We had a nice quiet Thanksgiving this year. We hosted for the first time and everything turned out great. We had lots of fun with Papa, Gamma, and Great Aunt Sherri.
The boys made pine cone turkeys the day before and when they saw me cooking the turkey, they went and cooked their pine cone turkeys in their kitchen.
We watched the Polar Express and nibbled on this yummy White Chocolate Peppermint popcorn bark. (Okay the boys watched about the first 45 minutes before the sugar kicked in and proceeded to run around spinning and jumping like crazy.)
We made gram cracker houses for day 14 of advent. We had some construction issues so they ended up looking more like bunkers, but fun was had and way too much sugar was consumed.
Today’s advent activity was to deliver all the goodies we’ve been making. I delivered some earlier in the day to a couple of people, and we were supposed to deliver to a few neighbors tonight. We got all ready to go and then noticed it was pouring down rain. Since we own no rain gear and the world’s smallest umbrella Matt made us stay home. We will have to finish our deliveries tomorrow.
Last night we set out to make sugar cookies. It wasn’t going so well so I finished up the rolling and cutting out by myself. We then waited until tonight to do the decorating. Which was met with much enthusiasm and tears. Three year olds can be a tad emotional!
Visit Santa! The boys went to a local Santa who volunteers his time to collect food for the food bank. The boys answered every question he asked with “3!” (Noah holds up four fingers, while Ezra holds up three.) Guess we are stuck on our age right now.
Today I combined our advent activity with play school. We made candy cane play dough and had a blast! I managed to keep all four boys from burning themselves, but someone did touch the super hot play dough and feel the burn.
Remember you can click on the photos to see them larger and read the captions
(Wow that took a lot of red food coloring!)
All three boys were giggling uncontrollably so I got the camera out, of course the giggles stopped, but they were still silly and cute.
Tonight we colored Christmas pictures together. Coloring is nice and relaxing, something needed this time of year. You can print all sorts of free coloring sheets here.
Today we went shopping for our angel tree boys. We had a 3 year old who wanted a football and a 5 year old that needed warm clothes. The boys did great with knowing we weren’t shopping for them.
No pictures tonight! We had a family dance party to Christmas music. There was lots of spinning, some slow dancing, and even a little break dancing.
Tonight we made cinnamon applesauce ornaments. Easy project and smells so good! The fabulous Sandi gave me this recipe while I was still waiting to know my boys. I’m so happy to finally get to use it.
1 cup cinnamon
1/4 cup glue
3/4 cup applesauce
Roll out and cut out
3-5 days drying time
Today for the 4th day of advent we made Epsom salt candle holders. We used a little Modge Podge, 2sticky toddlers, some colored epsom and some little tea lights.
Today’s advent activity was finding the perfect tree and decorating it. We had a lot of fun. It was even rainy and cold! Made it feel like winter around here.
Today’s activity was something I’ve wanted to learn to do for a loooong time – string popcorn and cranberries! I knew this would be slightly above the boys’ crafty level, but knew they would still like it (anything involving popcorn is awesome!).
The boys really liked it. They worked on it for about 20 minutes (long time for them). I left their supplies out the rest of the morning and Ezra came back a few times to do more. I think he liked it. 
I found it nice and relaxing. We did a couple of ornaments and I’m working on a strand. I doubt I’ll do enough to cover the whole tree, but so glad we learned how to do this.
I watched this video to learn how.