December Goings-On

I know that most of you won’t care about this since Christmas is so last month.  But I care, and grandparents care, and that’s enough reason for me to write.  We’ve been out of town in Salt Lake for the past two weeks, which meant that pictures were home but I was not.  So now that the pictures and I have been rejoined, it’s time for the posting frenzy to begin. We started off the month with a new tradition.  I found a cute felt advent calendar in the dollar bin at Target, and it became the hit of the month.  I wrote a Christmas activity for every day on a slip of paper and the kids got to wake up and find out what awesome thing we were doing that day.  I realized about a week into it that I had been WAY too ambitious.  For example, “make and decorate gingerbread houses” is NOT a one day activity when you’re doing everything from scratch.  Live and learn. On December 1st, all the kids got to open a present.  Christmas jammies for all!       That same day we also decorated the Christmas tree.  Ideally I would like to do this Thanksgiving weekend, but it hasn’t happened yet.  So first day of December doesn’t seem too bad.     Of course, we wound up with a million balls on the bottom branches (sometimes as many as five on one branch), but I managed (somewhat) to hold back the obsessive-compulsive inside of me and let the kids do the majority of the work.  It’s not as pristine as it’s been in previous years, but that doesn’t really matter. Averi had been going to a little preschool craft class that my friend hosted throughout the holidays.  I only imagine how much time and effort she put into each class.  They came home with the cutest projects!  December 1st they made a bunch of delicious treats that were devoured nearly the instant we got home.  I only had a few seconds to grab my camera before the disposal team got to work. We started another new tradition this December.  I loved the idea of wrapping up a Christmas book and letting the kids read a new story every night.  I certainly didn’t have 25 Christmas books, but I do have access to the public library.  I cleared the shelves of holiday books and we unwrapped one every evening.  This was something the kids really looked forward to, and Aaron and I really enjoyed this new tradition as well.  It was so nice to take the time out of a busy December day and just sit together every evening.  It really helped bring the Christmas spirit.  Our new favorite this year was a book by Kate DiCamillo (who wrote the Tale of Despereaux) called “Great Joy.”  It’s one we’ll be adding to our own library.