Introduction

About the time my son was three, I took him to the library to let him check out some books. He ended up picking out one about a penguin who wants to play soccer. For whatever reason, the penguin, named Sergio, was living in Argentina. As we're reading this book and get to the part of it telling us where Sergio is from, he says "Daddy, where's Argentina?" We wander over to the globe in the library and find it on there.

Shortly after that, our movie theater was showing kids movies and Madagascar 2 was playing. When it was over, he wanted to know where Madagascar was, so we again went to find it on the map.

My son's always been fascinated with geography. I think it goes back to when he first would watch the Weather Channel and want to know where the different towns were in relation to ours. My wife and I did our best to nurture this curiosity by pointing out places he might know, getting him puzzles of the United States and his own globe for his 4th birthday. He got a world map to hang on his wall with little velcro tabs to place on the different countries, rivers and oceans and another world map puzzle with the pieces cut into the shapes of the various countries. He's even asked that instead of a bedtime story, we go to the index of his kid's atlas and find countries or cities and then go find them in the book.

(More recently, we were driving from Georgia to Richmond, Virginia for a wedding. My son was excited that we were going to the capital of Virginia but he wanted us to plan a route through Raleigh, NC so we could go through that capital to get to Richmond. We had to turn him down on that request.)

Knowing this about him, my sister-in-law has taken to sending him postcards from the past two conferences she went to - one in Salt Lake City, UT and another from New Orleans, LA. He was extremely excited for two reasons. First, what kid doesn't love getting mail? Any mail he gets is good. It's not a bill or a mortgage payment notice or anything bad. Mail for a kid is always awesome. Second, he thought it was really neat to get postcards about the different states.

So last night we were driving home from dinner and a few errands and my son had the Louisiana postcard with him. He was looking at the front and seeing how far all the different cities are from New Orleans. It was then that I had the idea to see if I could get someone to mail him a postcard from all 50 states, ideally highlighting something about the state.

For me, this little project has two goals. First, I want to continue to nurture his interest in geography, not so much for the geography aspect of it, but because it's what he's interested in. That it's also educational is clearly a bonus and something I think is really important, but if it was race cars or dragons or something else, I'd want to encourage that interest as well.

Secondly, I want to see if I pull it off. I want to see if I my friends on Facebook and Twitter will help me out in reaching this goal. Think of it as a social experiment with social media.

This blog, ultimately, is going to be what I use to keep everyone updated on our quest. I'll be posting pictures of each postcard in its corresponding state. If we get more than one from a state, that's not a big deal. The internet's a big place, it can handle a few more pictures and my son would love to get a few more pieces of mail.