It Was a Great Day!

Today was full of fun and friends and many happy moments! :) We host a family Bible study on Thursday nights, so our advent activities for Thursdays have to be something fairly quick and easy. On the calendar for tonight...To go to www.officemax.com and 'Elf' ourselves. It was hilarious! The kids' reaction was SO worth it! Just during the few minutes it took to upload the pictures and create our 'elves' the kids were already cracking up!

Then, when we actually got to watch our elves dance, the giggles that erupted were priceless!

You can watch ours here:

We ALL had a great day! Peter has been doing the Warhorse Challenge all week, and it has been a VERY long, exhausting and sore week for him. BUT it all paid off! His team won first place! Here is a picture of his awesome metal, certificate and coin...

A close up of his Top Platoon metal...pretty awesome! I'm so proud of him!

Here are some pictures of a really neat project the kids did earlier today at our good friend's house.

Joshua got goofy and wore his as a hat for a bit! :)

Their trees turned out so cool! We all had a busy, but wonderful day today.  :)

No One Has More Fun Than The Adamses! :)

Advent Activity - Day 8

Tonight for our advent activity we each decorated an angel that had written on it a part of verse 11 from Luke chapter 2. They each turned out so cute with their little foil halos.  :)

There were six angels, one for each of us in the family, but Peter did Samuel's for him.  :)

Then we put the angels in the right order for the bible verse and hung them up on a ribbon in the center of our window. The verse reads, "For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord."

I am really loving our advent activity calendar time! It's been so much fun and so special, I wish we had an activity to look forward to doing together every night throughout the year, not just during advent.  :)

Day 7 - Hot Cocoa and Carols!

I realized a few weeks ago when we started listening to Christmas music around here, that our kids (besides Joy) don't know many of the traditional Christmas carols yet. So of course a night of singing carols just had to be added to our advent activity calendar. To make it even more fun we had a yummy treat of hot cocoa with marshmallows after we sang. It didn't take long, but after a couple times through a few of the songs, they were starting to get the words and I'm sure by Christmas they'll be pros! :)

We had a lot of fun and laughs! Peter even did motions to some of the songs which the kids just loved.  :)

Faith Elaina wasn't much into singing tonight which is why I don't have a picture of her...I'm holding her while I take pictures and (try to) sing. Peter sings WAY better than I do so he pretty much did it all tonight. As I held her, Faith said she just wanted to listen to Daddy sing. :) All the kids love to listen to him sing. I noticed a few times they'd stop singing because they were so into listening to him! :) It was sweet. So tonight was pretty simple, but still a fun memory was made, and that's really what all of this is about! :)

So Faith wouldn't sing, but of course when it was time for hot cocoa, she was really into that!

And her silly big sister too!

Advent Activity Day 6 - Fancy Snowflakes and Paper Snowflakes!

So today's activity from our advent calendar was to make snowflakes of many kinds. We already made marshmallow snowflakes, earlier in the day for a snack, and tonight we made some good ol' fashioned paper ones as well as some new fancy ones. We started off showing the kids how to turn a regular size piece of paper into a square. 

Daddy and I helped them to fold it and then the cutting began. The kids did so much better than I thought they would. I had expected them to need a lot more help with this part but I guess they are cutting pros now.

They turned out very pretty and all completely different!

After our paper snowflake mess, we started in on the fancy ones. I cut and glued these together earlier in the day and tonight, we all painted them with glitter glue and sprinkled them with some real glitter my sweet friend, Carrie shared with us. :) I just made them out of large popsicle/tongue depressor sticks and wooden skewers, I think they turned out pretty neat! Joy gave me an adorable compliment this morning as she watched me make them, she said, "Mom, you're just like one of Santa's Elves!" Apparently her reason for saying that was because she thought I made them very quickly. I thought it was really sweet and it made me laugh! :)

Our beautiful snowflakes drying before I put them up.

Their new home on the wall.

The paper snowflakes found a home on the big window wall.

Our house is beginning to look quite festive! I love it!

A Bit of the Fun We Had Today...

We are spending this week finishing some things in all of our curriculum and getting to a good stopping point to take a nice long 3 week break for Christmas. During that time, besides daily reading, we're just going to enjoy getting ready for Christmas, baking, crafting and visiting friends. I'm sure we'll sneak in some learning here and there, and practice some important skills, but it'll be through games and different things, none of our regular school books.

Joy is studying the ancient times this year for history and we have done a lot of really neat enrichment projects to compliment what we are reading about. Last week we learned all about the Phoenicians, their trading by ship and the founding of Carthage. One of the more exciting projects for these chapters we just didn't have time to get around to last week, so I promised Joy we'd do it this week as we were wrapping things up for the semester. We read about how the Phoenicians use to make beautiful purple dye from snails, so today we made our own purple dye, only we used blueberries instead. :) I have no desire to boil snails in my kitchen and I don't think we'd find the kind we need to make purple dye around here anyway. :)

Joshua joined us, as he usually does for the more exciting projects. :) They were both very interested in what we were doing. It was almost impossible to get them to focus on anything else while we waited for the hour to pass as the blueberries boiled.

I was a little nervous about it since I've never done this before, but it worked! The directions just seemed too simple, but before long we could see the blueberries beginning to fade as the color was being boiled out of them.

Finally, the hour was up, but we had to wait for it to cool a little. So we spent the time examining it and talking about what color we thought our cloths would turn out once we dipped them. We smelled it and even tasted it, stirred it and ooohed over the naturally rich royal color of the juice. 

We dipped some sticks to start. The kids stirred them around in it for a few minutes and they instantly soaked up the color. It was a lot like dying Easter eggs! In fact, Joy suggested that we make our own dye again when Easter rolls around, which prompted another discussion brainstorming some other natural things we could use to make different colors of dye. 

Next, we started dipping the cloth!

They turned out so pretty! Joy decided she wants to use them for doll blankets.  :)

Joshua wanted to let his sit awhile longer to see if it would turn a darker purple.

I couldn't stand letting all those boiled blueberries go to waste, so we added a little sugar and stirred it all up. It was about the consistency of chunky applesauce and the blueberries were still very dark in color even after all that boiling. It tasted yummy! So we spread a little on some biscuits and had a lovely blueberry snack! :)

Here is our other treat we had today, we made marshmallow snowflakes with toothpicks. :) It went along with our advent activity for tonight.

That was all I was going to share, but this was too cute, so I'll go ahead and put it up.

We have a big bulletin board that we use for many things and it is the start of our school day. It has our calendar on it and several parts that have things for the kids to do or change each day or week. One of those things is our prayer pocket. We place a photo of one of our family members or friends in the pocket at the beginning of the week and we pray for them everyday that week until the next week when we change the picture out.
Well, we recently got Baby Vera's picture in the mail and the kids were very excited to add her to the rotation of family and friends pictures that get placed in the prayer pocket. So this week is Baby Vera's week! And we prayed for her sweet Mommy and Daddy, Danielle and Jesse, too - we just used her picture to represent the family.  :) So during this time, each of us thinks of one thing we'd like to pray for our person in the prayer pocket and today Joshua's prayer was this...
"God, please help baby Vera to grow up big and strong like a superhero and let me get to meet her soon, so I can give her a hug and please give her lots of teeth so she can smile real big." And all of this he said with the most sincere, sweetest voice the boy has! :) It was so sweet and funny, but I managed to stifle my giggles. This is one of my most favorite times of our day, I love to hear what the Lord lays on the kids' hearts to pray. Sometimes it's short and simple and other times quite long, but always thoughtful, even if they don't know the person well. I think it's helped them to think of others and be a little less self focused, that's my hope anyway. :)

Advent Calendar - Day 5

Our Advent calendar activity for today was sweet and simple...Family Christmas Movie Night! We chose the Mickey Mouse version of A Christmas Carol which the kids had never seen before. It was a hit and we all snuggled on the couch and ate popcorn!

Day 4 - Family Wreath and an Advent Book Recommendation

Day 4....After our Battalion Family Christmas party we came home and the kids went running right to the calendar, eager to open the tiny door and get started!

First, we mixed up some yellow and blue paint to make a nice Christmas green color. Then Daddy made his handprints on the page.

Next, I make my handprints on either side of Peters. We each did 4 handprints then it was time for the kiddos to do theirs. We decided to mix up a little more blue and make a darker green for Joy and Joshua's prints.

Joshua printed next...

After he was done we mixed up some light green for the two littlest to use. I don't have any pictures of them doing it though since it took BOTH Peter and I to get their hands in the paint and on the paper without everything else getting covered in it! So here is our (almost) finished project. Our wreath ended up not looking very much like a wreath since it doesn't have a hole in the middle. Peter's hands were too big! In order to fit them on the paper, his prints had to be almost overlapping.

After the paint dried we added a pretty bow and some red and white 'berries'. It's now hanging on our wall and I think this is one I will treasure and save to bring out for future Christmases. I just love the collage of all of our handprints together on one page. It looks even cooler in person when you can see the definition and details of each one.

Lastly, I wanted to share this wonderful book that we have been reading together through the Advent season. We received it as a gift from some of our sweet friends here and started reading it together the first Sunday of Advent. It is called Jotham's Journey and the story is broken up into sections, one to read each day of Advent. The littlest ones are not into it yet but they still like to listen for most of it. Joy however is very much enjoying it. Each day sort of ends in a subtle cliff hanger so she is very eager to read the next day's chapter when it is time. Joshua thinks it's a pretty exciting story so far but has a little trouble with the fact that there are not really any pictures. I think this will be a new tradition we add to our Advent celebration each year, we are really loving it.
I heard that there are three other books in this series so you can read a new one each year for four years, then start over again with Jotham's Journey if you wanted to. I haven't looked into them yet but I am hoping we'll be able to find them and add them to our collect to rotate each year. I think it's such a neat idea and the other kids will really enjoy them as they get older too. Anyway, just thought I'd share since we're only a week into it and you could probably catch up easily if you still wanted to read through it this Advent season.  :)