December

I love December! There are so many wonderful things that happen in December. First off, a certain special someone's birthday. Happy Big 30 Honey! I'm so happy you were born :) I love all the red, the sparkle, the excitement of Christmas. I love the activities and spending time cuddled up with the little ones! We kicked our December off with a return visit from George the elf, a book advent and a RACK tree counterdowner. That would be a Random Act of Christmas Kindness.... one per day, more if we're really ambitious. More on that in a bit. First we sat down to open our first Christmas book. 25 neatly wrapped Christmas books, some old, some new... all fun to unwrap and read together. Please don't mind the crazy grain in the pictures... these kids get up way too early (no light).

We started off with our Elf on the Shelf book and a reminder that George is watching. Abriella wrote him about a dozen notes to deliver to Santa and even put some out the kitty door for Santa to pick up himself.

George brought her and Oliver a note from Santa himself.

We ended the morning picking Day 1 off our Counterdowner. Our first mission was to drop off toys at the Toys for Tots location. I thought it might be difficult for Abriella to not keep toys for herself but she was so proud to go drop them off and make sure that other kids have toys for Christmas too.

I've seen a lot of different Acts of Kindness Advent Calendars floating around but wanted to really tailor this to something suitable for a 3 year old. Most of them involve going out and doing something everyday but I knew that that would be setting myself up for failure and would be a lot to ask of Abriella. So we mixed doing things for others and doing things for her family. The first day was others and today was simply setting and clearing the table. We'll also be:
- taking hot chocolate to the bell ringers
- taking cookies to the librarians
- collecting canned goods and dropping them off at the food pantry
- have a happy helper day
- help do a chore
- open the door for someone
- tape quarters to vending/toy machines
- send a soldier a Christmas card
- draw a picture and give it away
- make Christmas cards for an assisted living home
- and my favorite... pick up toys!!
there are so many more things that you can do, for me... the point is to get out and do something. I'm so bad at following through with things but this holds a greater weight for me since I really want my little ones to realize that Christmas is not all about getting and more about giving. I hope they will learn something from this and I can already see that I will! Go bless someone!