Our Advent calendar is starting to fall apart…just a little. Not the calendar itself, but our ability to keep up with the activities.
Wednesday was supposed to be Wildlife Christmas Day, but because we spent the night at the old house and didn’t have our wildlife food available to us, we held off until Thursday, which was Pajama Day. (PS Every Thursday is pajama day for me. F3 told me that I need to get a pajama shirt that says “PJ Queen” It is the day that I consider my day off, so I like to at least be comfortable.) Anyway, back to the calendar issues. Combining Wildlife Christmas Day and Pajama Day wasn’t really a big issue, because PJ Day wasn’t really involved. How hard is it to not get dressed in the morning? So, that was a successful combination. We strung cranberries and popcorn on strings for our first activity. F5 gave up first, then F4 decided she was done too, so that she could eat her share of the popcorn. I finished their strings and did one for F6, as all he was interested in was eating the popcorn and cranberries. The Fruit cleaned up that mess while I got the second activity ready. I cut out snowmen and angel shapes from an old cardboard box. Then the Fruit spread peanut butter and bird seed on the cardboard to hang on the trees outside. F3 was very, very into it! I was so surprised that she didn’t have a problem getting her hands messy with peanut butter at all. She used to be such a prim and proper little girl, but now I think she’s maturing and realizing that getting messy is okay sometimes. After we finished cleaning up from that, the Fruit got on their snow things and strung the popcorn/cranberry strings on the pines, hung the ornaments up, and placed some apples that were in the refrigerator and in serious need of consumption out for the deer. I also filled an old frisbee full of squirrel food (dried corn, peanuts, and bird seed) and they placed that out. I don’t think anyone has come to take a bite of our buffet yet, but I’m hoping that they will soon realize the yummies that are there and will come partake. I took pictures…but haven’t gotten them off the camera yet.
Friday we had a busy, on the go all day, kind of day. We chose our tag in the morning, which was Christmas Art Day, and I immediately said, “Oh no! What was I thinking!?! We don’t have time for this today!” We ran some errands in the morning, spent a couple of hours at a friend’s house, ran more errands, then F1 had his first basketball game of the season. When we finally got back home, I began to look through some things, but I was just too tired to get the art stuff out (because I really, really wanted the day to be not only looking at some Christmas-themed Fine Art, but also spending time creating some ourselves based on what we see and our own interpretations of the Nativity story.). So I postponed it until today, thinking that we could combine today’s tag with the Christmas Art tag like we did earlier in the week.
But then today arrived, and we didn’t even have time to pull the tag, let alone complete an activity. Mr. Nutt decided that today would be the day to go get our ginormous Griswold-Family-Christmas-Tree (see National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for the humor in that), get the snowmobile that my dad had given us last fall from the other house, pick up some pipe that he’d ordered from the hardware, and get the rest of the Christmas decorations out of Mom’s storage. We didn’t get home until late this evening, everyone was starving, and I had to come up with a fast plan for dinner that did not use either gasoline or the buttons on the telephone (no, Kim, the computer keyboard was out of the question, too). Needless to say, we didn’t get Christmas Art Day in, nor even find out what today’s activity was supposed to be. (Shhh…don’t tell the Fruit. It was supposed to be Service Day.) I took pictures of the tree-hunting, but they’re still on the camera, too.
Tomorrow we will light the Advent wreath candle and read our verses, and I would love to work in Christmas Art Day. I found some pictures online that I would like to show the kids for inspiration, then read the Nativity stories as a whole from the Bible. I’m hoping the Fruit will draw inspiration from both the Fine Art we see and the story itself, and draw up their own versions. This year we will simply use colored pencils, markers, and crayons. Next year, I hope to pick a genre, ie stained glass, woodcarving, oil painting, and try to work within that genre together to make a masterpiece.
Hopefully, later this week, we will find a way to work Service Day into the schedule. It will be a very busy week with medical appointments, so I have no idea how the regular things are going to work, let alone making up for one day. That just happens to be one of the most important days, so I don’t want us to accidentally skip it.
