Advent activities - Week Two

Froglet's wrapping paper made at school...

"Mummy, it has to go on the wall, Miss said so!"

Scones, strawberry and rhubarb jam...
with our advent "wreath" behind them...

We give thanks to Ikea for the flat-packed gingerbread house...
and to God for the fun we had decorating it...

A reindeer with handprint antlers to adorn the front door...
although he seems to prefer the floor...

Toilet roll snowflakes, painted pearl and white, strung together for a garland...
much prettier than our blinds outside...

Waldorf-style shepherds...
with misshapen sheep...

And we still have time to hide in boxes too!

Advent activities - Week One

Advent calendar finished and hung up...

Tree decorated with unbreakable baubles, to the great delight of one small girl...

Some Christmas cards made...

New Jesse tree acquired (last year's died) and Holy Family settled beneath it...

Great concentration is required for making jingle bell necklaces...


Pipe-cleaner, beads and bells for a lovely jingle bell bracelet/tree ornament!

I know I've finished my advent list for this year (and yes we are doing all those activities so far - and some extra too! and photos will follow eventually) but here's one to save for next year:

Winter Crafts and Activities for Little Ones from Rhythm of the Home

(I like the one partway down about making felted balls with a bell inside, which I would pair with re-teaching my youngest "Jingle Bells", but there are other things to do with small children too.)

Rhythm of the home is the newest blog on my list and I love it! So many amazing ideas for crafts or food... two of my favourite things. :-)

Stocking fillers

Here's what's going in our little ones' stockings this year:

A home-made Waldorf baby doll and carrier sling each, if I get them finished in time...
A balloon each
A banana, satsuma, piece of pear-and-rye bread each
Chocolate coins - one bag between the four of us
A piece of Haba pretend food each, probably a muffin or berry of some sort
A matchbox car each - Nutmeg likes cars just as much as Froglet does!
A bracelet for Nutmeg, which Froglet will help me choose.
An umbrella for Froglet, for walking to kindergarten with
A mini-archaeology kit (semi-precious stones to dig out of a block of plaster)
A spoon with a coloured handle each. We're always short of spoons.
A blank mini-sketchbook of some sort each, so we can start having family drawing time as suggested in this post from The Green Parent.

This year our stockings are also our main presents, because we know we'll get lots of things from the grandparents.

Advent activities list

Did you know Orthodox Advent has already started? For the Eastern churches (including Byzantine Catholics and perhaps others I don't know of), Advent is a time of fasting similar to Lent. A bit different to what we're used to here, and Priest's Wife over at Fear Not Little Flock has a rather lovely post about how she intends to celebrate it, following the Proverbs 31 model. Check it out! :-)

Here in the more Western tradition, I have finally organised my advent activities list. Not quite the same as last year's, and I think it's a slightly different set of Bible verses each day too, as there seem to be different variants of the Jesse Tree. (You can see the set we used last year here) The verses are not related to the activities in the slightest this year however!

Update: I've linked each week to the post showing (some of) those activities now that we've done them. This post is also linked to ABC&123's Show&Tell series - for lots of other great Advent/Christmas/general activities, check out their site!

First week of Advent
Sunday 28/11: Put up Christmas tree (no reading)
29/11: Make Christmas cards (no reading)
30/11: Get out Jesse tree, Christmas bookshelf and red postbox*; read a Christmas story (no reading)
1/12: Make Xmas cake (Creation: Gen 1:1-31; 2:1-4)
2/12: Learn Jingle bells (Adam and Eve: Gen 2: 7-9, 18-24)
3/12: Make jingle bell bracelets (Adam and Eve cont.: Gen 3:1-7, 23-34)
Saturday 4/12: Make stable and Waldorf-style Holy family (Noah: bits of Gen 6 and 7)

Second week of Advent
Sunday 5/12: Bake scones, have cream tea (Abraham: Gen 12:1-3)
6/12: New Christmas book about St Nicholas (Isaac: Gen 22:1-14)
7/12: Candlelight dinner (Jacob: Gen 25:1-34, 28:10-15)
8/12: Public holiday - Make gingerbread house (Joseph: Gen 37:23-28, 45:3-15)
9/12: Learn Away in a manger; Reindeer paper plate craft (Moses: Ex 2:1-10)
10/12: Make toilet roll snowflakes (Samuel; 1 Sam 3:1-18)
Saturday 11/12: Make Waldorf shepherds, sheep and angel (Jesse: 1 Sam 16:1-13)

Third week of Advent
Sunday 12/12: Make felted star, eat gingerbread house (David: 1 Sam 17:12-51)
13/12: Buy gift from World Vision (Solomon: 1 Kings 3:5-14, 16-28)
14/12: Learn the Holly and the Ivy (Joseph: Matt 1:18-25)
15/12: Paint a Christmas tree or possibly some holly (Mary: Luke 1:26-38)
16/12: Open red postbox, hang up cards; make ironing-bead ornaments (John the Baptist: Mark 1:1-8)
17/12: Take Christmas card to school, eat mince pies (Jesus is Wisdom: Ecclesiasticus 24:2, Wisdom 8:1)
Saturday 18/12: Make Waldorf wise men, centurion, star, camels (Jesus is Lord: Ex 3:2, 20:1)

Fourth week of Advent
Sunday 19/12: Toast crumpets, play Christmas tree game (Jesus is Key of David: Isaiah 22:22)
20/12 Make felt crowns, hang stockings** (Jesus is King of the Gentiles: Psalm 2:7-8, Eph 2:14-20)
21/12: Play out nativity story with Waldorf figures, celebrate Christmas (Jesus is Emmanuel: Isaiah 7:14, 33:22)

* the Red Postbox, constructed out of an old nappy (diaper) box, red paint and some cotton-wool "snow", is where we keep Christmas cards that arrive so we can open lots and hang them all up on the same day. It's a tradition I carried over from my own childhood. I don't expect to get very many this year because we are absolutely rubbish at sending any out ourselves!
** A few days early, yes, but we will be away visiting relatives over the actual Christmas period so we are having our own celebration at home and with friends first using our own traditions.

Ménières Disease

I know I've been absent some time and not responding to comments - I've not been reading much online due to an onslaught of Ménières Disease (which you can read about on wikipedia here). The short version is it makes me so dizzy I can't blog or read online. So if I missed something important, I'm really sorry!

The long version is, I've been having dizzy/vomiting fits sporadically - like one every six months - for two years, and occasional bouts of mild dizziness lasting several days for about 7 or 8 years prior to that, but really extremely infrequently, like maybe two or three over that whole period. The more recent ones make me completely unable to function for the duration, usually starting one evening with the sort of dizziness that feels like extreme tiredness, and then carrying on the next morning with throwing up, inability to move much, getting better towards the evening and gone by the following day. As they only ever last 24 hours we didn't really think about trying to get a diagnosis until this time, we thought they were isolated incidents rather than an underlying condition.

Separately, I suffered a strong and apparently permanent hearing loss in one ear when Froglet was about 6 months old. At the time the ENT did every test you can think of, including an MRI, and nothing showed up at all. He also kept asking if I suffered from dizziness, and always seemed surprised when I said no - at this point I hadn't had any at all for a couple of years. The tests did show up that my inner ear on the affected side was completely non-functional (which incidentally is a pretty cool test where they pour water in one ear and then watch as it runs out to see if it makes you feel dizzy. It should! and it didn't for me, on that side at least.) So we went to him and tried various things for a whole year and in the end he apologised and said there was nothing more he could do but that he would keep an eye out and if anything new came up he would let us know.

Fast forward 3 years and I get the first bad dizzy spell, right after a long drive and while pregnant. We put it down to the pregnancy, mainly. Fast forward another two years and it's now. I'm on my third dizzy bout this year, so the rate is increasing. Several times it has come on on a weekend so we've seen the on-call doctor rather than our own, and he has injected medication to control the vomiting and nausea, but this time it arrived on Monday two weeks ago and we were able to see my doctor and ask him if this was likely to keep happening/get worse/be treatable... and he discussed it with the ENT and got my original audiograms... and so we now have a diagnosis of Ménières disease, although in fact Ménières is idiopathic which means it's not reeeeally a full diagnosis in itself, more a recognition of the fact that I have this recurring set of symptoms whose cause is as yet undetermined - if the cause is ever determined I will then cease to have Ménières and will have whatever that cause is instead, but in many cases no cause is ever ascertained, because the inner ear, like much that goes on inside our skulls, is still very much a mystery! (My apologies to anyone medical reading this. I know that's a gross over-simplification!)

So I now have an appointment with the ENT next Wednesday to do a new audiogram, which they expect will show a further decline in my hearing on that side, and some other tests as well.

And the last thing to say is that although the properly incapacitating dizziness only lasted 48 hours this time, I have been dizzy in the mild-to-moderate range for the last two weeks and am only just getting over it now, and extended computer time, I have just discovered, makes it worse, so that's all from me for now! :-)

Christmas planning

I know Christmas is still a long way off, but we're not American so no Thanksgiving - the Swiss have been having small harvest celebrations for several weeks now, they seem to stagger them so everyone can go to everyone else's village celebrations - and Switzerland doesn't really do Halloween as such (they save the dressing-up for Carnival time in February) and so Advent and Christmas are the Next Big Thing.

For Froglet's Advent bags this year I've bought some of those little cylindrical plastic beads that you make a picture with and then iron together, and I will do some designs for small baubles to make with them, probably while Nutmeg sleeps after lunch.

I have also got a 10-week preparation list from Planning with Kids, where there is going to be more about it each week so do click through!

• 10 Weeks To Go – Review Christmas budget
• 9 Weeks To Go – Start making the family Christmas cards
• 8 Weeks To Go – Make food packs to donate
• 7 Weeks To Go – Christmas present ideas (ones that are easy to pack)
• 6 Weeks To Go – Help my kids organise a mini fundraiser
• 5 Weeks To Go – Finish Christmas tags and handmade gifts
• 4 Weeks To Go – Handmade Christmas decorations
• 3 Weeks To Go – Cooking Christmas treats
• 2 Weeks To Go – Make arrangements for the house
• 1 Week To Go – Christmas celebration with family before we go

I have to say I am very intrigued to find out what some of them will be (a mini-fundraiser for what?), and intend to use the list as a basis for making my own plans. I'm cutting out the fundraiser as my eldest is currently 5, but it's an interesting thought for future years. And we wouldn't know who to give food packets to so unless we manage to find out before Christmas, that's getting replaced with Christmas parcels to send to Eastern Europe.

Here (for my own benefit more than anyone else's) are the posts I made concerning Advent and preparing for Christmas last year:

http://notreallyhomeschooling.blogspot.com/2009/11/planning-advent.html (this one has links in it to the Jesse Tree stuff)
http://notreallyhomeschooling.blogspot.com/2009/12/advent-week-1.html
http://notreallyhomeschooling.blogspot.com/2009/12/second-week-of-advent.html