It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

In case you aren't aware there are only 10 days until Christmas!!!! Woo-hoo! Are you as excited as I am????? I hope so! 

Before the Christmas season began I created an advent type calendar using PicMonkey. This type of list is called subway art (I don't know why). It took a while to design but I was able to come up with 25 fun activities, one for each day of December leading up to Christmas morning. 

I used the same three frames from my Thanksgiving wall of thankfulness and had 3 separate lists that had a total of 25 activities. I really like how this looks in the playroom. We've been pretty good about doing an activity each day and I like having them in this type of list because I can be flexible for what we do each day. A couple of days we've done more than one so I think I'll be short the week before Christmas but I figure we can still have fun. And I put going caroling on there twice without realizing it.  Oops. I guess we really better go caroling next week. 

We stuck with our small tree again this year. Our big tree that used to be my grandma's is in storage at my parents and we decided that the small tree would be better with Eva. Honestly, I really wish that we'd gone with the big one, but it's okay, I can use the big one next year. The main reason we went with the small tree was so that it would be safer if Eva pulled it over....which she has....twice. Oh, toddlers.

You never know what can end up in your tree! I found this stuffed animal tucked into the back the other day. We're trying to teach her that she can gently touch the ornaments but she can't take them off or pull on them. Our plan has mostly worked :) I've only had to do emergency repair surgery on one ornament that I didn't even realize was breakable.   

One of our favorite holiday traditions is going to Denton for Wassail Fest.  We got to see lots of old friends while we were there and Eva had fun at the petting zoo. 

Last week Ryan and I hosted our small group's Christmas party. Umm, it was pretty awesome!!! Probably because we have the best small group ever. Literally. That's our group's official name. 

 

We played several minute to win it games (from the popular game show). From top left going clockwise: 1. Wearing pantyhose with a tennis ball in the toe on your head to knock down water bottles (I won!!!) 2. Using chopsticks to race with fruit loops. 3. Cup stacking (the boys cheated). 4. Using a barbeque skewer to stack nuts (as in nuts and bolts).

Two fun traditions for Eva: We have an advent Santa and a Nutcracker days until Christmas countdown and every morning we change the days and open up the new door on the Santa calendar as a family. Eva goes straight to the shelf and points until we walk over and pick her up. She also received a Fisher Price Little People nativity set that she absolutely loves and plays with every single day. The book by the nativity shelf is The Story of Christmas by Patricia Pingry - it is one of the best simple stories of Christmas that presents the basics of the true meaning of Christmas in a toddler friendly way.

Early on for our advent days I put up this felt tree that I made for Eva. This was so easy and inexpensive to make. I used cookie cutters to make the fun ornaments. Honestly right now Eva's favorite thing is for me to put all the ornaments on the tree and for her to quickly knock them all off. When I was figuring out what ornaments I wanted to create I considered having this tree for many years to come so I purposely thought of ways that she could sort and count ornaments in the future (like circle/not circle, glitter/not glitter, and by color) - of course this year it's more just about the texture and colors of everything!

Another advent activity was to take a walk as a family to go look at Christmas lights. I figured that she wouldn't have much driving around in the car to look at lights because her view would be limited from her car seat. Also Trophy Club has awesome lights so it was easy to walk around to find really decked out homes.

 

The other night for our activity we all cuddled in our jammies and watched the classic Rudolph movie. The movie has Santa Clause in it, of course. She really likes cartoon Santas..... 

Real Santa? Not so much. I promise that we only sat her on his lap for a milisecond to take this photo. She was really interested and happy to see him up until the moment we sat her down. So sad, yet so funny at the same time. Everybody needs a classic toddler meets Santa photo like this, right?  Despite what this photo may suggest, she still gets excited and says,  "Ho-ho-ho" every time she sees a picture of Santa on TV or a book. So I don't think we scared her too much.

Ah! I'm having so much fun doing Christmas things with my family!!!! I've been so intentional to keep things light and fun and to remember that it's more about spending sweet time together than having a perfect moment so I don't get stressed about things. Because the holidays should be about LOVE and JOY and PEACE!!! Can't wait to share more activities this week!