Advent Box

As if Christmas wasn't busy enough, I decided that an extra good thing to do in the lead-up would be to whip up a homemade Advent Calendar, so that the boys would have a special Christmas activity to do each day.



I found lots of good ideas on the web, for activities and for construction.  (Home-schooling sites are a mine of information.)  In the end I put in a mix of very easy, achievable activities for the days when we were also fitting in school/sport/tap-teaching - like reading a Christmas book at bedtime, or doing a Christmas maze printed from the net - and fussier activities like card making or tree decorating were carefully plotted to fall on days with not much on.



As for layout, I used Aunty Cookie's Christmas Wrap (left over from last year) to make origami envelopes and then stuck on some faux dymo labels. 



By the time I'd finished all the folding and stuffing and sticking last night it was nearly 1am, so all the envelopes were stylishly dropped in a box for discovery in the morning.










Cherub was probably more excited about the chocolate advent calendar, which is for bedtime.  He also, for good measure, asserted that mine wasn't really a calendar (fussy fussy, it's a calendar in a box, okay?). And not content with that, little fidget-gidget that he is, he managed to push down the Number 1 envelope that I'd left sticking up, which meant that as Climber opened the first envelope and read aloud the day's activity I practically had a heart attack.  You don't hang your stocking and leave a present for Santa on December the 1st, not in this house anyway.  No, no, no put that one back and start again with number 1 please!