Wednesday, March 03, 2010

The Inaugural Family Letter - Let the Fun Begin!

A few weeks ago my friend Juliann told me about an amazing family tradition she and her family have been doing for the past TWELVE years!! Every month they each write a letter to their family, updating their family members on what is going on in each their lives. Their dad sends these letters out in a package to each family member, via regular old mail. She keeps a big binder of these letters (really 4 or 5 big binders now) that is basically a huge extended family journal, plus she has a monthly written record of her family.

I fell in love with the idea and suggested it to my family. With twelve kids spread literally from coast to coast (and one in Malaysia) I thought it would be an awesome way to stay updated on each other's lives, and for Harrison to learn more about his cousins, aunts and uncles while he lives so far from them. (Not to mention how much Renee is going to love getting these updates on her mission!)

I was so happy to hear that my family was also interested. We decided to start on short notice and let anyone who was interested submit a letter for February. ELEVEN people submitted, even though this month was last minute and optional. I was SO excited. Even though the letters were submitted to me over the past week, I've made myself wait to read them, until I can do it all at once and make a big event out of it, just like Juliann suggested. I think this will make a really fun activity for our family to once a month get an update and it is helping me document more closely what is happening in our lives and with Harrison.

So this post is to let everyone in my family know that the letters are officially in the mail as of today! And anyone who opted for electronic version is going to have to wait another couple of days (I don't want you blabbing all of the letter information to people who are waiting for snail mail!)



So thanks to my friend Juliann (and our ward's enrichment, where I learned this idea) I can already tell my large and spread-out family is going to become closer from this little experiment!!

2 comments:

Brooke said...

i really am getting very excited about this, hopefully people are better about this then their dumb blogs.

Brit Warner said...

Julianne told me about this last year and I tried to get my family to do it because I thought it would be fun too. I was not as successful at getting them excited. I guess I will have to work on them again!