More... Advent Activities :)

A few more fun ideas that have popped up in our Advent calendar (I knew there were more pictures to include in my last Advent post, plus we had yesterday and today's, too)...

By the way, we are all ornamented-out. We now have more ornaments than we know what to do with! Ha! There is one more ornament activity planned, but I'm scrapping it. I love her handmade ornaments, but we have ornaments coming out of our ears right now. And so, these will be the last of the ornaments. Promise.

So let's start off with... Ornaments! Ha!

For $0.49 each (at Joann's or Michaels), you can't beat that. She loves to paint them in and even I got in on the fun with her.

This was another favorite from last year. Last year, she liked it because the M&Ms magically stuck. This year, she liked it because the M&Ms are deliciously tasty. Ha!

I'm fairly certain that she did more sampling than decorating.

It was so much fun, however, having Daddy, Annie and Megan making trees with us!

They're just sugar cones, frosted with tinted frosting and decorated with ornaments (I mean, M&M Minis).

On our, "Make sugar cookies" day, we ended up making gingerbread cookies instead (it linked up with our Muffin Tin Monday).

I don't have any baking pictures because, well, baking was quite an adventure. There were phone calls and delivery men dropping off packages and a certain 2 year old cracking her own eggs...

I decided that we did need at least one picture to commemorate the last time I make gingerbread this fun occasion, and I ran to grab the camera. I was gone...oh... 4 seconds and came back to see Maddie's little cheeks stuffed with gingerbread dough.

Oh, Maddie. Such your mama's girl.

Oh, so we'd intended on making salt dough ornaments. However, when I found a fresh package of Model Magic (in the box of goodies from Ginger), I figured we'd just go with that instead. Megan and I rolled out the Model Magic and used Christmas-themed cookie cutters to make all sorts of ornaments (using a straw to poke a hole for the ornament hanger). When the pieces were all dry, we sat down and painted them.

How cute are these guys?! I think we may have a new Shafer family tradition. We each took a gingerbread cutout and painted ourselves. I think it'd be fun to make these each year and see how they change with time.

These are about a fifth of the finished ornaments (read: ornaments coming out of our ears).

Alright, so not all craft foam kits should get a bad rap. We've done a couple more and I'm finding that you should just go into it knowing that you'll need to bust out the hot glue gun at some point. I've even been putting my OCD tendencies to the side and allowing her to, you know, create it how she wants. Of course, it's only fair to mention that once she's moved on, I might go back and sorta...rearrange it. Is that terrible? I think it's fun. She creates one thing and then I use the same materials and create another thing. Totally and completely cool.

This was a little reindeer craft and it was the easiest of all the craft kit projects so far. The tacky glue seemed to hold (well, it held for a couple of hours until the whole thing toppled over and Maddie was screaming that Rudolf had died; Very traumatic) and so I had to break out the hot glue gun (which is, this season, my latest fashion accessory, it seems).

See, all in all, it turned out cute. Of course, Maddie insisted that it wear a bow because, "Bows are the most boo-tiful thing you can wear!" I agree, Maddie. I've taught you well. :)

And, one last thing... I updated our homemade/handmade Christmas blog today. Check it out HERE!