A Christmas wreath...

I am loving my new tradition of having the boys make a wreath for the door for the different seasons.  We retired our fall wreath, and have made a Christmas one.  I let the boys pick out some decorations at the craft store, and while I was worried about what the finished product would be - I really shouldn't have.  They picked out two huge pointsetta flowers (which they later wouldn't use when I told them I'd cut the stems off), some sparkly stuff, some christmas balls, and a glittery plauque I bought for the occasion.

I helped them cut up the sparkly stuff and then they got busy with their glue guns... to create this:

Yes, they often do crafts while still in their pj's.  Regular clothes are a battle I rarely fight unless we're going out.  And, the boys were so proud of their creation and so enthusiastic in their posing that Vin (who was making sure that nothing fun fell on the floor while they were working) just had to jump into the picture as well!

Our advent tree...

The holidays have kept us uber-busy but there are a few things I want to write about so I can remember them for next year.  One of my favorites is our changing fall bucket list  tree which is now an advent tree.  All of the fall leaves have fallen and been removed -- what can I say? Once they were within easy reach, it didn't take the boys long to make them fall to the ground.  repeatedly. until they were mere pieces of what they once were...  They served their purpose so it was fine.

We made 24 ball ornaments to decorate the barren boughs instead.  I lined up a long strip of clear contact paper and let the boys go to town with christmas colored tissue paper.  Once they were done, I covered it with red, white and green construction paper.  We might have added a lil glue here to make sure it all stuck or not -- I don't remember now.  I traced a glass to make circles and cut them out and then we stuck them onto the tree to decorate it.  I used a sharpie to write on a few with things I wanted to do for advent.

Then I cut out a christmas tree shape from brown paper bags and had the boys paint it green.  We hung that from another wall, and every day we moved one ornament over.  Any time anyone asked when Christmas was, they were pointed towards that tree to count ornaments.  It was a game at first, then they stopped asking, and then it became exclamations of excitement when they could easily see how many were left.

The tissue paper pack had a few shiny silvery plastic-y type sheets, and we used that to cut out a star to stick on the top.

The ornament to-do's:
-Watch a Christmas movie
-Elf somebody
-Go Christmas shopping
-Decorate the house for Christmas
-Explore Smithville
-Write letters to Santa
-Have hot chocolate after playing outside in the cold
-Make some Christmas ornaments
-Christmas Baking
-Make presents for family
-Make snowflakes
-Decorate some Christmas foam shapes