25 Days of Christmas: Days 1 thru 8

Day 1.  Advent Calendar & Wreath

I wanted to do some kind of “countdown calendar” for Finn for Christmas since he has trouble with the concept of time.  I found this cute idea for a simple advent calendar online.  We don’t have any star stickers, so we’re using smiley face stickers for each day to countdown to Christmas!  Both Finn and Riley are taking turns putting up the stickers each day.  And we’ve also got our awesome felt Advent Wreath that we got from church last year.  Every Sunday we sing Happy Birthday to Jesus (Finn’s idea) and put a new candle on.

 

Day 2.  Listen to Christmas Music & Decorate the house, or pull out ALL of the decorations.

I didn’t get a picture because it was just mayhem.  But Finn woke up on the 1st and asked “can we decorate today?” and about peed his pants when I said yes!  Daddy was just about to walk out the door to go to work but I made him go to the basement to pull up a few of our decoration storage bins before he left and oh the joy!  They pulled EVERYTHING out and we put on Christmas music and played with the little people nativity set that we got for Christmas last year and just had so much FUN!

Day 3.  Ride the Pink Pig

I took the boys to go ride Priscilla the Pink Pig!  So much FUN! 

 

And we met some friends!

We also had our picture taken with Priscilla which both boys were looking at the camera and hugging her and so cute and it all happened so fast I didn’t get my camera out but I did *have* to buy the super cute picture!  Sadly I do not have a scanner, just trust me it is cute!

Day 4.  Santa Parade

I got word about a Santa parade that is put on by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta so we went downtown to go check it out.  I had low expectations but oh my goodness, it was a really awesome parade!  There was TONS of giant blow-up balloon characters and it was almost 2 hours long!  Very FUN!  I’ve got a million pictures and will try to narrow it down…..

Here comes the parade!

Loooooooook!!!!  It’s Abbie!!!!

 

 

Random men dancing with briefcases!

SANTA IS COMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Day 5.  Decorate the tree and put up lights!

 

 

I still haven’t taken a picture of the lights outside, but Todd got them all hung and then we let Finn plug them in.  Yeah, probably not the safest/smartest task for a 3 yr old, but we got lucky, he’s still alive.  :)

Day 6.  Cookie Decorating!

We went over to our friend Davis’ house for cookie decorating!  We made such a mess and ate a TON of candy but we had a lot of FUN!

Day 7.  Reindeer craft!

We did this craft last year and I wanted to repeat it because the face of the reindeer is their foot print and the antlers are their hands.  I’d like to keep repeating this for as long as I can to see them grow!  To be honest, they were totally into tracing their hands and feet but then wanted not much to do with the craft after that, not even the gluing!  So I really did this craft.  But they colored and we all hung out and sang jingle bells about 10,000 times.  :)  So we still had FUN (and I still got my hand/foot prints!)!

 

Day 8.  Write and Send a Letter to Santa!

OK, this I was SO excited for!  One of my friends in the burbs mentioned they had a place where you could mail a letter to Santa and get a response!  I was so jealous!  I found out that our post office had a mailbox where we could send a letter, just no response.  OK, I’ll take it.  But then!!!  THEN!!!  Someone found a place that is doing responses too!!!  And close to home!  YAY!!  I asked Finn if he wanted to write a letter to Santa and mail it to him and he said yes and was super excited.  But then when I started to pull out our paper and markers and stickers and such he said “momma, I can’t write very good though”….awww!  I assured him I would help him and write whatever he wanted to say!  It was still a little tough.  Even though he scours through the toy catalogues (that he calls his kids magazines) that come every.single.day and says he wants every single thing in them, when it came time to it, he really couldn’t think of anything.  But he came up with Mickey Mouse (???), a sled and some cars, and a penguin and some snow!  And his little brother Riley would like his own scissors.  We added some stickers and I made an envelope and off we went!  The mailbox was too high and I needed to lift him up, so I wasn’t able to take a picture of him dropping it in.

   

More to come…….Merry Christmas!!!!