Tag Archives: Advent 2015

The Anticipation of Advent

Posted on by

Over the last few years, I have grown to love the Advent season.  As a child, I felt like the weeks leading up to Christmas were absolutely magical, and as I grew older I never seemed able to recapture that anticipation.  Of course, what I was really looking forward to back then was Santa’s arrival and present delivery.  It was hard to feel the same once I had outgrown that fantasy.

We don’t play the Santa game at our house, but once we had children I wanted to try to create a similar sense of excitement as we looked forward to the day we celebrate Jesus’ birth.  The great mystery of His arrival is so far beyond any childish dreams about a jolly fat man bringing presents.

We’ve developed many Advent traditions to help make this season a time of wonder and delightful anticipation for our family, and this year as I was decorating our home, I decided to add one more (borrowing from my nominally Catholic roots).  We have Nativity scenes scattered throughout the house, and I set them all up without Baby Jesus (except for a few where that was impossible).  Right away my kids started asking, “Where’s Jesus?”  To which I replied, “He’s not here yet.  We have to wait for Christmas!”

Advent Creche Collage
Every time I pass one of those scenes, I’m struck by how incomplete it feels, which was the whole point, of course.  It’s hard for me to imagine a world without Jesus, where the only thing to cling to was the hope of God’s promise.  Having a concrete reminder of His absence has helped me spend time each day reflecting on how Christ’s arrival brought a sense of completeness (or at least it set things in motion for the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise).  I tried it on a whim this year, but I think this is going to become a tradition.  (I’m still trying to decide how I want to bring out the Jesus figures.  I’ve got lots of great ideas from which to choose!)

“O come to my heart, Lord Jesus,
There is room in my heart for Thee.”
 

Posted in Holidays

Wrapping Up Week 18 (2015-16)

Posted on by

Weekly Wrap Up 2015-16
 Don’t you love those weeks when everything actually goes according to your plans?  I have a natural tendency to try to pack too much into our days/weeks, and it’s really hard for me to ease up or take a day off.  Yet I really want to minimize the time we spend on academics over the next few weeks, so I battled with the side of myself this week.  And won.

At the start of the week I sat down with Ian and showed him my lesson plan book for December.  We looked at what needed to be done (basically two weeks worth of lessons in his Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course, and five math lessons with lots of additional facts practice).  I told him once those things were completed, I wouldn’t ask him to do any more official schoolwork until after Christmas.

To be honest, I wanted him to dive in and get through it all this week.  He didn’t.  And so I just bit my tongue, took a deep breath, and let him go at his own pace.  We took a day off for Arianna’s birthday and he still managed to get in a solid week’s worth of work, so I can’t complain.  In addition to his history and math work on the computer, he’s reading through Robin Hood (A Stepping Stone Book), the assigned literature for his history course.  Ian loves being read to, but he’s usually reluctant to read on his own, so I was surprised at how enthusiastically he picked up the book each day.  He even asked if we could get some of the other Stepping Stone books, intrigued by the titles like Man in the Iron Mask and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  I told him I’d rather he wait a couple years and just read the “real” books, but I’d help him look at the library for the Stepping Stone versions.

DSCN0913xAs far as Elijah goes, I didn’t demand much from him this week.  Instead of doing regular lessons, I set him to work systematically going through his Architecto Gameand the Equilibrio book that uses the same blocks.  I like giving him something to do besides flying through grade levels on CTCMath.com, and since he’s fascinated by building things, I figure his time is well spent developing his spatial visualization skills.  After Christmas I’ll have him go back to lessons too, but for these light weeks I think this is a great Kindergarten activity.

Read Alouds

One of my goals over the next few weeks is to read with my children as much as possible , and we got off to a great start.  They spent a lot of time pawing through our collection of Christmas books, sometimes just flipping through them quietly on their own, and sometimes bringing them to me to read.  Here are the ones we read this week(for my most complete list of Christmas picture books, see my post Christmas Book Countdown):

http://i1.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51k9H2TFMWL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg?resize=199%2C259

 

Best Christmas Pageant

I also had the pleasure of introducing the boys to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson, one of my childhood favorites.  From the first page, Ian was hooked, and within a few chapters we had drawn Elijah in as well.  They kept begging for more and we ended reading the book in one sitting (well, with a few interruptions from the little ones).  It was such a hit I went searching for the movie, which I’d never seen.

So all in all we had a delightful week of snuggling up with books and enjoying lots of family time in the glow of the Christmas tree with the iPod serenading us with Christmas carols pretty much all day every day.  Bliss!

Posted in Holidays, Weekly Wrap Up

Slowing Down for Advent

Posted on by

Advent 1I love making Advent a season of joyous anticipation in our home.  Over the years we have developed many traditions and I’ve tried to make plans for special activities to help point my children to Jesus in the midst of the chaos in the world around us.  Here are a few things we’ve done at least once:

This year, however, I feel a call to slow down, to purposefully step back from the busyness of the season and soak it all in.  I want to keep school work to a minimum, just keeping up with Ian’s online history course, playing math games, and reading with all the children a lot.  Rather than wrapping up books for each day, I’ve just left them all out for the kids to peruse.  Ian’s already started bringing me old favorites, and I hope we’ll all find lots of time for reading together.

Reading is actually my only real plan.  Last year we really enjoyed Jotham’s Journey by Arnold Ytreeide, a story broken into daily readings to be enjoyed through the weeks of Advent.  We loved gathering as a family every evening by the glow of the candles on our Advent wreath and the lights on our Christmas tree to hear about Jotham’s latest adventure.  It was such a hit that this year we’re reading the next book in the series, Bartholomew’s Passage.  I had planned to also go through Unwrapping the Greatest Gift by Ann Voskamp, but it might just be too much to try to do both, so I may save it for another year.

I’m hoping to have all our gifts purchased by the end of this week so I can just rest, reflect, and ready myself for the celebration of Christ’s glorious arrival.  I’m sure things will come up, but with God’s help we’ll slow down enough to really enjoy the beauty of Advent.

Posted in Holidays