Advent Tree

The season of Advent is upon us, and Rebecca and Elliot are extremely excited for Christmas! They are singing Christmas carols and enjoying Christmas lights and decorations on the houses in town. Normally our family spends the weekend after Thanksgiving buying and decorating our Christmas tree, which we will then enjoy for over a month. This year, however, we will be buying a living Christmas tree so we can plant it in our back yard after Christmas. Living Christmas trees, unlike cut trees, are only supposed to be inside one's home for four to five days, but because we still want to have a tree brighten our living room and keep us in the holiday spirit, we have decided to do an Advent tree until Christmas Eve, when we will bring in and decorate our living tree.

Our Advent tree is a small, artificial tree that we inherited from Jared's grandmother. It is just the right size for our two girls, and it is the perfect precursor to what will replace it in a few weeks' time. Several times each week we read a portion of the story of Christ's birth from the Bible, and then we have the girls decorate an ornament for one of the important characters in that part of the story. The ornaments are simple, just coloring pages of Biblical characters (Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, Herod, etc). After the girls color their ornaments using crayons or markers or colored pencils, even glitter, they are mounted onto a piece of construction paper and placed on the tree. Our goal is to keep the Christmas story at the front of all of our minds as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas morning. We are using our Advent wreath, and the girls both received Advent calendars from their Godmothers, all of which are other ways to keep Advent holy and count down the days until Christmas, but I wanted to do something that my four and nearly two-year-old can actually interact with and make their own, so this is what we came up with.

Speaking of Christmas, I just finished our fourth knit stocking (above are three of the four), and it's about time too! I started it one year ago, and since I was unable to finish it before Christmas, I put it down and didn't pick it up again until last week. There's something about the holidays that makes me want to be knitting something, so I've decided to knit a tree skirt as my next project. We don't have one still after years of celebrating Christmas together, and it's about time we did. I likely won't finish it before Christmas 2010, but Christmas 2011 should be easy to pull off.

Fall Fun

So I guess we have dropped off the face of the blogging world, at least for the last two months! This is in part due to the fact that we have been BUSY! Between hosting out-of-town family, Halloween, Rebecca's fourth birthday, and now Thanksgiving, we have been up to our ears in planning, cleaning, cooking, and everything else. What's more, I have decided not to try and stick to my one art project per week regimen and instead work toward less frequent but more extensive projects. The truth is that between preschool, story time at the library, and our Church's child care, my kids do lots of art without me, and instead of throw together a quick project before the week's deadline is up, I want to plan projects that are more involved and more meaningful. With the holidays upon us there will be no shortage of ideas and opportunities for art experiences to introduce to my kids, and I am excited to see what we come up with.

For now I will share a few pictures of crafts we made at Rebecca's fourth birthday.

It was a chilly afternoon party, so we went with a fall theme. This picture is a leaf book that the kids at the party put together. I ordered plastic leaf rubbing forms from Oriental Trading, and each kid was able to create a collection of leaf prints to take home.

Also from Oriental Trading,

this second picture is a cardstock leaf with a paint-covered design the kids could reveal by scratching the paint away with little wooden sticks. Some simply scratched designs in the paint, while others decided to scratch all the paint off.

Finally, the third picture shows two contact paper trees I cut out and stuck to the wall of our covered porch. Rebecca and Elliot and I went outside and gathered as many different leaves as we could and put them in baskets for the kids to press onto the sticky contact paper. We found that the green leaves stuck better those that had already dried out.