Advent Activities

We’ve done lots of Christmas stuff lately. Candice and I thought of some great activities for the month of December and each day we pull an activity out of our Advent Calendar with Asher. He loves to do the Advent Calendar. Some days we open a new book and read it together. Some days we open a new Christmas ornament and put it on the tree. To give the house a festive feel, we put up some nice decorations, which we made ourselves, to complement our Christmas tree :).

Speaking of the tree, here’s a shot of our Christmas tree… originally, we had the ornaments spread pretty evenly over the whole tree. We told Asher not to play with them, but occasionally one would drop off (from him poking it), and he would dutifully bring it to mommy or daddy for us to put back onto the tree. Well, pretty soon, more and more ornaments were getting “accidentally” knocked off, and he would bring them to us to put them back on. Every time he’d hand us an ornament, we’d ask him where that came from and he’d give us this look like, “Hey guys, don’t look at me! I don’t know how this thing fell off the tree. I’m just being a good boy and bringing you the ones I find so we can get them back on the tree where they’re supposed to be!” So, we started taking each ornament he brought us and putting it up higher… eventually, the tree came to look like this. She’s a little top heavy, but still very pretty.

One day, the Advent Calendar activity was to take family photos…

Another day, it was for Asher to participate in his first Nativity Play at church… he didn’t really have much of a part, all the little kids went up with the moms and sang the song they had practiced, “Donkey, donkey, donkey…”

Asher, of course, with his giant red bow tie, was the cutest frickin’ kid in the whole place!

He also got more and more bold as the play went along, and ended up getting away from us a couple of times… this is him stealing the show :)

Which, by the way, he thought was extremely funny…

Another activity last week was to go see Santa and his reindeer at Burwash Manor, a local farm and tea shop place…

The reindeer got a little friendly, which Asher wasn’t really comfortable with…

In the end, this was the best we could get… no smiles for the reindeer…

This was better than what Santa got, though. We couldn’t get Asher anywhere near Santa without him screaming and clawing to get away. We didn’t really care… no hard feelings, Santa, we’ll try again next year… maybe.

Asher liked riding the little choo-choo train they had running…

The other day our activity was to make little treats to take to the staff at Tyndale House as a Christmas surprise…

And even though we didn’t have this on our calendar, a couple of days ago we wrapped some Christmas presents and we had a pretty big cardboard box left over, so…

This is what we did :)… we built a spaceship! It was awesome! We put in a window and a control panel…

We installed a sophisticated lighting system…

We also put in a nice pulley system with string and cardboard pieces, and we built a little storage area in the back where the cardboard is bent down a little… there’s a little string you can pull that will bend the cardboard back to the closed position… it’s pretty genius.

Asher LOVES his new spaceship…

Also, there’s this, which I couldn’t resist showing you… this is Asher after he woke up from his nap one day. His hair is getting awesome, and we can’t bear to cut it.