[homemade wall advent calendar]

When I saw the trees in this photo, an idea came to me to make a large wall advent calendar. This is the beginning of it. The trees are cut from poster board. The largest one is about 27" (70cm) tall. I found a picture of an empty manger online and printed it out. I'm not too happy about the "hill" the manger is on, I might still change it. But the idea is that each day I'll add more to the calendar and on Christmas morning, Sienna will find baby Jesus lying in the manger and the star of Bethlehem in the sky above Him.

The theme for this calendar is "forest Christmas" but who knows what it will end up looking like by Christmas. So far I've printed these to add to it:

I found the perfect baby photo to be Jesus, didn't I? And yes, I'm totally using photos I'm finding online. I'm sure the owners of the photos won't mind since this is for a good cause: to make one little girl super excited and happy about Christmas. :)

Sienna loves animals so I thought it would be fun to add all sorts of animals in the forest. Not just forest animals. Little treats and surprises will be found in the forest too.

Another idea is to have your child(ren) draw the animals (or Nativity characters if you want a more traditional Nativity scene) instead of printing them out.

I'll come and show you how the calendar is progressing throughout December.

Fun! :)

[the joy of babies]

My sister had a baby boy recently so I’ve had babies in my mind. Here are some of my favorite baby things from my BABY Pinterest board. Please click the link to see the source for each photo.

Thank goodness for the Internet, by the way. I was able to “almost be there” for the birth as we kept in touch via Facebook during it. It made it less of a blow to be so far away from my family when such an exciting event was occurring.

Love my new nephew already, even though we haven't met in person yet. ♥

my BABY Pinterest board

[Christmas is coming...]

I know, I know... I've been neglecting my blog big time. I think one of the reasons is the blue tint photo problem (see earlier blog post). But I just had to come and share this photo today. 

It's so cold and snowy right now where we live. So I'm loving all the hot pink in this photo. Could do this in a smaller scale unless you're super rich and can afford this many large gifts for an advent calendar. 

Now to just find the energy to do something like this... I tell you, there's something to nature slowing down during winter. I find it takes so much more energy to do everything in the winter. Hibernating sounds pretty good to me right now. J 

 I was looking through some old photos yesterday and cherished remembering spending Christmas in California in 2009. I so could handle Christmases without snow. Palm trees with sparkly lights is it for me! Please feel free to send me some plane tickets to somewhere warm. You know you want to... J

Until next time: stay warm people. Stay warm. 

♥   T ♥

(photo source)