A Share of Birthday-Letter Ideas

In the past two months I had another bunch of Birthday letters to get ready. My birthday kids in the next few months are Jenny, Lamayian (turning 16), Sawadogo (turning 12) and Darcy (turning 8). 

Today I want to share what I sent to them. 

Doing the birthday letters for Darcy, Jenny and Lamayian seemed to be hard at first, because they had to be send off quickly after I received them as a sponsor/correspondence children. So, I hadn't received a letter from all of them. 

But I'm quite happy with the outcomes. 

The photo below shows my birthday gift for Jenny. 

I decided to send her a Birthday Book. I added birthday greetings from friends of mine to it, Bible verses, a game of Pairs, coloring pages and a Birthday crown.

Most importantly I added a lot of encouraging words for her. I had the feeling that's what she needed the most. 

For the blue cover of the book I used a folder, for the pages in the book I used simple colourful paper. I put all the pages together with small bits of cord, not too much to make sure that it will go through but enough to give Jenny the chance to open the book no problem.

                                                                                                                                                              

The next photo shows the birthday gifts for Lamayian and Darcy.
Lamayian was the hardest one to choose a gift for. He is the first boy his age I have received as a correspondence and I had no idea what to send him. At the end I decided to send him a self made tic-tac-toe. For the board I choose green cardboard and for the meeples I used thinner paper in two different shades of blue. I cut out small stripes and added stickers to them to make them more "interesting".

I have sent the same game to one of my other boys and he told me that he loved it and that he took it to school to play it with his friends. So I hope, even though he is older, Lamayian will enjoy it too.

For Darcy, I decided to put together a birthday book as well.
Her book is a lot smaller than the one I did for Jenny, but I trusted my feelings here. I sent her paper flowers, a very thin activity book with coloring pages, a connect-the-dots-game, and a sticker page which she can decorate with zoo-related stickers. For her book I cut a cardboard folder into two pieces and put them together with a short piece of cord again. To store away the gifts I used small gift bags and glued them to the pages - making sure to change their position in each to make the book thinner. I sealed the bags with stickers and wrote on the pages what was inside the bags.

The last birthday gift I made in the past weeks, was for Sawadogo. He told me in one of his letters that he loves to play with his friends and after reading the blog entries from Hannah about the sidewalk games (Sidewalk Games - Hannah's Blog) from around the world, my mind was made up quickly.

I would send off another "book", but this time with sidewalk games from around the world.
First I started to search for various sidewalk games myself, but at the end Hannah was so kind as to send me the games she uses for her monthly game-letters. Funnily enough, one of the games I knew.   I loved to play it when I was Sawadogo's age, I used to play it endlessly at home and during recess. Of course I pointed that one out to him in the birthday card.\

Again I chose a folder for the cover, and normal paper for the pages and cord to hold it all together. 

Spending some time on Pinterest and the fact that my kids regularly tell me how much they like the photos and postcards I send them, caused me to come up with an idea for the next birthdays.

There are so many beautiful photos online which I want to share with my kids, but because there are so many, I know there isn't really the chance to send them all unless I send a letter per day. 

So I went through all my letters which I have received from my kids, searching for a hint of what kind of things they like best. 

Once I finished my list I searched on Pinterest for photos and put them together in a collage - one for each child. I saved the collages in 30x20cm sizes and will laminate them before I send them off for their birthdays.

Below you find a few of those collages.

And here is a photo of the first birthday package with one of the photo collages ready to be send of. Very special to me is the "F", the "C" and the line benath "Feliz Cumpleanos" of the birthday letter - because Finn helped me decorating it.