The Beginning of Advent

Advent has had a great start around here.  I took some much needed time away from social media to allow myself of the graces of more space and time.  It has been incredibly fruitful for myself, my marriage and my family.  There have been wonderful feast days to celebrate, lots of past traditions and even a few new ones.  There has been a lot of reading, cuddling around the fire, laughter and family time.  It is good for heart, really good. 

 

Here is the first few weeks of our Advent in pictures!

 

 

St. Andrew's novena is my FAVORITE novena of the year.  This year our families intention is very near to my heart and God's ability to support us and answer our prayers always continues to simply amaze me.

 

Blessed is She hit it out of the park again with this year's Advent journal By the Manger in the Morning.  This book, my bible, and my cup of coffee gets my day going right!

 

I love decorating our house and we continue to add more Advent decorations instead of simply Christmas decorations.  We have our Advent tree with purple, pink and silver decorations which we love and I adore this simple "Wait in Joyful Hope" decoration which amazingly switches to saying "NOEL" for the Christmas season!

 

 

One of my favorite things EVER might be snuggling up with a good book to a fire with Christmas lights.  It is so beautiful and amazingly peaceful, which can be rare to experience with a house of four little boys!

 

Every year I try to do a handprint craft with the kids to capture those little growing fingers in the current moment!  With having four children this year I thought it would be really fun to do this cute Advent craft with their handprints as the greenery.  I love how it looks and glows with the light thru the window!

 

 

We have a new tradition this year of writing in an Advent journal together as a family (plus I adore how it has the St. Andrew's Novena prayer on it!).  We can record prayers, stories, drawings or whatever is in our hearts.  It think it is a really special way to come together as a family as our children continue to get older and have more personal thoughts and reflections.

 

We have been slowly bringing Advent and Christmas crafts and art projects into our school work and they bring so much joy to the kids.  Our three year old has recently gotten into the Dot Markers and he will sit and do his "ink projects" while the older kids work on structured school work.  It is wonderful!

Outside activities have been slowing down and we have had a lot of time home together as a family.  It is good to focus on family and watch our boys truly develop friendships and their amusing imaginative play!

 

We were even able to sneak away for some adult time, which is always enjoyable, but especially fun during Advent!  We are off to a good start!

The Feast of St. Nicholas Fun

On December 6th we celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas, which is probably our family's current favorite feast day!  Knowing that St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children and our home is filled with lots of little one, I guess this only makes sense!  On December 5th we decided to do a giant baking day to make sure to have some yummy snacks ready for St. Nicholas.  We ended up baking over 200 cookies and the kids had SO much fun decorating.  It is so nice to have them getting older because it was the first year that they were actually really helping.  They measured out ingredients and had a blast decorating everything.

That night we cuddled up to read some stories about St. Nicholas, put out some cookies, our Letters to Jesus and laid out our shoes!  

Then, the next morning the children woke up to the fun miracle of St. Nicholas having visited our home and leaving great treats.  They received gold chocolate coins, candy canes, Christmas plates, a new book and a small toy each.  Santa Clause does not visit our house on Christmas Eve, but instead on his feast day, so it is always exciting to have an "extra" super fun morning in our home! Plus, our Connor had dressed up as St. Nicholas for our All Saints Day party this year and he was so excited to get out his costume and hand out treats to everyone that we saw during the day!

That evening, St Nicholas himself was visiting the Durham Western Museum in our town so we knew we had to stop by to say hello!

It was a beautiful evening and since we were already downtown to visit St. Nicholas we decided to have our fun continue by going to take a walk on the Pedestrian bridge which crosses from Nebraska to Iowa.  The kids think that it is so cool to be able to be standing in two states at once!

To finish our fun feast day we went to the Gene Lehy Mall to go down the big slides and look at all of the beautiful Christmas lights.  It was such a fun feast day and definitely one to remember for years to come!

First Piano Recital

Our oldest sons Ryan and Connor started taking piano lessons this past September.  My husband and I both grew up with music instruction being an important part of our lives, so we knew that we wanted to instill the same love of music in our children.  They have both done so well and are constantly practicing and playing for fun.  It is beautiful to have our home filled with little fingers playing songs throughout the day.

We are so blessed to have an amazing Catholic piano teacher who is willing to teach our children in our home and work with our homeschooling schedule.  She then had their first recital at one of our favorite places, the Holy Family Shrine.  Ryan played Good King Wenceslaus and Away in a Manger and Connor played We Three Kings and Silent Night.  They then also played a duet of Immaculate Mary.  It was such a wonderful event to prepare for Christmas during the Advent season. 

There was a pair of older brothers at the recital playing beautifully together and I couldn't help myself but close my eyes and image our young men all grown up. I cannot wait to see and hear how they grow in the future years playing the piano and other possible instruments.  It was a wonderful recital and I am so proud of them for all of their hard work and commitment in learning something new!