Advent Activities: Days 3, 4 & 5

Continuing on with Advent today, our last three activities were fun for both the kids and me. It's a little work to put these things together, but the kids enjoy them so much and I love making opportunities for them to enjoy all the fun of the season instead of it all just being about gifts.

As I mentioned last time, Monday's activity was to make cinnamon dough ornaments. They turned out great, though I think I baked them too long so they aren't smelling as cinnamon-y as I'd hoped.

Cinnamon dough ornament making

Ornaments baked and ready to hang

Tuesday's activity was writing letters to Santa. I printed special stationery for the kids to compose their letters and we even got them in the mail yesterday morning on the way to school. You have no idea how much that makes me feel like a supermom. 

Last night's activity was making paper snowflakes, which I mostly let the older two children work on while I put Isaac to bed. When I finished that up, I joined them to make a couple myself. I bought double-sided tape at the dollar store the other day, which was the perfect adhesive for hanging our snowflakes on our patio doors.

This afternoon's activity is to decorate gingerbread houses, which made yesterday afternoon's activity for me making royal icing and assembling the gingerbread houses so they are all ready to go after lunch tomorrow. I bought these little houses at Bulk Barn. They were very basic: just the houses and cheap piping bags that had holes in them (well, the only one I tried to use had a hole in it and since I have plenty of my own piping bags, I abandoned the kit bags). I always think the kits come with too little decorating candy and too little icing, so I chose my own candy from the vast selection at Bulk Barn and I have a much better assortment than the kit houses! Fun fun fun!

I have also been playing with my camera a little more this week. I am proud to say after reading through a few helpful blog posts and watching a couple YouTube videos, my camera is currently in manual mode! Even with the tough evening indoor lighting, I am taking pictures without a flash and managing to balance exposure okay. Before I would shoot in auto - no flash mode with my fixed 50mm lens, which for the most part worked okay, but I think my pictures are looking just a bit better than they were a couple weeks ago! Yay. Took me long enough.