Penpalling

I had my first penpal when I was about 11 or 12. She was a girl from England called Nicole the same as as me. I loved writing to her. My next two penpals were Stephanie from France and Petra from Germany. It was so exciting when the postman came and I rushed out to the letter box to find a letter waiting for me... I remember Stephanie wrote on the most beautiful notepaper out of the three and her penmanship was very neat. And she used different ink to what I would use..... a plain old biro.

So that is where my love of penpalling started. And to this day I still penpal but sadly not to any of those 3. By the time we started getting our first serious boyfriends our pen-friendships had fizzled out.

When I was 14 I went on my last decent family holiday with my parents to kangaroo Island just off the coast of my state SA. My 2 brothers were 5 and 9 years older than me so they were working and too grown up to come on family holidays anymore so I was bored. One night my Dad and I went to see if we could see the platypus that only came out at night at the waterhole in the Flinders Chase National Park. While there I met another girl who was about 8 or 9 yrs old and who looked alot like my cousin Dulcie. Her name was Sally and because she was the only child with her Dad and stepmum she was bored too so we got to chatting. We became friends and over the next few days when not on day trips around the Island with our parnets we hung out together like big sister, little sister and met at the waterhole at night with our Dads to try and see the platypus pop its head up. Now some 27-28 years later we are still penpals. I have seen her go from a young girl into a young woman to a wife and to a mother of 3 beautiful girls. It has been a joy.

At one stage I had aboout 60 penpals but I found it quite frustrating writing a decent letter and alot of them writing one small A5 size sheet back. To me that was a waste of my time and stamps so eventually cut it right down. Now I dont write to anyone in Australia and only write to people overseas.

In 1996 when I was pregnant with my first son I put an ad in the Parenting Magazine Australia looking for other expectant or new Mums and to this day I still call 4 of those girls some of my closest friends. As I dont write to people in Australia anymore, we no longer snailmail apart from Christmas Cards but chat on Facebook, talk on the telephone and even catch up on holidays together when visiting one another states. In fact we are catching up with Tanyia and her family again in two weeks time in Queensland where she will meet our new bubba J and we will finally ge to meet her 5th child Master k.

So the reason for my post? Well I am taking on a new penpal from Finland. A Mummy with a 20 month old baby and I am looking forward to it. So I will be writing to her, my longtime penpal karin from Estonia and Sally who after a few years in Hong kong for hubbys work is returning to Sydney to live.