Advent Activities

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...maybe not outside, but it certainly is around our house! While I refrained from putting out all of the decorations this past weekend, I decided to go ahead and assemble the 9" tree in our upstairs living room while Taylor napped for three and a half hours on Sunday. (That's 210 glorious minutes for anyone who's counting.) Talk about an early Christmas present - it was magical! When she awoke, I carried her into the living room anxiously awaiting the look on her face as she caught the first glimpse of the tree. She smiled and clapped as if it were the most fabulous thing she had ever seen, then she immediately ran down the stairs to touch it. Later that evening, we put a little 4" tree in her bedroom. I was clearly out of my mind caught up in the Christmas spirit when I decided to put ornaments on her tree, because I spent the rest of the night telling her "no, don't touch." Needless to say, the ornaments only lasted until Monday night.

That night when Jake got home from work, we put the tot to bed and went to work on her advent calendar. After reading this post last year, I was super inspired to recreate something similar for our tot this year. (Seriously, if you all don't follow Little Baby Garvin you are missing out. No joke.) We wanted to find a space where we could hang the calendar at Taylor's height and in a place that she went past every day (because with kids, if it's out of sight it's most definitely out of mind). So, we chose the hallway that leads from our bedrooms to the kitchen (which she travels up and down 50 times a day).

After we hung the calendar, we stuffed each stocking with a piece of paper that has an activity written on it. These activities include everything from making Santa beards in the bath tub, watching Rudolph and painting our nails red, surprising Daddy at work with coffee, and making cinnamon ornaments to decorating Christmas cookies, visiting Santa Clause, making red and green play dough, visiting the Magic Tree, decorating a gingerbread house, and making Christmas cards. Each activity has a small treat that goes along with it, most of which were dug out of the Target dollar bins. Sweets and treats, what's not to love?

Technically, I jumped the gun a bit since we can't actually start for another week, but after the long holiday weekend (which is sure to be full of food, shopping, and decorating) I know we'll be more than ready to start in on our Christmas fun come Monday. Maybe it's just the kid in me, but I cannot wait to do all of these fun activities with the tot. And with Jake practically living at work until Christmas Eve, I thought this would be a nice distraction from his absence. I'm all about making the countdown to Christmas just as exciting as the actual day itself. I mean, why limit the fun to just one day when you can celebrate an entire month?!