Advent Calender

I've made a kind of Advent Calender I found on, naturally, pinterest. I used the idea of getting a bucket and wrapping up things to do each day, trying to use things I already had so as to not spend too much money. In that strain, we used the packing paper left over from our move, red and green folders we've had for a looonnnggg time, and things lying around the house made into new things.

Each day, we're going to do something fun:

1 - bake cookies
2 - bake brownies
3 - make fudge
4 - play with the Veggie Tales nativity set
5 - make a "year in review" ornament
6 - read a book
7 - red and green playdough
8 - indoor snowball fight
9 - hand print ornament
10 - handprint Christmas trees
11 - Christmas jokes
12 - letter to Santa
13 - read a book
14 - make pine cone birdfeeders
15 - make gingerbread house
16 - make coffee mugs
17 - make snowglobes
18 - make snowflakes
19 - read a book
20 - Christmas bingo
21 - go Christmas light hunting
22 - make gingerbread cookies
23 - read the Christmas story
24 - Christmas Eve box

We're looking forward to having lots of fun this Advent season.

Setting Up the Tree

I told you I'm seriously in the Christmas mood! We set our tree up today, Jeremy and Leilani set the tree up while I cooked and took care of Natalia, then Leilani put up most of the ornaments with occasional help from me, Jeremy, and even Natalia (who more chewed ornaments rather than putting them up, but still...). Now Leilani's ready to wrap presents and put them under the tree *grin*

I eventually want to do once-a-month cooking, but for now, whenever I make a meal, I'm making double and freezing the second batch. Just trying to do little things to make life a bit easier.

Natalia's been ALMOST crawling all day. She gets up on her hands and knees and bounces, turns circles, and kicks. She's so close!

I know we did more than that, today, but the day got a bit derailed by Leilani throwing a massive fit and spending a lot of time in time-out. It sort of works, time outs. I'm not really sure what works with her, I just know that this isn't a particularly fun aspect of parentingh, but an incredibly necessary one.

Bnh jbn7vnmn87m - this is Natalia's contribution to today's post *grin*

We're still doing our Thankful Tree, it'll be fun to go over it on Thanksgiving and see what we've been thankful for :).

Girls' Bathroom

The girls' bathroom already had a jungle theme - from the previous tenants, I guess - so I decided to just go with that. I had pinned some silhouette things on Pinterest so decided to use that idea to spruce up the room and make it more relaxing. I cut out eight elephant silhouettes and hung four to a ribbon, then cut out a monkey, giraffe head, parrot and lion head silhouettes and put them in some frames with a backdrop of some of Leilani's art from when she was littler. It's definitely original :) The shower curtain and border were already up, and the lion trashcan and monkey cup were left here, too, so got incorporated :)

I'm not sure how I feel about the lion head, I think it looks more like a bush, but I think the rest of it turned out cute :)