Advent days 1 and 2

I love this idea over at The Crafty Crow.  She shows what Christmas book they are reading every day for advent and the craft they did that day.  I thought I would try and do this on craft days too.  Although, after searching through my kids' extensive library I could only find 3 Christmas books!  That is not going to keep us going for long!  So the book feature will include many non-Christmas ones too obviously.

For Advent day 1 we didn't read collectively but the craft was to make gift cards for the teachers and I didn't worry about taking photos of that one (this activity was only for Princess E as Lord A is not at school yet - he got a chocolate instead).

For Advent day 2 we read 'Madeline's Christmas' (by Ludwig Bemelmans) and our activity for the day was family art night.  I got this idea from The Artful Parent and she got the idea from SouleMama.  Basically I just put a very large piece of paper on the dining table after dinner with coloured pencils and felt pens and then everyone took a turn naming a theme to draw from.  We had Christmas symbols, oceans, trees, flowers, dogs, funny scenes (that was an easy one! lol) and rain.  The kids particularly loved seeing Daddy drawing and it was a fun activity to do together.

Now, what to do today.....

Day one of Advent!

Well, I retrieved my advent boxes from last year and surprised the kids with them today.  Now I just have to think of all the activities to go in them!  Here is my starting list:

- Make ice-cream
- Visit a different beach for shell collecting fun
- Treasure hunt (as in put the first clue in the box and have them find a little treasure somewhere in the house/yard)
- Make Christmas decorations for our Christmas tree branches (some dead branches I ripped off a shrub in our yard - I am not setting up the big tree this year as we won't be here for the day)
- Go to a fancy cafe for afternoon tea (hmmm, still thinking on this one....)
- A picnic in a park/at the beach
- Themed country food days (only a couple - don't know if I could organise more than that)
- Make a cup and button game (suspend a ribbon with a button on one end from the bottom of a cup and they have to try  and catch the button in the cup)
- Various baking exploits (incl. gingerbread men)
- Go bowling
- Visit friends

 and probably lots of recycled ideas from last year.  What do you do for an Advent calendar?

Christmas fun

Well, I can finally upload photos of craft projects rather than just baking. I have been busy doing a few things, three of which I am going to show here. I was inspired by many blog posts about advent calendars so spent a good evening covering 24 little matchboxes in various papers to put in a bowl for Miss E to open every day (A has shown zero interest so far). Miss E punched all the little flowers and wrote the numbers on them and then we glued them on together. Inside them I have printed off little slips of paper with a special activity for that day. I tried putting a little present in a couple of times but Miss E was very disappointed and prefers a fun activity much more. Nice to know. Bonus: saves me the trouble of trying to find things tiny enough to put in a matchbox! I was starting to regret buying the small boxes and thinking I should have bought the super large ones.... Just as a reference, the two sites that inspired me with their matchbox efforts are here and here. I did see one just like mine but in all shades of blue and white and they were placed inside a glass bowl but I can't remember where it was (despite much searching...).

Just as a reference, my list of activities for our advent calendar include:
- baking chocolate chip cookies
- going out for ice-cream
- playing tag in the park
- going to the beach to collect seashells
- visiting the christmas decoration warehouse
- a visit to Santa
- making cards for friends
- having a picnic dinner in our backyard
- playing hide and seek
- having a special games night
- getting to stay up late to watch a movie together in our pj's

I am still thinking of things to put in them.

Here are a couple of my card efforts recently. The photo is pretty bad. I can't seem to find a good spot to take photos here in this house but there you go. I had fun making these. Very simple and I just love using the scrapbooking papers - so many lovely designs. With the flower one, I just drew the branch freehand on some brown paper and cut out with very fine scissors then used flower and butterfly shaped craft punches on different papers. You really need to use a dense pattern for the best effect I find. Then I attached them with mounting tape for some depth. The Christmas one was very similar. I drew the tree trunk freehand and cut it out, used a circle cutting tool for the tree and found some free clipart for the bird silhouette. I printed out a square of paper with the words on it but, if I had access to all of Lynette's and my craft stuff, would have stamped it and used the heat tool for a raised print. I can't even remember the name of that special powder for doing that! Been away from the craft table for too, too long.... Oh, I remember now, embossing powder! Phew..

As my last project for this post, I also wanted to jazz up our very plain white walls in the dining room seeing as I haven't quite got around to hanging any art there. Apologies again for the horrible photo. This holly and word have simply been cut from thick card and put on the wall with blu-tac. I used felt pens to add some details to the holly like a leaf vein and some shading on the berries. I was planning on 'Joy to the World' but haven't quite finished cutting out the other words. That font is quite laborious to cut out let me tell you... I might cut out some music notes to scatter amongst the holly too. This is such a fun, easy thing to do I might keep going with other spots around the house (and with a simpler font perhaps). Stay tuned.