ADVENTures in Advent - Day 1

Today's bag contained two marshmallow covered Santas for the boys as a special treat.

The card I inserted read:

December 1:

Today’s Activity: Write letters to Santa

Today’s Letters: A & B for Angels and Baby Jesus

Discuss the 12 Days of Christmas – Day 1: A partridge in a pear tree

Tonight’s Movie: The Santa Claus

The plan is that they'll do their letters to Santa, I can capture some great shots of them doing this.

The "letters of the day" feature is so that I can have an ABC book of Christmas of drawings done and colored completely by the boys this year. I hope to do this each year. They both really adore drawing and coloring so it's an easy craft for them to do and lets me capture their skills and inner artist all for me. It's their Christmas present for me. What I did was find a poem containing the letters of the alphabet and a Christmas meaning and then I changed up quite a bit of it to fit some of the things I wanted to draw attention to. Then I printed out two letters/lines per page -- one on each half. I'm going to bind the books at the top for them when we're all done.

So, today's Letters of the Day are A and B.
A is for Angel who sang for peace on earth
B is for the bells that rang out the baby's birth

Doing this, too, is a way to bring in a sort of family devotional in discussing how God created angels to be His heavenly messengers. I found, too, on another on-line resource, to discuss how Gabriel was an angel sent from God to tell Mary and Joseph that they would have a baby that would be God's son and that God told them to name him Jesus.

And then there's the tie in on discussing the 12 Days of Christmas. I thought it'd be easy to tie it into the first 12 days of December because things generally aren't as hectic then so it would be something I could easily help pull off AND it keeps CHRIST in Christmas for us since the references are all supposedly hidden Christian messages in the song. I've found some nice coloring pages the boys can do for each of the days as well (if they want).

Day one - A Partridge in A Pear Tree - The partridge in a pear tree is Jesus Christ. A partridge often feigns injury to draw attention to herself and away from her young to protect them from danger. Because of the self sacrifice the partridge was used to represent Christ.

And, if you're the parents of children, you understand that things don't always go as planned. My goal is to HAVE a plan, and be flexible enough when things don't go the way I anticipate I don't get hung up on it.

Yesterday, I had to pick up Drew from school with an ear ache. After an 11:30 trip to the doctor with a diagnosis of a so infected ear that we'd be lucky if his ear drum didn't rupture before the antibiotics were able to get in and kill the infection" infection, a lot of the plans were srapped for the night because I didn't get to do my grocery store run which means, too, that dinner was me going to Central Market at 6:20 to pick something up while the boys watched The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

However, tomorrow's a new day. That's all that matters.