Christmas Excitement
As our calendar tells us, there are only three days til the BIG DAY! Yes, Jesus' birthday celebration will be the highlight of our Friday....and then two days later we will celebrate Little Bear's THIRD birthday! We (me especially) are just trying to soak it all in and enjoy the wonderful celebrations ahead!
We have continued with the Jesse Tree and it's hard to believe we are almost to the very special reading of Jesus' birth story. There are so many little ornaments on our tree now and I can hardly wait to add the last one, the most important one that represents the Christ child. Here is our beautiful little Jesse Tree:
We've done a lot of preparation for gift giving this year by making homemade treats. I have had a wonderful helper in the kitchen who just loves to make sure the gifts we are giving taste good enough to give to others ;) Last Saturday, Little Bear and I made Pretzel Wreaths using round pretzels, Hershey Kisses, and red and green M & Ms. We made two whole trays and she was getting quite tired towards the end and decided it was a better idea for her to eat the M & Ms than to press them into the melted kisses. 
Grandma picked up these foam ornaments and snowflakes at Wal-mart one day and Little Bear had a great time sorting them by color. It took everything in her to NOT peel the paper off the back and stick them places....so I let her decorate a paper with them after she was done sorting. Of course most of them ended up on her clothing and other random places around the house, but I suppose she was just adding her *own* decorating touches to our Christmas decor :)
We received the Little People Nativity Set as a gift for Christmas last year and it has been a huge hit with the girls this year. Little Bear especially loves to hide baby Jesus so she can have him all to herself ;) We have been reading the Christmas story in the Bible daily and she is getting pretty good at filling in the blanks and telling the story by herself. She said the funniest thing in the car the other day....we drove by a house that had a large Nativity Scene in their yard and she immediately noticed and excitedly told me she saw baby Jesus. I then mentioned that those people had a Nativity Scene just like the ones we have at home. A few minutes later she said to me, "Yeah, we have lots of *Activity Sets* at our house," of course meaning "Nativity." I guess the word "activity" gets used around here so much that it stuck ;) 
I found this cute little candy cane pattern *activity* here. She loves using a glue stick so this was the highlight of her day to glue each little piece onto the candy cane. (Yes, it's winter and she is wearing her baby sister's summer romper as a shirt...silly girl!)
After she glued on all the pieces, she told me the pattern and we talked a bit about the symbolism of the candy cane at Christmastime. We turned it upside down and she told me it made the letter "J" for Jesus! 
This is a random drawing by Little Bear that I thought was worth adding here. She says it's "Kelsey" (my cousin who we saw at Thanksgiving) and she's holding a balloon...and later she added a jump rope. I love that she included eyes, a nose, a mouth, and arms and legs. Pretty good for an almost 3 year old, I'd say!
I just love it when I catch the girls sharing and playing so nicely together. I got out these "sticky blocks," as we call them, this week and they have been a big hit. I have learned that if we want to make our toys last longer, we keep them in the closet out of sight and rotate which ones get to be played with on a regular basis...it makes them seem more special and *new* to the girls. Just wishing for more storage space ;)
Here's Little Bear *singing* the Christmas Bible Verse, Luke 2:11 (keep in mind she cannot say the "or" sound very well so "born" sounds like "bern" and "Lord" is "Lerd")
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