Advent is fun. I like doing stuff with my kids every night. But this year, as mentioned, has been different. We're busier. We have more friends. They ask us to do things, which are fun, but then our normally scheduled advent activities get pushed aside. I like to have the house clean before we do an activity. Alas.
The first few nights of December were really fun. They were like old times. Just me and the kids doing little activities (Greg was out of town). After the first week, things got crazy.
We actually started a day early. For the 4 Mondays before Christmas, we light a candle and talk about a part of the Savior's life. Monday 1: Prophecies. We read a few verses from Isaiah, listened to the Hallelujah chorus from the Messiah, then drew pictures of what we saw in our minds when we listened to the music. Then we read about Samuel the Laminite while the kids threw rocks (socks) at me and talked about how to listen to a prophet.
December 1: Coffee filter snowflakes. Highlight: no crying because the snowflakes weren't perfect. Alice doesn't care, and Rex finally figured out how to make a descent snowflake. It was a nice evening.
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| I hung the numbers up differently this year, which Greg didn't notice, but I thought was kind-of a big deal. Usually I hang them on a string up higher and the kids freak out about being too high and refuse to get the numbers down. This year, I ditched the clothes pins and height and just taped them to the wall. No crying. |
December 2: Snowman pizza. This was the first time we did this and it was a big success. They loved making their own pizza.
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| See, even Alice got her number down all by herself. |
December 3: Write letters to Santa. Rex wrote an actual letter telling Santa he could choose one of three things to bring him. I thought it was rather mature. Alice, who is very independent, made a collage. I'm not sure what she wants, so she'll have to take what she gets. Henry, he's a menace.
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| Busy bees. |
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| Also that day, Alice went to a friend's house so Henry and I made cookies together. It's been a while since I've made cookies with just one kid. We had a good time. |
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| Earlier in the day, Alice and Henry colored and otherwise entertained themselves for about 45 minutes. It was lovely. |
December 4: Laser Light Show. I've already written a blog post about this. It was fun but freezing.
December 5: Did not turn out how I had it planned. I'll spare you all the boring details, but I was helping some Young Women pay for college applications by having them sand my dining room table, which took longer than I thought and they were supposed to feed the Elders so we ended up having the missionaries over for dinner. The table turned out really cute, but may also be the reason I was in such a bad mood for a week--the house was a mess with me trying to prime, paint and seal a table. Plus we had no where to eat dinner. I decided to wait until after Christmas to repaint the chairs.
December 6: We made Christmas cards for all the grandparents, which turned out pretty cute and wasn't a complete nightmare and filled the weird morning hours before 1 o'clock church.
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| Oh look, Henry's eating something. (It's a marker) |
December 8: Snowcones. They turned into slushies because we used straight root beer to flavor them instead of the syrup, but the kids liked them.
December 9: Greg took the older kids to a Hornets game while Henry and I finished up the last of the Christmas shopping then did a service project with the Young Women.
December 10: A friend of mine took the older two to watch her daughters play in the Independence High School Christmas band concert, while I went to the Relief Society Christmas activity and Henry and Greg stayed home and watched a movie. (See how our family gets all divided up even as we're doing activities intended to keep us together? On the other hand, I'm working on getting myself adopted into this family, so they count as cousins. These are the Wheatley's cousins and I love them.)
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| Alice, Rex and 3 of my beautiful Young Women. |
December 12: We doubled up this day. Every year, we go to a real book store and pick out a new Christmas book. We got The Animal's Santa by Jan Brett this year. Then we went to the ward party, where Rex played "O, Come, All Ye Faithful" and the other kids ran around the building like crazy people.
December 13: We were supposed to play games as a family, but then we got invited to a friend's for dinner (we do this a lot. We have a group of friends we do Sunday dinners with every month or so). But then her kid got sick, and the party last minute got moved to our house. Loud and messy but fun and no family games. I also count these friends as cousins though, so it was kind of like a family dinner.
December 14: And we're back to our candle burning Monday. This day was scheduled to talk about the actual birth of Christ so we took a blanket out to the back field, which is pretty dark, and I tried to talk about the shepherds and how they would have been in a dark field like this one, watching closely over their sheep, which may be one reason why the angels came to them--they were looking for Christ. We talked about how we need to be diligent in our waiting and watching for Christ as well. Mostly the kids ran around in the dark. I tried.
December 15: Angel tree shopping. We took the kids to Target to pick out gifts for the tags we'd picked off the angel tree at church. I found watching Greg try to take 3 kids around Target fairly amusing. He eventually gave up and took Henry out to sit in the car.
I'll leave it here. Because 1. this is getting really long and 2. Google refuses to back up the pictures from my phone for the last week, so I can't post them here.
I like listing the advent activities in a recap blog. That's nice because it's all in one place. Also you don't have to write a blog everyday. I might do this next year. I also love the snowman pizzas. I make too many treats. Snowman pizzas would be festive but also classify as dinner.
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