Holiday Traditions

The day after Thanksgiving is when we decorate the house for Christmas.  We doing it while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.  :)  This year I bought two small trees for each of the kid's rooms.  The boys now share a room and we've divided our home school room in half so that Ev can have her own room.  I gave the kid their ornaments and let them decorate their trees as they wanted and they turned out pretty cute and I got to decorate our large tree how I wanted. This year I put the tree in front of our large window. When you walk into our apartments our window is what you see so our tree is what you see when you come into our building.
For Advent this year the kids we are doing a Jesus tree for the first time.  We are using the Birth of Jesus Grapevine studies to daily draw out the story together and we are praying for other unreached people groups.  As we prepare for Jesus' birthday we will spend the day celebrating Jesus with a birthday party and lots of activities.  We really love keeping Jesus' birthday free of presents and focusing on us.  In the past years I have made a scavenger hunt through our house for the kids to find baby Jesus.  One year they were wise men, last year they were shepherds and I think this year they will be travelers on their way to Bethlehem.  I'm excited to see how this year turns out.

Thanksgiving Recap

We had full house of 24 people celebrating Thanksgiving this year.  It seems like each year we top the last with the amount of people and food.  We enjoy hosting and having our friends hang around the house enjoying a second helping of food.  We moved Todd's desk, and the kids desk into our family room and moved some furniture around to accommodate enough seating for everyone.  As a family we spent the month sharing what we are thankful for.  I made little trees for each kid this year and it was sweet to see their own handwriting on the leaves.

Our Week

Hobs have been drawing every day.  Can you tell what he drew in his picture?  Ian was catching up on some reading :).... and we woke up to a snow covering two times this week and for our city which is so dry we don't get a lot of snow.  It was gone by noon though.  And Ev lost another tooth this week.  Her grand total is up to six teeth and two more are loose. 

Bird Cape

One of Ev's friends loves birds so I decided to make this for her for her birthday.  Ev loved it too so I ended up making another one for her. 

Evangelia's 7th Birthday