Going away for work is never easy for kids or parents, but activities like this can make an anxious time a little easier on everyone. I will be going to a conference this week and both my son and I have been feeling increasingly anxious about being apart. I came up with this activity when we saw these mailboxes at Target and he begged m for it.  I hope this little mailbox and the letters I leave for him give him some comfort and something to look forward to every day while I’m away. We will also have our Kissing Hand Necklaces that we made last year .

1. Gather your materials . You will need a little mailbox, paper and envelopes for each day you are away, pens/ markers and stickers if you want.
2. Label each envelope with the day. I did it like this so that my husband who will place the letters in the mailbox every night knows which to grab, and it helps teach days of the week as well.
3. Write the notes. I tried to hype up what he gets to do every day. I did this because every morning before we are even out of bed my son asks me ” Mama what are we going to do today?” One of the days I included money for him to take my mom out for lunch. He’s been learning about money so he’ll love getting to pay.
4. Seal them up.
5. Hide them from your child and get someone at home to play postal carrier by placing them in the mailbox every night so in the morning your child has mail.

I get asked all the time if I throw my son’s creations away. Most do get recycled but one we have used over and over again is our mail box. The other day my son was playing with it when I decided to capitalize on his desire to sort everything and make a post office sorting activity for him. Our letters were sorted by the name on the envelope but you could use numbers and sort it with the zip code , or for even younger kids use different color letters and sort it by color. My son loved this and it even sparked writing a fan letter to his favorite baseball player.

1. Gather your materials. You will need some boxes, paper, scissors, envelopes, pen, plain sticky labels and crayons. 
2. Start by writing addresses on the letters. If your child is able have them help or write the addresses themselves.
3. Write 44 cents ( or whatever appropriate stamp amount) on your blank labels.
4. Time to decorate. My son loved coloring these envelopes. He insisted on doing it all himself. 
5. While they do that depending on how many boxes you have write out the letters that will go in each box on paper.
6. Attach them to the boxes.
7. Next add on the stamps.  My proudest moment of the day came next when my son said we should purposely leave off the stamp and make a do not deliver basket for those letters.
8. So I made one quickly.
9. Time to play- I made a simple sign for our post office and our mail box came to play too.
10. Pop your mail in.
11. Dump it out.
12. Sort it.
13. Deliver it – we delivered it to various rooms of our house.

Book

Delivering Your Mail: A Book About Mail Carriers by Ann Owen is a simple book about being a mail carrier. The text is to the point and perfect for toddlers and young preschoolers learning about mail carriers for the first time. It focuses on not just what the mail carriers do but how it impacts the reader, which is paramount for young children who see the world through their perspective only. Cute beginner book!