Christmas Home Tour - family room

Our family room is downstairs in our home.  When we bought the house it looked like this:

All of the furniture, etc. is from the previous owners.  The furniture went but the paneling remained!  

Then we did this:

And by we I actually mean our neighbor who is a contractor while we were out of town for Thanksgiving that year!  Wild!!  

Then there was a lot of this:  

And this!  

The countertops finally came in stock at Ikea and the door was removed and now here are our little Christmas touches this year.  

December calendar for homeschool - circles from Dollar Tree that I wrote numbers on and several extra came in the package which made me feel good in case there were mess ups!  Then I just stuck them up with washi tape.  Underneath some were post it notes with special things happening that day.  Inspiration from this book.

The glittered popsicle stick snowflakes are a craft that the kids dreamed up and executed with my help.  We did that on December 1st which felt really fun.  Cora wanted hers hung with a PINK ribbon.  :) 

Some of our engagement pictures, the felt tree I made when David was little that the kids enjoy decorating, a cross bought in a shop in Fredericksburg, TX with my mom when I was single and we took girls' trips a lot and the Rudolph I made in 4th grade.  So glad my mom kept that.  It makes me smile.

a little snowy scene with a red truck and a red snowflake cap to a bottle that broke :( some sparkly fake snow and bottle brush trees of course  (Thanks for helping me with that collection, Erin!) 

And finally a little merriment on the guitar

Merry Christmas Eve tomorrow!  

Kelly

Christmas-y things

Well, I thought I was sitting down to write another Christmas home tour post and I thought those were the pictures I was uploading BUT these are the photos that uploaded instead so rather than trying to fight it at the end of the day I am just going to go with it. 

Our church hosted a brunch for the women the first Saturday of December and my mom and I went together and then got to enjoy the first December snow on our way to a thrift store afterwards where we both scored some fun finds.  

The following Monday our family went up into the mountains into Pike National Forest to cut down our own Christmas tree!  It was a perfect day for it!  Not too cold!  We had a lot of fun.  This is David posing by the huge crosscut outside of the office in downtown Colorado Springs where you go to purchase a permit for cutting your tree.  

After cutting down the tree we went to The North Pole!  

We had SUCH a good time riding rides.  The kids thought it was pretty much the greatest thing they'd ever done!  

Hope you've been having some fun outings this season and may you all have a very merry and blessed Christmas this week!  

Kelly

Christmas Home Tour - welcome in

The Nester is having her annual Christmas Tour of Homes today.  I have joined in several times in the past and when I was single and had lots of time free for reading blogs I remember looking forward to this day and looking at home after home!  

I don't have as much time these days between parenting and teaching my kids but I wanted to join in the fun.  I am going to post a room at a time and hope that I get more than just this one post in today but we will see.  

We had a lovely snowfall last night!  David, my 5 1/2 year old took this picture of me in front of our home.  I am participating in Dressember all this month to raise awareness and funds for International Justice Mission and A21 who are on the front lines working to educate those most vulnerable to becoming victims of human trafficking so that it can be prevented as well as seeking, finding, rescuing and providing aftercare for those who have been trafficked.  If you are interested in supporting me as I wear a dress every day of December in order to raise funds for these wonderful organizations, please email me at sundrenchedmoments @ gmail . com (link in sidebar as well)

The JOY sign is a new decoration that I made this year.  I dug a piece of wood out of the garage that was formerly a shelf in our linen closet before I revamped that space to make it more useable.  I have had the wreath for many years and had acrylic paint on hand as well as glitter!  

inspiration here and here

Once you step inside you are greeted with the merry jangle of bells!  This is one of David's contributions to our Christmas decorations.  He has appointed our house as a Christmas Museum and this alerts him when we have a customer.  :)  

I hope you are having a very merry Christmas season and a warm and cozy day today!  

Kelly

Happy Thanksgiving

school this week

We are all really enjoying this new journey of homeschooling that we are on.  I thought I would give you just a quick glimpse of our week in pictures.  

David created his own motorcycle - dreamed up the project and figured out how to execute it.  This boy is always building and creating!

Celebrated our first snow with snowflake tortillas for breakfast - just cut, butter and sprinkle cinnamon sugar - these are the uncooked ones from costco so then we just cooked it up on the skillet.

And a snowball fight before it all melted away!

Another project of the week was building a playground in the living room.  

We did a Five in a Row unit study on the book Cranberry Thanksgiving.  We examined cranberries under our magnifying glass and made observations about them.  I let David dictate and I recorded all of our observations for our nature journal.  I think I have decided that instead of a chronological journal I want to get alphabet divider tabs and insert sheets into a binder alphabetically.  

Examining the holes that hold the seeds. 

We counted the seeds in three separate cranberries.  I thought the numbers of seeds would be more uniform but our three counts yielded 18, 19 and 22.

Baking pumpkin cranberry pecan chocolate chip bread.

Today we did homeschool with friends!  We had such a fun day doing Cranberry Thanksgiving all together.  In the book one of the main characters "judges a book by it's cover" in regards to judging character.  We learned the saying "Don't judge a book by it's cover" and had a little object lesson to reinforce the concept.  (idea here)

Each child got to choose if they wanted a colorful gift bag or a crumpled plastic shopping bag.  The colorful bags contained rotten banana peels and the shopping bags contained leftover Halloween candy!  

They also got the immense privilege of eating lunch WHILE watching a video!  Dirty Jobs Cranberry Bog edition!  

We had a cranberry relay where they tried different physical skills (tiptoes, hopping, etc.) while trying to transfer cranberries on a spoon to fill their cups!

There was some impromptu "ice skating".  

And here my photos have gotten a bit out of order.

Breakfast Bible reading

Brother/sister free play

Sorting Halloween candy

Nature walks

And back to the photos from our friends' house . . . we made a "cranberry bog" sensory bin that they LOVED.

Craisin, whole raw cranberry and stewed cranberry snack that we ate while describing the different ones on a thinking map. 

The boys figured out how to turn the syringes in the sensory bin into cranberry launchers using the pressure of the water to propel the cranberries!  

Also, homemade cranberry playdoh in the background!  

coloring the New England states on the map since that's where cranberries are grown and the story took place

listening to the story

It has been a great week!  

Kelly