I will be honest. I am having a very hard time coming to terms with the fact that we are only 11 days away from Christmas. Dusty made a comment during our evening service at church last night that he felt like an event that had taken place LAST December felt like it was just yesterday. We all reminded him that we have been living in a world that all but stopped frozen in March so yeah, we all kinda feel like that.
Anyway, we had a really fun week last week with our Advent activities. Sometimes I have a really bad habit of biting off more than I can chew but at least we had some fun this week. So here is a bit of what we did.
December 7: Decorate Paper Bags for the Church
This day was originally meant to make cards for friends but we ended up doing that a bit earlier for another purpose. So instead of that we took some time to color and decorate paper bags for the church. One of the ladies in our congregation will then pick them up this week and will be filling them with goodies that we will hand out on Christmas Eve. This is another activity that we didn’t do last year because we were still getting our feet under us but I’m excited we have picked it up for this year. The kids has fun being part of the process.
December 8: Play with Christmas Playdough
This day I was labeled as “epic.” Who knew that making a dough out of flour, salt, water, and some essential oils for a holiday smell would make me an epic mother. But nevertheless it happened. I whipped up a quick batch of red and white salt dough, added a few drops of peppermint and clove essential oils and off they went. It was even more exciting when I brought out the cookie cutters for them to use with it. They spent a solid 2 hours at the table together and very little fighting actually took place. I was just shocked.
December 9: Make Christmas Ornaments
Again, I over did myself. This activity is one that we always try to have happen. We made fun Christmas ornaments for the tree. I was excited when I found a fairly simple idea on on Pinterest. I was even more excited when I discovered I realized I had all the supplies I needed. I got a third level of excitement when I realized that I had enough of the supplies to make ornaments not only for the 4 kids that were participating in the activity but also for my 3 nephews.
We took some of our broken crayons, shredded them up, dropped them into the bottom of some clear glass balls. We then heated the balls on low heat with my hair dryer, rotating the ball to make sure the gratings cover the whole of the inside of the ball. It melted the crayon wax on the inside and left it a beautiful speckled type of print. I painted on their names and the year.
December 10: Candy Cane Science Experiment
SCIENCE!! It’s always fun when the we get to do fun science experiments that don’t cause a lot of mess. This time our experiment consisted of discovering what liquid would dissolve a candy cane the fastest. We used cold water, hot water, vegetable oil, and distilled white vinegar. Each kid made their guess as to which one would win, we placed the candy canes in the glasses and left them for about half an hour. The clear winner was the cold water which shocked all 4 kids. That was the part that I enjoyed the most. 🙂
December 11,12,13
Our weekend activities were cut fairly short this week for a number of reasons. The original plan was candle lit dinner on the 11th, shop for gifts for the siblings on the 12th, and make ginger bread houses on the 13th. Due to the fact that we spent the whole day with Dusty in his office on Friday while he was finishing his school assignments the candle lit dinner got pushed to Saturday. So on Saturday I spent time with each of the kids taking them to the Dollar Tree to shop for each other then dinner by candle light. We didn’t get to the gingerbread houses on Sunday so that is on tap for this afternoon.
We have all really had a lot of fun when it comes to these activities. Stay tuned for next weeks update!
A Wise Woman in Progress 