Getting Ready for Advent

I love these years where Advent starts more than a week after Thanksgiving!  Having the week to get ready makes everything feel less stressful.  Although I do realize I am getting ready for getting ready for Christmas, which does seem silly...

Actually, I love Advent, but now I find it's nice to ease into it. I've found I need to do 6 Advent things a day so that everyone can do something each day.  Plus stepping up the prayer (daily Mass), fasting (I'll be skipping sweets and minimizing desserts until Christmas proper), and alms giving (Heifer donation Jar, and probably Angel Tree).  Plus doing good deeds to put hay in the manger.  Plus we need to make an Advent wreath.  Plus, to start out, I need to strip all the walls... I love it all, but it's tough to do from a standing start.

Anyway, our 6 daily activities this year are:

1. The Advent House, full of Playmobil nativity figures and candy (6 pieces plus a figure behind each door).  This year I'll have the older kids set it up.

2. The paper Advent calendar.

3. The Jesse Tree.  This is doubling as our Bible time since each day goes through a part of salvation history in both the Old and New Testaments. I need to go through and replace the missing ornaments.

4. The ornament: a new Christmas decoration picked out each day!

5. Lighting (or just blowing out ) the Advent wreath candles.

6.  A kid gets to pick one thing we all can do as a gift to God that day.


Also, we may do the old velcro nativity scene Advent calendar (if we can find enough pieces!), so that may get combined with number 6.

You can see pictures of everything Advent here.

I also love online Advent calendars!  My favorite religious one is on Busted Halo, my favorite secular one is Boola and Kwala.

Easy Beautiful Candle Gifts

Fortunately, none of these are going out to people who read this blog, so I think it's safe to post it!

Basically, they are ordinary pillar candles with beads, sequins, and jewelry supplies pinned to them.

Klenda, Leena and I did these on Girls' Night in an hour or so.

Most of the beads and so forth we had on hand, but we did buy the chains in the jewelry section of a craft store (on sale!).
 
We picked up the candles on sale at a craft store, but dollar stores are also a good source.

Helpful tips: 
1. We used sequin pins from the craft store because they are short and easy to push in, but any pins work.
2. Sketch out your design first with a pin.
3. Use a thimble!
4. Longer, pearl headed pins also work, and look like beads, but they are harder to put in.  
5. We really liked the combination of sequins topped with seed beads.
6.  Keep the designs a little way down from the top so the candles can be lit without interfering with the design.

The Secret Life of Gilwell

 Gilwell is the (stuffed) tiger cub mascot for Choclo's Tiger Cub Scout den.  Each session (they meet every two weeks), a different cub takes Gilwell home to have adventures which are then recorded in Gilwell's journal.

Here are Gilwell's adventures on Zoom:

Alligator wrestling!

A trip to the National Gallery where he saw what Choclo described as "The Biggest Fountain in the World!"  If you've been there, it's the one under the central dome.

We started with the oldest Medieval paintings and made it up through the Italian Renaissance and the museum's Da Vinci portrait before Oob had enough.

We took a picture of Gilwell with the Da Vinci, but it didn't come out well (I wasn't sure if it was ok to use the flash).

 We took Gilwell to Oxon Hill Farm where he went for a ride on one of their horses!

These were not ordinary riding horses, but the big draft animals.  To give you a sense of scale, that's the Emperor whose hands are in the picture.  The top of the fence was about the height of his shoulder.

And, of course, Gilwell had a Thanksgiving adventure in which he tried to eat one of the seven pies.

We made three pumpkin, two chocolate, one sweet potato, and a lemon meringue.  You would think it would be fine for Gilwell to have one, but no, the Emperor saved the pies for Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Happy Thanksgiving from Zoom!

In Which I Shoot a Turkey

 We had missed Choclo's Tiger Cub visit to Oxon Hill Farm last Sunday, so we decided to go today (the day before Thanksgiving).

The farm has cows, horses, pigs, geese, rabbits, chickens, a cat, and a donkey.  It also plays host to a flock of wild turkeys who like to mooch off the feeding bins!

Yes, I shot my very own turkey with my very own camera on the day before Thanksgiving!  It was thrilling.  For me.

More thrilling for the Zoomlians, they each got to try their hand at milking a (very patient) cow named Minnie.


We took along the Tiger Cubs' mascot, a stuffed tiger named Gilwell.  Each kid gets a turn to take Gilwell home and write his adventures in Gilwell's journal.

We had the whole farm to ourselves, and had a great time poking around in all the outbuildings!

Meme!

I have been enjoying Catholic Memes for a while now, and I finally came up with one myself!

I've often had to explain to my kids why we can't have a dog: I would be utterly unable to resist naming it this!( that and the dog allergies)

"Anathema sit" is the term used to formally denounce a heresy, and literally means, "Let him be anathema."  It's always proceeded by an "if," as in, "If he says Jesus Christ was not truly God, let him be anathema!"

Unfortunately, the "sit" is pronounced with a long e instead of a short i, but I wouldn't let that stop me!

Just Turkeys

Sometime when Mxyl and Klenda were very small, I had the idea of having them do the same craft every year to see how they changed and how their creativity evolved.  That craft was to make a construction paper turkey with feathers (real or paper) and  googly eyes.

This has sort of taken on a life of it's own.

Here are this year's turkeys.

Leena did a Classic Turkey of the type I always have in mind when I drag out the paper.

Zorg has the Conquering Alien Turkey... of Doom!

 Klenda did The Flirty Turkey.


Mxyl did Turkey.

Highlight the empty space after this text if you can't figure it out.
It's the country.

Oob snuck in under the radar and, unbeknownst to me, made a Baby Turkey snuggled up to our big Thankful Turkey.

Choclo, also on his own, made this Video Game Turkey.  He explained, "When he pushes the square button on his chest, he spits out twenty video games!"

Math Turkeys

These addition turkeys were a great idea I got from Royal Baloo.

Her blog looks like a real gold mine of home schooling ideas, definitely worth a look, although her kids are a bit younger than most of mine.

The turkeys say =10 on them, and each feather is a different way to add up to 10.  Choclo loved this craft and, although he knew the answers, having the pattern feathers in order was something he found delightful.

Oob, on the other hand, needed the Math-U-See blocks to see the the pattern, but he also liked the project a lot.  I need to do more crafts like this with them!

Easy Art Project

 This was a fun and easy project!

I had the kids draw a tree on black paper and then cut it out.

I pointed out that the trees branches get smaller as the split and that they tend to end in points, but otherwise gave no direction.

I think with younger kids, I'd let them draw it, and I'd cut it out for them.

For the second part, we used watercolors on white paper, but you could also do watercolor on tissue paper and put the finished project in the window for a stained glass effect.

We had been looking at some sun rises and sunsets in real life lately, and we talked about using warm colors for sunsets, and cooler, lighter tones for sunrises.

  I'm finding it interesting to see the kids decisions on these projects.  It was important to Leena that her tree be off center.   Mxyl's tree (top left) looks like an oak to me, while Klenda's (bottom left) makes me think of a maple, and Zorg's (top right) is very much like the elm that was in our front yard at the house where he was born.

Zoomlians in the News

I'm not sure I mentioned that we now have three scouts: two Boys and a Cub. 

Generally, the Troop (Boy Scouts) and the Pack (Cub Scouts) don't cross over that much, but occasionally they do.  This past weekend the Cubs and Boys worked together on a project gathering food for the hungry, and they collected nearly half a ton of food!

They made the local news here.