Day 19 - Postcrossing

I was stupid.  Did I really think that I could do something worthy of writing about every day for thirty days in a row in the middle of summer?  Somehow every year I think I am going to have all this free time to do things - then we end up overscheduled.  So since things have been so busy over the past couple of days, I am going to take a few minutes to tell you about something the boys and I do from home.  It's called Postcrossing.  Basically, you send postcards to and receive postcards from all over the world.  First, you go to www.postcrossing.com.  Take a few minutes to register and you're on your way.   To send a postcard, you click on "send a postcard" and then "request address."  You're then given an address and a postcard ID to write on the card.  Once the recipient gets the postcard, he or she registers the postcard using the ID.  Once that is done, your address will be given to a random person in the world.  You can have up to five postcards traveling at once. 

Once you've sent and received postcards, you can look at your stats.  You can see how many miles your postcards have traveled (ours have gone over 25,000 miles so far), view a map showing sent and received cards, and view charts of your activity.  You can upload digital images of the postcards you receive and view your "wall" of cards.  

In this digital age, when email and facebook and texting have replaced snail mail, it is so exciting to go to the mailbox and get a personal note from some random person from halfway around the world.  Originally, I signed up because I thought that Ben and Jordan would really have fun with it.  We went to the spillway and purchased postcards, and that was fun.  As a side note, do you have any idea how hard it is to actually find postcards these days?  But initially, they were not real involved with sending the first postcards.  There I was, spending time writing these notes while my kids played.  But as I suspected, they are way more into it now that we have actually gotten a few cards.  Jordan was amazed to see that we sent postcards across the ocean.

Oh, who am I kidding...I didn't really do this just for my kids.  I am hooked!