You've got mail!

"You've got mail!!!" says Honeypie.

And I am not talking about email... I'm talking about the glorious old-fashioned way to receive letters... those written with paper and pencil.

I love receiving traditional mail and so does honeypie. I still have old letters saved in shoeboxes, birthday cards I received as a kid, old postcards and notes written between friends during study hall. I love pulling them out to reminisce.

We love going to the mailbox and though it does tend to get bombarded mostly with junk mail... we love receiving the occassional goodie. Now when we go on vacation, we will send friends postcards and when other friends go on vacation they send us some too! and it is so much fun to receive a postcard from the grand canyon or even Japan!

I have tried to encourage writing to honeypie without any pressure. We love writing thank you notes and thank you drawings when someone has given us a present. We love sitting down and making cards for friends, just because we miss them and they are far away. And of course the love letters daddy and I receive from honeypie get treasured away by me almost immediately. So it seemed a great idea to create and open welcoming area that she could gather her thoughts, pick up paper and pencils on her own and write when ever she wanted to.

These are some good writing tools.

Colored pencils, erasers, sharpener, scissors and some markers all in one place for easy picking.

This is probably not the tidiest writing area...

but honeypie's need list included:

a mailbox, a sticker box, stampers, stencils, envelopes and stationary, construction paper (in case she wanted to make her own envelopes), and all other sorts of things....

This weekend I made her a mailbox using some packaging material we received in the mail, old cardboard, a glue gun, brads, scissors and some pretty scrap book paper.

I added some velcro to the opening to make the closing of the mailbox easier....

The maibox flag goes up and down according to ..."you've got mail!!!"

We also worked on creating our own stationary. All you need for this is some paper. (I used printer paper 8 1/2 by 11), some fancy decorating scissors or some plain ones (for creating decorative paper edges), colored pencils and stampers.

Here honeypie is creating an owl inspired stationary page.

We decorated some envelopes too.

( Junk mail comes in handy when you can collect the envelopes in those letters.

I give those to honeypie)

and here's an old old book we found at a flea market... (1940's)

happy writing!

~birdycake