Our Christmas Tree
Our Christmas Tree…
…went up today!
Today is…Monday Dec 13, 2010
Alright. Today, I made our morning start a priority before we went to the gym.
So, we did actually:
Pray.
Look at a Gospel Picture:
and we even read a story:
(no, Giant is not sneering at the book. He is afflicted with the “loose glasses” disease, which causes the wearer of loose glasses to attempt to inch their spectacles up their nose with a scrunch of their nose and cheeks. I myself was afflicted with this disease often as a child, and was only able to partially overcome it. When I got contacts.)
The Gym was set up for a party, so we went for a walk and collected a couple of friends to come back to our house, where we:
ate snacks (that’s a Christmas tree apple sculpture)
(yes, really)
read “The Night Before Christmas” with heavy emphasis on the tree pictures,
and did not do a craft.
I had a craft fail.
Mostly due to trying to wing together a very messy craft in five minutes for five little boys (blowing bubbles tinted with lots of green paint and then placing a piece of tree shaped paper over it to get a nifty bubble like effect. Not happening).
Luckily, they had fun playing, and hardly noticed that we were not doing a craft like I’d told them we would.
And I didn’t get a chance to do the craft with Giant after lunch, because he was gone playing at a friends all afternoon. Wonderful!
So after Ettin woke up from his nap, he helped me make supper and snitched some beans:
(This boy loves beans!)
And Galoot hung out:
(just thought I’d throw and extra picture in here 😉 )
Today is Thursday…Dec 9 2010
We started with our Advent tree:
And read some stories while I nursed Galoot:
Then we had friends over. The boys played for a while, and I mustered up some courage and decided to do school while we had friends. Actually, it was almost easier with an extra kid…kind of like how making supper for one or two people feels a little pointless, while making supper for a family is satisfying, and making supper for a crowd is a fun and rewarding challenge.
Or is that just me?
We had snowman pudding sculptures decorated with trail-mix for snacks
Read, “The Mitten”
Traced our hands and cut out two mittens—one regular sized and one extra large from being stretched out by all the animals ;). Then snow-white cotton balls were glued on top, and we attached a string to connect them;
After lunch, Giant wanted to know how to say: “snow”, “snowman”, and “monkey”, in Russian. So we looked the words up on a great site
and added them to our Russian word wall:
Ettin was colouring while we did this:
I love these swirls. They seem so peaceful.
Then the boys watched movies, until I convinced them to go outside and play in the last little bit of sunshine left of the day:
We all bundled up.
Galoot:
Giant:
And Ettin:
We played for a bit.
Until I was frozen and convinced them to go inside and watch movies.
An Ettin Nativity
One Empty Stable..
plus One Busy Ettin…
equals The Nativity, categorized and codified, graded and grouped, separated and sorted:
And that’s just how his brain works.
Jumping
Today I felt brave.
I brought up my mini-trampoline:
At one point in the middle of his jumping, Ettin hopped off and came over to me. With a look of complete seriousness, he stated: “I yike it, yumping.” Then went back to the tramp.
I guess he just needed to let me know.