We’ve been baking cookies

crafting

playing with our many nativities

working through our Advent materials

and spending time with good friends.

Lord, as we celebrate your birth on earth, let us turn our every smile and sweet moment to you in glorious praise.

I decorated this window over a year ago. It’s been sitting behind my couch since then. Hubby finally hung it for me just in time for this Christmas–a little early gift.

Check out my little KONOS Tree for All Seasons done up in aqua Christmas decor. I love living on the water! I have so much freedom to do things that just wouldn’t fly inland.

While hubby and I enjoyed adult company to honor our Sunday School volunteers (he teaches fourth grade boys), our children were treated to something I’d never try at home

Shaving Cream Creations

When we find something we like, we want to repeat it year after year. The only problem with that is we get too full and I either end up feeling guilty about not following through, or cranky trying to fit everything in. This year I narrowed our Advent celebrations:

Lighting our Advent candles (in my childhood wreath) as we read Jotham’s Journey, and sending the kids to bed holding lit candles. The story is intense, and is pretty scary at points. We’re using mini-jar candles because they’re too young to handle lit tapers.)

Reading about a Christmas hymn each day using O Come Let Us Adore Him.

Stickering scenes in our copy of The Very First Christmas.

Circling and underlining key words in our copy of Eleanor Zweigle’s Advent inductive study for families.

Listening to Brooke read devotions from Virginia Colclasure’s Christmas is Coming advent activity book and creating all sorts of crafts as she suggests.

Hoping to get around to reading and coloring in our copy of The Glorious Coming, A Jesse Tree Celebration of Advent by Anne Voskamp.

If you’re wondering how we fit it all in, Christmas is our primary focus for the month of December. These devotions replace our typical Bible curriculum, and in true unit study style, we cover math, science, history, reading, etc. through our Christmas preparation. I would not recommend trying to accomplish all these things on top of a regular, rigorous school schedule. If you don’t feel free to school in this way, you could always choose one of the above studies.

Happy Advent!

I don’t typically give the children written “tests” to assess what they’ve learned in home school. Usually I ask them to teach their daddy what they’ve learned, or narrate back what they’ve read. Sometimes I use lapbooks. Here are the kids’ lapbooks for our Rocks and Minerals unit.

Brad:

Brian:

Brooke:

Brooke bought a set of bunkbeds for her Liberty doll. I didn’t take a “before” shot, but they were uncushioned, covered in a red calico print.

Brooke added a 2″ thick foam cushion and used a pillowcase to re-cover them.

Aren’t they just adorable? You can see how we just wrapped them like Christmas gifts on the ends. We could have taken a little more effort to match up the stripes on the ends, but I wanted Brooke to be able to do this by herself without getting frustrated. 

She wanted to add pillows, but we didn’t have any pillow forms. So we made them ourselves out of felt and leftover toulle. She liked the crisp white look so much, she didn’t even want to make a pillowcase for them.

I’m so proud of how she’s learning to create beautiful things herself.

We’re loving the book we’re using this year, Dannah Gresh’s Secret Keeper Girls: The Gift of True Friendship.

May’s theme was BFF’s (best friends forever’’s).  I’m happy with what good friends the Sonflower Sisters have become over the past four years.

They crafted–their favorite part of the gatherings–cards to other friends, letting them know how special they are to them.

We finished up with a group brithday party. What fun!

What a blessing we have in our Sonflower Sisters BFF’s.

The boys were completely clueless after receiving a plastic grocery bag as a clue to the theme of their bedroom.

The girls were excited to reveal the new theme…can you guess yet?

I managed to catch their initial reaction

to their new MILITARY room!

Their daddy was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, and the plastic bag was a makeshift parachute. In this photo you can see him during a jump.

If you look closely in the photo above with the girls, you can see him in the jungle. The boys LOVE having photos of their dad and his army gear all over their bedroom.

Brian wanted a teddy-bear theme. We managed to make him happy with this pilot teddy bear.

I think it’s safe to say they’ll enjoy this room for years to come.

Talk about giddy! We were too excited to wait until after breakfast to reveal the new bedrooms.

The boys made hearts out of hot pink hawaiian leis to greet the girls.

Look at what else greeted the girls:

and this

and this.

Look at this cute shelf.

I changed up their closet drapes with a little RIT dye

and some pretty fabric (necessary when I dried the drapes in the machine and they shrunk.)

The girls were so surprised! They really didn’t know what to expect.

Brooke went straight to her desk/crafting area. It was the one thing she wanted in her bedroom.

Even though Brea cried when we took out her crib, she was thrilled to meet her new trundle bed

and find her own stash of books nearby.

She invited us all, and I mean all, to join her.

Didn’t the boys do a FANTASTIC job?!

The kids worked really hard on each other’s rooms.

Brian and Brad sanded a $2 from the county school system.

You can really see the difference in their personalities here. Brad is very intent and detail-focused and Brian’s a big-picture kind of guy.

The boys put together a really cute hot pink chair from Ikea for the girl’s desk area.

They were really wishing they had space for their own spinny chair–only not in pink!

In the  meantime, the girls were hard at work on the boys’ decor.

And helping a very stressed Mama

take care of the mounds and mounds of JUNK that were cleared out of their closets and from under their beds. Ugh!

After hours and hours of grueling work you don’t see on that daggone TLC show, we were ready for bed. In a clean living room. Aaaaahhh.

Stay tuned for the Whipped Cream Pie Throwing challenge and the Clues.