advent calendar

The advent calendar got put up on December 1st, just in the nick of time.  I am pretty pleased with it.  It has been cloudy/rainy since then so I haven’t had enough light to take a decent picture of it.  As soon as the sun shows itself I’ll post one.

The first day started off with a bang.  We went to our city’s Christmas festival called Sights n Sounds.  We weren’t sure if we’d go this year but last minute decided to go for it.  The weather ended up being great and the crowds weren’t too bad since we went early.  Josiah got to pick one ride to go on and he chose the little roller coaster.  He loved it.  He also got to make a wooden camel and try some cotton candy.  He really didn’t care for it which meant more for me.  I LOVE cotton candy and only get it once a year at the most.  Audrey threw hers on the ground when I handed it to her because she thought it was just cotton.  Sacrilege!  When I showed her that you could eat it she tried it and then probably consumed more than me.

Here is an attempt at a group picture.  Ha.  Yeah right.  I don’t remember what Audrey was freaking out over but she went from being fine to not fine in about 2 seconds flat.

Yesterday, we made salt dough ornaments.  I saw others do them last year but didn’t have the time.  So I made sure to make it happen this year.  I got the information about them from Prudent Baby and Lorajean’s Magazine.  They were super easy and I didn’t have to worry when Audrey nibbled a bit on them since they are just salt, flour, and water.  I used the one on Lorajean’s but the ratio on Prudent Baby is probably better because I had to add more flour to the mixture.  Today we painted them.  Some I painted white to go on our church’s chrismon tree tomorrow and the rest the kids painted however they wanted.

Audrey went from this

to this

She still kind of has a green five o’clock shadow.

 

We finally got our tree decorated yesterday as well.  We set it up a few days ago but our “pre-lit” tree decided not to light on 3 different rows (the middle row of each section of the tree).  Super annoying!  After the first night the bottom row that wasn’t on decided to fix itself.  But after a couple days the other rows still weren’t on (and we couldn’t find anything wrong with them).  So we finally bought some lights and put them on.  It was fun.  We had a fire going and Christmas music playing.  You would have thought we were a hallmark card.  Today, our first day with the tree decorated, I have had to put the ornaments back on it countless times.  This is going to be a loonnng month.  Since having kids I love the holidays even more but am also always really ready to get the tree put away as soon as possible.  Hopefully in a year or two it’ll get a lot easier.  We do have all our non-breakable ornaments at the bottom so at least that isn’t too much of a worry.

One funny thing while we were decorating the tree last night Ken pulled out an ornament and said, “Who’s this?!”  I took a look and had no idea.  We pondered for a while until he told me to open it to see if it was really a picture or if it came with the ornament.  And yes, it was just a piece of paper.  I guess we got it as a gift last year so we had never used it yet and forgot about it.  But for a moment we had a mystery family member.

Well, this is just the first 3 days of the month!  I’m sure we’ll be all Christmased out by the end.