I’m failing miserably at getting daily advent projects done – but we’ve got an every-other-day average going so I’m not going to stress about it.  The kids are still having a great holiday season, so who cares – right?  HA HA!

I found these cute little marshmallow skewers on William.s-Son.oma for way too much money and figured – what the hell – let’s make them.  They were super fun and so cute!  I should have bought regular marshmallows and not the stackers, but they still worked out and the kids thought they were awesome.  Once they were done, Hottie informed me we had no milk for hot cocoa… so the boys just ate them straight-up.  HA!

It feels like I’ve been missing the holiday spirit for a long time.  That’s probably because I have been.  Ever since getting that call a week ago, it’s been hard to focus on the fun stuff.  Our Advent projects came to a halt and we went into “fix-it mode.”  Well, we couldn’t fix it but we could make things a little easier, and that’s all I can expect in such a situation.

Now that things are settling down (for us, not them), it’s time to get back into the spirit.  It feels weird, but we have to do it for the boys.  I texted Hottie yesterday and said, “the holiday season returns to our house TONIGHT.”  I picked a super easy project for yesterday because I KNEW they would LOVE it.  It involved laser-cut wood ornaments in the shapes of race cars and trucks and… markers.  Slam dunk!  I even did a set  😉

Tonight, we trudged forward with making paint-filled ornaments for ourselves, family members, and Hottie’s work friends.  I did this project at Matthew’s preschool Christmas party today with TWENTY kids and it went perfectly!  I planned ahead and had the drying cups with names on them ready to go, the ornament tops removed and bagged (and then taped to each cup), drying instructions written up for each child, the paints unsealed and ready for use, and Hottie employed to help me.   It was so fun having Hottie there – he is so great with kids and with two of us helping the kids pick paints, shake them, and get excited about the end result – well – it was fun!

So much fun that I brought the boys home and we got to work on the GLASS ones for ourselves and loved ones.  They had a great time making specific ones for Grandma, Grandpa, and SANTA (yes, we are leaving one out for Santa) and when Hottie’s friend’s daughter came over to hang with us for the night, we made some for her parents too.  It was seriously fun!

It was time… time to do the dreaded gingerbread house/train.  Bryson’s been dragging the box out of the pantry for over a week now, begging to, “please make the train, please!”  I’d been thinking about it since Sunday and decided to finally bite the bullet today.  I’d taken out frozen homemade soup from the freezer and knew it was going to be an easy kitchen night ahead of me – so why the heck not?

The joint project on December 3 made me realize that teamwork is not the best idea for these two boys when it comes to crafty projects – they each want to do EVERYTHING “by my-seffffff.”  Once Bryson was up from his nap, Matthew and I turned on his new favorite show for him (“Justin Time” – OMG it is so cute and we’re so happy to have it back in our daily line-up!) and quietly ran out to the kitchen.  He and I had fun constructing the train before calling Bryson in to help us decorate it.  Bryson just wanted to eat every piece of candy in front of him, and Matthew wanted to do more than I would let him.  I was in a rush because the train was not stable and it was not going to hold for long!  What that meant was, “just help me with the icing and I’ll do the rest quickly.  You can hand me the candy pieces.”  Matthew came and went but Bryson stayed the duration and was super excited to stick on the Wilton sugar figurines I’d picked up at Target for this project.  Honestly, that little Santa, snowman, penguin, elf, and reindeer took this train from being cute to being adorable!

I took a few photos (which is always when I lose my cool because they cannot seem to cooperate during photo-taking these days) and Bryson asked if he could start eating it.  DIG IN!  Within a minute, the train was down (and I caught it on video!) and Matthew came out to help eat it up  🙂

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I had high hopes for this project, but it ended up being just me working on it.  Notice – not a child in sight.

We made two of these foam scenes for Halloween and they were ADORABLE so I thought it would be fun to make one for Christmas too.  It’s cute, but man, it’s a lot of work.  There are no real directions, just pictures of a few steps, and you have to figure out what piece is what.  I thought the boys would love peeling the stickers off the backing, but that kept Bryson busy for only a few minutes before he found deconstructing my buildings to be more fun than peeling stickers  😉  I lost Matthew immediately when he got his own supplies to make a microscope or something – I can’t remember what.  I thought they were binoculars, but I was quickly corrected and I can’t remember what the correction was.  Bad mom.  I was too busy sticking foam pieces onto foam pieces that were attached to foam pieces.  😉

I regret buying the big foam train that’s in the basement, just waiting for us to tackle it.  Maybe we’ll make the gingerbread house tomorrow… much less stressful  🙂