counting down and hot glue in your teeth

Last year I started collecting Christmas books. This year I added a few more. The plan was to add one new one a year. So by those calculations we should have 2. We now have 14. It's sort of a sickness. I love buying books and apparently I have no self control when it comes to buying books. Oh and a couple other things I love to buy compulsively? Wool sweaters at thrift stores to felt and fresh raspberries and blackberries because I love them more than chocolate(especially out of season. shhhh. don't tell).

Ahhhh well. It doesn't really bother me. It actually makes me happy and it's better than compulsively buying organizing equipment like I used to. Right? Wait. Don't answer that.



So then back to these delicious Christmas books. I saw this lovely idea and decided that that was why I had collected 14 Christmas books in 2 Christmases. I knew I had a plan! Now we have another way to count down till Christmas which also incorporates opening a gift and that makes it an automatic hit with the littles.

This year we started our Christmas Book Advent Calendar on December 10th but don't worry because next year I'm sure we will have enough books to start in November. So between this advent calendar I made last year and opening a book every day I figure my kids will always know the date in December, right? Hmmm. Maybe not.


In other news we had our annual gingerbread house making fest. John and Papa Wes were the chief architects while Zander, Asher, and Tiernan ate lots of candy and even several spoonfuls of Royal Frosting which is disgusting and barely edible.








Funny Story: Tiernan noticed that his Papa Wes was using extreme powers of concentration to build Asher's house and therefore was not paying him much attention. So he took it upon himself to gather little broken bits of graham cracker and his discarded half-eaten candies and feed them to his unsuspecting grandfather while he worked. And because Tiernan was very persistent and Papa Wes was very distracted the table and floor got pretty cleaned up. Later Papa Wes told us as he picked hot glue residue out of his teeth that he thought that Tiernan must have been picking up all the the pieces he had made mistakes on and feeding them to him. Yup. That's what it looked like to me. I tried not to laugh. Wasn't successful.




Every year I wonder why we do this project because it's messy and sends my kids into sugar induced comas for hours afterward but then we do it and I remember why. Because they love it.