal?