Merry Christmas to All

We've been pretty busy these last couple weeks, doing Christmas activities, visiting with family, and getting through our day to day routines :) Here is a little peek at what we've been doing:

Christmas Books
As soon as I filled the book basket with the Christmas books, the girls dove right in! They had made some sort of fort thing with the couch cushions and laundry basket and it grew very quiet in the living room...which can be quite scary when you have little ones. I walked in to find them reading their books so nicely, melted my heart!

Christmas Printables
1+1+1=1 has so many adorable printables on the site this year! The girls have enjoyed these a lot. Little Bear completed the Christmas Counting page where she had to trace each number and then draw a line to the correct grouping.

While big sister was working on numbers, Tiny colored the J is for Jesus worksheet. When she was doing this, it just looked like a bunch of scribbles to me...but now looking at the picture I took of it, you can actually tell she colored in only the capital and lowercase Js :)

Little Bear is REALLY into figuring out beginning sounds of words lately so this page was just right for her. She did a great job and pretty much did this by herself. She had some trouble writing letter S, but with some practice attempts on the back she finally mastered it. And she insisted on writing lowercase Js for Joseph and Jesus simply because she likes to make the dot at the top ;)

Both girls worked on this shape Christmas tree decorating page. Little Bear did it ALL.BY.HERSELF. and did a wonderful job! Tiny just needed a little help identifying colors and she pretty much found the shapes on her own. Fun for both of them!

Snack Time
One morning we made these adorable Christmas Rolo Candy Turtles. I pulled up the recipe on the computer and had the girls help me look at the different steps we needed to do. They each had a cookie sheet and lined up pretzels in rows (they were thrilled to find out they could eat the broken ones!). Next, they put a Rolo candy on top of each pretzel and we baked them for 4 min. Then we placed a red or green M & M candy on top of each Rolo and pushed them down. Yummy!!!!!
The girls have also helped make some candy cane bark, homemade Cookies in a Jar for gifts, and we have big plans to do more cookies later this week!

Art Time
Kids LOVE paints....so when I got out some red and green paint and allowed the girls to have some "free-paint" time after finishing another little project, they were loving it! Tiny is so serious when she's creating!

One of the projects they did was a N-O-E-L decoration. Little Bear painted letters N and E with red and Tiny painted letters O and L with green. After the paint dried, I cut the letters out and hole punched them to hang on a strand of twine to use as a decoration in our house. HOWEVER....the N mysteriously disappeared and this project could not be completed. I have no idea where it could be, I DO know WHO helped the lovely N escape and I know it's somewhere in one of her many collections in our house ;)They made and decorated their own shape Christmas trees the day after we decorated our real Christmas tree. While we did these, we talked about the different shapes that were used, 3 triangles, 1 rectangle, and 1 star. Then they glued on their shiny ornaments :)

Our Jesse Tree reflection last night was the story of when the angel Gabriel came to Mary to tell her she would be pregnant with God's own son...which was my inspiration for the angel craft we did this morning. The girls loved painting their hands and gluing the parts on to form the angel, but their favorite part by far was decorating them with GLITTER GLUE! This was Tiny's first experience with it and she was in heaven :)

While they worked on their angels, we discussed the symbolism of the angel at Christmastime. I printed out the Bible verse Luke 1: 30-33 that we read last night and we made this beautiful scene on our door for everyone to see.

This is one of my most favorite times of year and I wish I could just s. l. o. w. down time for the next few days! It's so much fun to witness the joys of Christmas in my children. Just today at lunch, Tiny was having trouble getting her chair scooted up to the table. Little Bear noticed her and ran over to help her right away and said, "Christmas is helping, so I helped." I think she's really getting the concept of loving, giving, and helping lately.

We want to wish all of you a wonderful, joyful, MERRY Christmas and a very happy New Year!