Advent Activities

Like last year, I tried to have an activity for the kids and me (and sometimes Tyler) to participate in for each day of advent.  Some of them were crafty and some of them were just fun, like watching A Charlie Brown Christmas.  We kind of lost steam around Albert's birthday but here's some pictures from the first few activities.

Have you ever cloved oranges?  I hadn't either but it seemed festive and easy enough for all to be able to participate. 

You just poke a small hole in an orange and stick a whole clove in it.  You can do whatever design strikes your fancy and the end result smells pretty spectacular.

 He might have just eaten one of the cloves.

We used a couple different things to poke the holes.  Asher was using my digital food thermometer. It worked really well.

But we also just tried small nails and they worked just as well.

Look at that furrowed brow!  He was concentrating so hard.

Poke!

Our beautiful and ever so aromatic creations.

The next day we made an edible craft.  It involved marshmallows, sticks, sprinkles, and melted almond bark.  That sounds like a recipe for fun, right?

Albert's first marshmallow didn't make it to the almond bark.

 Dip.

 Sprinkle.

The end result were these marshmallow Christmas trees.  

More dipping.

These were cute and super fun to make.  They tasted just like a marshmallow peep.  I'm not a fan of peeps so I wasn't too thrilled but the kids thought they were great.  

After that, we made twig stars. We have an abundance of sticks in our yard so we gathered some thinner ones and made these.

I was originally going to tie them all with string but I tried it beforehand and it took quite a while.  So for the kids, we had them find sticks of matching lengths and then we hot glued them.  It was way easier and still cute.