Christmas 2013

 For Advent this year, we chose the following activities to spend our time on. These activities have replaced the ABCJLM bible lesson for the month of December.

Sparkle Box: Filling a box with those things we've done for the least of these so we can open it for Jesus on Christmas day.  Munchkin asks often if it's time to open the box yet, love this! It's definitely helped this mama to be more intentional about acts of service this time of year.

Adventure Book: Using this as a reference as the boys oohhh and ahhh over decorations
and other symbols of Christmas to bring it back to Jesus. Invaluable!

 Jesse Tree:. We placed last year's home made friends swap version on the tree when we put it up the day after Thanksgiving. My long term plan is for each of our three boys (yes, I am expecting our third boy in the Spring) to have a set to take with them when they are grown to hopefully (if they chose) continue this tradition with their families. Our main version is from 1 +1+1=1. We used their calendar cards, eBook and ornaments along with the Jesse Tree book by Geraldine McCaughrean and Bee Willey. I also back with felt and used our Thanksgiving Tree for doodlebug our 2 year old so he'd have a safe friendly set to do as well. Munchkin opens up the felt sack every morning, we find his match in the eBook I printed out, read and they both run to their trees and hang their ornaments.
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The other item in the felt sack every morning is their Christmas book of the day. Here's a sampling of ours:

I 'may' have gone felt happy this year with ornaments and puppets:

 

 

Projects still in process....

Gifts :-)

Cookies!

 Videos:

New one this year: Merry Larry and the True Light of Christmas. We also added Miss Patty Cake's Christmas Party DVD too.

Daddy and the boys cleaning, ALWAYS good!

Diffusing Christmas Spirit, it's a Young Living blend of Cinnamon Bark, Orange and Spruce. It's awesome!

Week 15 ABCJLM

So, we did actually skip week 14 and for Thanksgiving week we focused on character, gratitude, family time and mommy has a baby growing in her tummy which requires breaks this year :-) Since little doodblebug is doing his letters, numbers, starting his shapes and introducing colors, we feel able to relax. Munchkin at 4 is starting to sound out words, asks lots of daily why questions and counts items up to 20 with one to one correspondence.

We spent two weeks on week 15 since we were getting Advent activities up and running, had some ice days with daddy home and our schedule gets fun interrupted :-)

If blogger will let me, I'll come back later to organize the photos in to groups of areas of study, i e, Christmas , letter of the week etc,. For the most part, Christmas does take over for the month of December focusing on the birth of Jesus.