Advent Mania

So I haven't been as organized with the advent calendar this year (thus the cups in the first place). Last year I typed out cute little activities for almost every day ahead of time. This week I was lucky if I stuffed the cup before he woke up. This morning I had to distract him during breakfast and do a little surreptitious slam dunk with the loot. I caved and stuffed it with dinosaur tattoos as I didn't have any activity inspiration (or time) today. But yesterday was inspired (or so I thought).

On the first day we took out all the holiday books. We had a lot of fun reading all of them. Monkey will sit for hours listening to books. We read "If You Take a Mouse to the Movies" over and over and over and over. Monkey is enamored with the mouse since we saw the theatre version of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" a few weeks ago. In the book, the mouse strings a popcorn garland so I thought it would be fun to make one too (there's also one with popcorn and cranberries in "The Littlest Christmas Tree" so he wanted to make that). I didn't have any cranberries and Monkey didn't have any interest in going to the store so we kept it simple with just popcorn. We also don't have a popcorn popper so we went old school on the stove top. Well, let me tell you - stringing popcorn that's cooked on a stove ain't as easy as you'd think. The kernels are still stuck to most of the popcorn so it makes it really hard to get a needle through - and they're dry so there's a lot of breakage. Luckily, as with

any project, it's not about the end result to Monkey (and I had to remind myself of that when I was wanting to swear at all the broken popcorn). He thought it was really cool and enjoyed eating the popcorn just as much as making the garland. We finished a little over a foot and he decided (hallelujah) that it was long enough for the birds. So we donned our coats and hung the sad little thing on the tree out front. We plan to watch and see how long it lasts with birds, critters and weather. Tomorrow the activity is "go to Grammy and Grandpa's for the weekend and watch the Santa parade". That will be a big hit - and give me some time to come up with some stuff for the next few weeks (or maybe I'll put that off and nap) . . .

Update: This morning we watched as the crows devoured the last of the garland.

P.S. thanks to Kids Craft Weekly for linking to my little advent idea. I got 500+ hits the other day - craziness! If you haven't checked out her stuff out you should.