…counting the days…

The first count down to Christmas appeared sometime in the middle of November, around the same time the Christmas decorations and marketing reached saturation point in the shops. After one too many days of the beetle baby asking me how long there was until Christmas, even Boy2 was over it, and took himself off to the craft room and whipped up a cute little paper chain with the right amount of link in it. Each day, he will wait until Beetle is awake and chores done, and then together they remove another link from the chain.

We’ve done a mix of advent calendars over the years, from bought Lego ones to home made lego ones, to an activity tree, to a matchbox lucky dip, to envelope bunting, to a magic box of crafty goodness. So many fun ways to celebrate the Christmas season and get ourselves in a very merry kind of mood! This year, I thought it would be fun to hand over advent calendar prep to the kids. Inspired by our current Christmas readalong, we spent a couple of days in the craft room painting inserts and cutting boxes and generally making a mess and having fun, and ended up with four funky, very individual calendars, that have become the highlight of their morning routine to race and rip open each day.

I am still half tempted to see if our previous activity calendars are easily accessible in the storage shed – while we have some structure to our mornings thanks to the light school program we are working on, I wouldnt mind having some fun Christmas activities on standby for the afternoons, especially on days like today when the heat and smoke of summer is sapping 98% of my cognitive ability,with the 2% remaining dedicated to functioning enough to operate the ice tray and the soda stream…