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Advent Weeks 3 & 4

Early Christmas present from Grandma and Papa H


Christmas is over, and this mama is pretty far behind on her blog posting.  A lot has been going on which means a lot still needs to be shared.  Advent was a lot of fun this year.  We did a lot of crafts as Buddy has been asking to do a craft almost every day.  He's recently discovered the use of scissors, and has been enjoying his newfound skill.  It's funny, though... when I used to try to do daily crafts a year ago with him, he wasn't so interested.  Now, he'd love that!  Mama just needs more time to plan!  We did manage to do a few though which Buddy really enjoyed.

Handprint Ornaments


The first one we did was making handprint ornaments as Christmas presents for their grandparents.  Once again, I found a tutorial for making salt dough ornaments on Pinterest.  We had used craft store clay before, but I thought it would be fun to make them completely from scratch with the kids.

The boys helped with the prepping.


However, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the dough to turn out right.  It was much too grainy which made for a frustrating experience.  The boys played around with the "dough" (if you could call it that) for a while with some cookie cutters until finally mama gave up on it and pulled out the store-bought clay.  Once we did that, everything went much smoother.



"Mommy, take a picture!"
If you do ever make ornaments out of clay, do make sure that you make the ornaments thick enough.  We found our first set were quite fragile.  We used Crayola's Air-Dry Clay in white.

Gingerbread Cookies

Another day we made Gingerbread Cookies.  The boys loved helping me put in the ingredients, stirring, and cutting out the little men.  Button almost didn't want to let me even roll out the dough because he was having so much fun helping out, but he gave me a break when I let him have at it with the spoon and bowl.  The frosting was fun too!







Mod Podge Paperweights
In a spontaneous activity, we made paperweights from rocks in our backyard and pictures of the boys.  One morning, Buddy came up to me with Mod Podge in his hand wanting to do something with it.  After a quick scour of Pinterest (am I addicted? or just resourceful?), I made up my own craft.  I sent the boys outside to pick out a small rock, then I trimmed a small picture of each of them and helped them paint mod podge all over the rock.  It took some manuevering, but I finally got the pictures to stick mostly right.  It was difficult to get the picture to lay down on the rock right.  I used some super glue to help.  The boys then mod podged the top to give a more fluid feel.  I didn't get many pictures, though, as it was very hands on for me and couldn't juggle the camera and the glue.


Great Wolf Lodge


One of our biggest memories this season, though, is our trip to Great Wolf Lodge.  We went there with my parents and my brothers for three days just before Christmas.  We had an absolute blast.











Since Buddy's birthday is also on Christmas, we decided to celebrate his birthday there so we could focus on Christmas when we got home.  He enjoyed his cupcakes, balloons, and presents.  Button, on the other hand, kept asking when his birthday was but decided he was content with a cupcake and a birthday hat.




Loren playing with Buddy's new ukelele
The waterpark sure wore the boys out.  Button fell asleep at 5PM the second night and he loved that he got to sleep with mommy while he was there.  Buddy doesn't nap anymore, but he couldn't resist catching some winks on the ride home the last day.



Next up... Christmas!
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