Advent: Day 13

Lego Calendar:

Bible Verses:  John 1:10-18

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”)  Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.  For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.


Activity: Make gifts for teachers {sunday school, piano, dance}/coaches {gymnastics}.


Growing up my mom always made our teachers a tea ring for Christmas.  They loved the thoughtfulness of a homemade gift and enjoyed a yummy treat.


At the end of the Christmas season last year, I decided I wanted to do homemade gifts for my kids' teachers/coaches.  I knew it would take some planning and research on my part.  As the year went along as I would find ideas in magazines I would tear out the picture and place it in a file or if I found something on the internet I would bookmark the page.  When planning time came around I had a good selection of ideas for gifts.


As I sat down with the kids to decide what they wanted to give their teachers/coaches, they came up with a pretty good list of things they wanted to try to make this year.  


Today we made a few different things.  They worked really hard and loved it.  I heard Morgan say "i might have to change my favorite day of advent to today."  


The first thing we made was homemade hot chocolate.  This was really easy... easy enough that my older two could have done it on their own.  We doubled the recipe and were able to make 6 - 8 oz jars and then one 12 oz jar.

 We also tried our hand at making candy cane bath salts.  Again this was very easy to put together. It was harder finding some of the supplies than making that bath salts.  This recipe makes quite a lot of the salts.  We made 16 - 8 oz jars, 2 - 12 oz jars, and we had some left in a baggie.

 Morgan made peppermint syrup and hot fudge.  Both the recipes were really straight forward so she was easily able to make both things on her own.

 We are giving the hot chocolate mix and peppermint syrup together as a gift.  We wanted to include a little something else with the gift.  Morgan and Landon picked out mugs and today we spray painted chalkboard paint onto the mugs.  They loved being able to paint and were so excited for this project.  The mugs turned out cute. If you can find chalkboard paint not in a spray bottle I think it would work out better.  We did have some issues with the paint running but nail polish remover took the spray paint off without ruining the color of the mug.

 Our last project of the day was making some magnets. I picked up the paper magnets as a kit from Oriental Trading company.  The kids just needed to modge podge the saying/picture onto the marble.  I made a few magnets with fabric today.  When I was at the craft store over the weekend collecting supplies they had large bags of the marbles on sale for $2.  I picked up a bag and made some magnets using fabric scraps.