Last September, my friend and fellow stay-at-home-homeschooling-mom (SAHHM) Debi and I, started a project.

This project is pretty simple - it's a homeschooler's postcard exchange. Not email, but real postcards, sent through postal mail.

Ultimately the purpose was for fun, fun, fun. The more Debi and I talked about it, we considered all the useful learning aspects of it as well. Penmanship practice, geography knowledge, learning about the postal system, and meeting new kids from around the world, via postcards.

I did a search and found exactly ZERO Christian homeschooler's postcard exchanges. I thought "no way, someone MUST have thought of this before???". I don't know, I just know there wasn't one. Maybe they were hiding from me?

So we launched the HSPX. We tried to make it as simple as possible. You do have to join the site, before you can join up, but other than that, it's just a matter of putting your family on the list.

So here we are 8 months later, with 39 families - which represents a grand total of 96 children, from all over the world!

We've sent and received postcards from kids in Wales, New Zealand, and several states in the US.

Here's the frustrating part:

While the only real condition to participate, is that you commit to sending postcards to one family per month (we didn't that was too much to ask?), there are some on the list (including us) that rarely ever hear back in email, from those we've requested addresses for. The public sign up is for parents email address only. Postal addresses are exchanged privately in email, between parents. You can use your work address, or church address (with your pastor's permission of course), you dont have to use your home address.

It's been over a month now since we've sent out a postcard (the kids look through the list and send cards to those of their same age - even if the cards go to different places), only because I don't hear back from participants on the list. Kinda hard to send a postcard to someone without a postal address. :-)

This is one of the things I had planned to have the kids continue doing, over the summer. Instead of once a month, I was thinking more along the lines of once a week, exchanging summer fun postcards.

So here is my whinefest:

Calling all HSPXer's... and even those that haven't signed up yet!!! Sign up, and when you get an email from me, reply! The kids are going to lynch me if I don't get addresses for them.

I'm thinking about re-designing the site, and/or moving it to it's own website - but for now it's at our msn homeschooling group. Moving it would be a big project, so that's just a thought for now, nothing concrete.

SOLI DEO GLORIA