A random, exciting note

Wednesday night when B-rad came home from planting, he said, "Look what I found in the field!  You should send this back to them."  It was a note from some elementary aged kiddos in Illinois.

I thought the whole idea was really fun & we were excited about sending it back to the students!  B-rad said he would like to send a Google Earth map picture of where he found it & I thought it would be cool to send pictures of the tractor.  You know, at my leisure....

Well.

I put a picture of the note on Facebook & it was all over from there.  Everyone was VERY excited about it which made me feel less lame about being so excited.  I heard from many people that they had done this as teachers or as students & most the time never heard anything back.   They were UBER excited that I was going to send the note back.  And since I have no tiny humans that attend school I didn't even think about it being the end of the year.  Luckily, I have a teacher friend (Hi Alicia!) that promptly reminded me of this fact.  Suddenly it was a flurry of activity... I had a friend on Facebook who posted their website info (including email address).  I texted B-rad to have him draw a map of the field to email me.  His friend, Brian, was sending me facts about how far away it was so I enlisted him to get a Map quest picture to send along.  My contribution was finding pictures & composing the letter... (hey, we all do our part...)

A mere 6 hours after I posted that picture to Facebook, I had written an email to the principal, Mrs. Wenthe, including pics.

I decided to keep it short (lets face it - it's really difficult for me to go on & on & on about something) because small children have no attention span.  I tried to keep the writing simple so they could understand it but still make it fun for them.

Behold...my email to the tiny humans:

Hello St. Thomas students!  We were VERY excited to find a note from your class in our field on Wednesday, May 15, 2013!  I wanted to be sure that you knew we found it before summer break so I am emailing your principal, Mrs. Wenthe!

 

 We live in Southern Indiana and are located about 20 miles northwest of Louisville, Kentucky.  Louisville is famous for a very special horse race called the Kentucky Derby! 

 

My husband is a farmer and he was planting corn in our field when he came across your note!  This is a picture of his tractor and planter.

The red line outlines the field and he marked for you where the note landed!

     

I told many of our friends about you all and they thought it was really cool that you released balloons with notes inside!  It is neat to see how far your balloon traveled!   Your school is around 141 miles from us and it would take a little over 3 hours to get here by car.

I do not know the date of your 100th day of school (my teacher friend told me it was probably in January), nor do I know how long it has laid in our field!  I’m not sure how long it took your balloon to travel here!   

I hope you enjoyed hearing from us! I would love to hear back from you about the balloon release date!

 

Have a great summer!

 

Brad & Jaime McAfee 

Epic, right?  I think so.  I envisioned the class room of tiny, rambuncious 6-8 year old children being mesmerized while the teacher read my letter (...with pictures!).  They would be so excited at the end they would jump up & down & cheer loudly.  They would write on poster board 'thank you Mr. & Mrs. McAfee.  We love you.  You made our whole school year.  AND you're so pretty!' & pose calmly while the principal took a picture of them to send me.  

Yea, that didn't happen...  

I had hoped they would tell us a little something about the balloon release.  But this is what the principal emailed me:

THANK YOU! I am getting to have the students view this now! Today is our last day of school so perfect time.

Vicki Wenthe, Principal

St. Thomas School in Newton, IL

(618) 783-3517

Ok-so I should be happy with that I suppose.   At least she acknowledged that she heard from me & the all caps 'THANK YOU!' gives the impression of excitement.  I am believing instead that all the stuff above actually happened...I just didn't hear about it...