correspondence

Two of our children are writing letters in school, of the correspondence variety.  Elliott has been coming home each afternoon and wanting to hurriedly write a letter to a family member and send it off, before the mail carrier arrives.  I am trying to keep up and to have an ample supply of stamps on hand.  We started with the usual suspects, one of whom was my father, who rewarded him with a three page tome mailed back to him.  Family friends.  And then, he started wanting to write to people that really I should have written to/emailed/phoned myself long ago.  So it is with a bit of chagrin that I gamely put his handwritten notes with a sweet picture drawn on the envelope into the mail box, raise the flag, and think about what the reaction will be when the letters reach the person on the other end...

At the same time, Julia is learning to write thank you notes, her teachers using the motivation provided by a series of guest visitors and expert presenters, as their class completes their Safety and First Aid unit.  I giggle inwardly about this unit, because it is the theme that the 3rd graders complete while their classmates, the 2nd graders, get their worlds rocked by the Genetics and Reproduction unit.  Without the seed studies, the "fresh" babies brought in to visit, and let's face it, everybody's favorite, the life-sized lamaze pictures of a baby growing inside a woman's body, Safety and First Aid is either a carefully chosen breather for the teachers or the laying of the groundwork to be able to discuss Safety and Reproduction in a few years.

But it is probably just that they want the kids to know how to put on bandaids, right?

So Julia has written thank you's to the police officers who showed her the city's emergency call center, the school nurse who taught them how to bandage each other, and the YMCA employee who tipped her out of a boat in the middle of the pool.  She draws beautiful pictures on the front of her cards and then arduously and somewhat tippily writes her thank you note, with three main points to address...in cursive.  It is a big job.

Inspired by Julia and Elliott's correspondence work, at dinner tonight, looking about at the three faces of our children, I was inspired to follow suit.

Here we go.