Advent, Day 15, 16, and 17

We've had a busy week!  Monday's activity was to build a gingerbread house.  Let me preface this by saying that we are not an artsy family.  I can be creative in certain areas of my life, but I have no artistic ability.  My Pinterest crafts are always fails, I don't cut straight, I can't draw, and most of all, my handwriting is terrible.  So, I'm always reluctant to do a gingerbread house because my type-A-everything-has-to-be-in-it's-place-and-look-good personality does not mesh will with my lack of artistry.  But after taking a few years off, I thought we'd try it again this year.

It wasn't good y'all.  We couldn't even put the house together to start decorating it.  I piped and re-piped that icing, but those pieces weren't going to stick.  So instead, we just divided up the parts of the house and everyone got a chance to decorate their own section...

Charlotte was completely bummed when she found out that we weren't going to eat the gingerbread house (read: threw a tantrum after school in front of anyone who would listen).  Telling her that it was just for decoration didn't seem to ease the pain any.  So, this ended up being a bonus for her (and her brothers), because everyone was free to eat their piece after they finished decorating.

Here's mine...

NAILED IT!

I tried to help Grey with the icing at first, but he was over that in about 0.2 seconds. It went straight to the mouth...

Gone are the days of me reviewing pictures before moving on to the next thing, so the majority of them end up like this...

Maybe in a couple of years when Grey is out of his spastic house destroying tornado phase, I'll get better at this again.

 Please note my third born eating his brother's shoe when he has a perfectly good cookie in the other hand...

  

Tuesday is our crazy activity day, so we just squeezed in eating Christmas candy and reading Christmas books.  Charlotte had her dance show off that day at the end of class...

I let her stay up too late the night before, so she was really tired.  She told me she fell asleep on the carpet at school earlier in the day!

Her new ballet/tap teacher, Ms. Sophia...

 

Today, we made snowstorms in a bottle.  I found it on Pinterest and thought the kids would love it.  The big kids (especially Hunter) love to do science experiments at home and somehow that always translates into mixing concoctions in glasses and freezing them.  So, the snowstorm in a bottle was a perfect activity for him I thought.  They were both really excited to do it, and it looked super simple.  But.  It was another Pinterest fail.  I didn't even get a picture of what it looked like, but here is what we were aiming for, and what we got was a goopy bottle of liquid that had glitter floating on the top.  It was beautiful when we were shaking it, but once we stopped, everything just floated upward.  The kids actually didn't seem too disappointed by this, though.  I guess it's a good science experiment either way:)

 

During our reading this week, we got to the most exciting part of the story, Jesus' birth, and have since been reading about the angels appearing to the shepherds in the fields.  And then about the shepherds sharing the good news of great joy to the people they encountered.

 

I read an article on patheos.com tonight, and I loved how the author described the gospel.  She says, "God gave us the perfect gift even when we did nothing to deserve it...Instead of looking at us in our sin and putting us away, God was overcome with love for us.  He didn't hold our wrongdoings against us.  Instead, at great cost, He gave us a way to be forgiven and reenter into communion with Him.  That gift was His son, in the form of a baby."  I love that.  He was overcome with love for us.  He has given us the greatest gift possible in Jesus.  Won't you receive it this Christmas season?