A $1.71 make over

I got my first handwritten letter from GI Joel in the mail this week. I wanted to make it into something really special so this is what I did.

I scanned the front of the letter and sent it to the Copy and Print Station at Staples. It's pretty simple, you can do everything online and print it as an engineer print. It cost me a whole $1.71. Since my frame was 16x20, I photoshopped it to the appropriate size and then cut out the extra white space. (Engineer prints don't come in the exact size that I wanted.)

I bought the frame at a flea market ($5) and repainted it with some extra chalk paint I had (The large frame is the same color as the side table in the photo above.) I did the same with the smaller frame and placed a piece of scrapbook paper ($1) in it. Simple and affordable!

Now every morning and night I get to see my GI's thoughts and handwriting!

Care Package 4: An Army of Green

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, my GI got a box full of "green items" to make the holiday a little closer to home.

This package contained: Sour War Heads Green Hand Sanitizer Green Kleenex Gain pods for Laundry Sour Cream and Onion Pringles Lucky Charms Breakfast Bars Joel's favorite Girl Scout Cookies, Caramel Delites Doublemint Gum Pistachios The King of Green, Yoda YoYo and Stick On Mustaches

Also for this box I put green construction paper in my printer and printed out shamrocks.

I added a reason why I'm lucky to each shamrock and added them to the box.

Here's the box complete and packed! Another fun one!

Counting Down the Days

I wanted to share how I count down the days of deployment. I stocked up on plastic army men at the dollar store and raided my little brother's stash. I went to our local scrapbook store and found a few things I liked and hot glued them to a vase.  

I get to take out an army man each day. It's a nice reminder that I am one day closer. 

Here's another thing I sent with Joel when he left a few weeks ago. I stocked up on mini envelopes from Hobby Lobby and wrote a letter for every situation I could think of that Joel might have while were apart.

Here's a picture of all of them. I had fun with this. Almost all of the letters have a Bible verse to go along with each situation. This way he has something to read if we don't get to talk immediately.