Postage Due

So, The Mailman is into self-preservation. I'm not talking about the wheat in the basement or the life hammer thing in the car, I mean postage. There are several ways this impacts our lives. Rule #1 is no electronic bill paying. Every month I write a pile of checks and stuff them into envelopes and put these pretty little stickers called "stamps" on them. Quaint, I know. I've written in the past about my Oddball Blankets and how I know he's calculated the amount of postage spent collectively on that project by all the knitters in all the groups in the US. We won't talk about the time one of my packages showed up on a UPS truck. He was not amused. And then there's his Swaptree. Swaptree is a site that facilitates trades of CD's, books, DVD's, and video games. I know he loves to get new CD's in the mail, but I think part of its appeal is the postage people spend on it.
Our most recent endeavor to Save the Mail is actually my fault. I was reading a magazine at the library called "Practical Homeschooling" and came across an article about a site called Postcrossing. This site gives you an address of a registered user somewhere in the world to send a postcard to. When they receive it and log it into the website, someone else is given your address, and you get a postcard from them. Now, Postal Preservation was not the first thing that came to mind. No, I am a mom, not a mailman. I thought of how wonderful it would be for the kids, how it would improve their writing skills, their penmanship, their geography, their understanding of different people and places and cultures. I pictured how we would track our sent and received postcards on the giant world map, the excitement every time a new one came. It was with all these lofty ideas swirling in my head that I showed the article to The Mailman and said breathlessly, "Read this!"
I watched anxiously as he read it and waited for his response. Yes, he agreed, it sounded like a good idea. So, once we registered and got our first address, all we need to do is find a postcard. Easy, right? No, not easy. I can't find a postcard anywhere. This has been incredibly frustrating as I have spent most of my holiday weekend searching out postcards in what seemed to me the most obvious places. Forget that the lady in Leipzig, Germany we are sending it to has requested postcards of libraries or reading related themes. I'd settle for any old postcard. On the way home from another fruitless search last night, I had a brainstorm...I wonder if you can get postcards made from your photos at Costco?
Yes, hooray, yes you can! For 69 pennies they will turn any photo you take into a postcard! My project has become fun once again. We will take a picture of the library in the town we live in and make a postcard. The children will indeed hone their writing, penmanship, and geography skills. We will generate postage, even international postage. What joy I have found thanks to two of my favorite places: the library and Costco.