At the start of the school year, Adam was having a little bit of a rough time adjusting to school. He really loved school and his teacher, but told me he wanted it to only be half as long, because he missed me too much.

I had been putting notes in his lunchbox, but he can’t read and the cafeteria was too busy for him to have someone read it to him. His teacher suggested giving him a family photo to keep in his backpack and sneaking a note into his snack.

So I started putting photo notes in his snack (and his lunch still, but he only really packs once or twice a week). Sometimes I will have a little note on them, but even if someone can’t read it to him he still likes the pictures.

I try to keep it different, once a week I send in a hidden object picture.

Adam also really likes silly animal pictures.

And pictures of his favorite cartoon characters always go over well.

I’ll take some time every other week or so and make up a bunch and print them out. Each one is only about 3×4 inches big so it fits in his snack bag. Most of the time I just look around online for silly animals or cartoon characters eating, things like that.

For Halloween I found a website where I could add our photos to silly pictures. Adam really likes these and his teacher told me how funny she thought the Adam’s Family one was (he likes to show them to the other kids in his class and his teacher too).

Adam looks forward to them each day and it really helped during those first couple of weeks while he was getting used to being away from home for seven hours a day. His teacher was great about encouraging him to look at his pictures if he was missing us (he keeps them all in the front pocket of his backpack).

Plus, I have fun making them.