Advent Happenings

Over the last few years I have read lots and lots about Advent and its traditions but have been intimidated to jump in.

Well, here we go.

We celebrated the first Sunday of Advent today. This is the first year we are being intentional about where our focus is this season. We have always tried to focus on Christ and not the commercial parts of this holiday, but this year we decided to intentionally talk about it every day.

We decided to make a Jesse Tree. I sent the boys to get us a "branch" .... I said a BRANCH .... I got this:

Yeah .... boys will be boys. =)

After some trimming I think we ended up with a nice tree that will sit in our kitchen window seat.

We got this book to help guide us.

Here are the kids diligently making our ornaments for each day's reading:

Here is our ornament for our Day One reading:

And here is Bubby placing it on our Jesse Tree:

We also made an Advent Wreath which I am super excited about. What a wonderful and simple way to focus on the Reason for this season.

The Husband made us a lovely dinner and we read our first Advent reading and lit our first candle. We decided to go with this book to guide our daily readings for the Advent season. We will read from it and the Jesse Tree book each day. The readings today were such a blessing. I can't wait to read them all!

We decided there was no better time to start our other decorations so The Husband drug out the tree. We used to always go cut down a real tree until we realized that it was no coincidence that Bubby was always sick at Christmas time. He was even hospitalized for his first birthday AND Christmas. Ugh. Anyway, turns out part of his problem was that he was allergic to the tree. Boo.

Here are Daddy and Fancy working away on the tree:

 

And Bubby working on the lights:

And me and Pedro supervising ..... well, we got tired:

And yes, for the "keeping it real portion" of this post, that is me laying with Pedro on the living room floor in my jammies. I never even got out of them today. That is the result of working the last five nights in a row. Painful. I was excited to get Advent rolling today but tuckered out during the decorating. I will have to go to bed soon so we can have a productive day around here tomorrow.

I hope you are all having fun getting ready for Christmas!