A while back I remember reading a website that suggested using the 25th of each month as a day to set aside to prepare for Christmas.  This can mean whatever people want it to.  For the crafty, it may mean working at making homemade gifts, ornaments and decorations.

I sort of put the idea on a back shelf in my mind, but mentioned it recently to my kids, who (of course!) loved the idea.  For one thing, it means a day off from the books (always a good idea to them), and for another, I give a homemade gift to every single person on our church staff, as well as elders and close friends.  With a staff team that's pushing 40 people, this is a huge undertaking.  And for another thing, the kids have been making homemade gift tags, bags, and small gift items to sell to raise money for their own Christmas shopping, and for missions.  We've done this for the past 2 or 3 years.  But we've always put the books aside in December and worked madly on these projects every day through the month in a mad race to make the deadline.

So, tomorrow we're having our first Christmas preparation day.  We'll be making homemade and decorated gift tags and gift bags as these are our top seller, and we can never seem to make enough of them.

Maybe I'll put on some Christmas music, blast the air-con, and make some hot chocolate to get us into the Christmas spirit, but my biggest goal is to make this December just as memorable, but a little less hectic.  How do you deal with organizing for the holidays?

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We finally did it!  We finished our snake craft project.  Here are my three blessings with their finished products.  (We didn't paint them to look realistic.  It was too much fun choosing favorite colors.)  They wriggle and rattle and everything!  Hooray!  By the way, you can find instructions for this project, and lots of others at www.hitentertainment.com/artattack.  This project was called Wriggler Rattler Snakes, so you can find it listed alphabetically under W.  Try it!

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I know that many homeschoolers are gearing up and heading back to school after the summer holidays, but here in Singapore, the school year starts in January, so we are slogging away just a little past the mid-way point of our school year.  This is the time when many can get tired, bored, overwhelmed, etc.

Today, I just sensed that we needed to do something different and keep ourselves out of the doldrums.  There are certainly days for exceptional things like field trips or game days, but there are also just days upon days where we go through the routine of covering our core subjects.

So, we got started on an art project.  This one was very much student-led.  A couple of weeks ago, my kids saw a cool craft project on Disney's Art Attack.  It was a Wriggling Rattle Snake, made from toilet paper tubes.  Well, the kids thought it was so cool, we've been saving toilet paper tubes ever since so we would have enough to make a snake for each of the three of them.  (you need 6 tubes per snake!)  We finally had enough tubes to make snakes for all three kids, so away we went.

Roboboy was a little discouraged when he found just cutting the tubes in half a bit too difficult for him.  So, I jumped in and got all the tubes cut in half, and he was able to take it from there.  It was so nice to just sit there and cut and talk and paint together.  Somehow, just sitting there with your hands occupied, but nothing too demanding on the brain seems to open the kids up to talk about life, about school, about whatever pops into their heads.  It's so important not to miss these times!

This particular Art Attack was a 4-parter, so we cut the tubes and painted them on the inside today.  Part 2, we will connect the tubes together, and part 3 will make the head and tail of the rattle snake.  Finally, part 4 is when we paint and decorate our snakes to look like whatever type of snake we want them to look like.

I realized that it's very easy for me to get into a rut and keep the kids on their more academic subjects like Math, English and Chinese.  But I know it's important to keep things balanced and include art, music, and other "fun" stuff that really is so important to give them a well-rounded education.  They need it!  So, I'm resolving to try to include these things at least once a week in our schedule.

It was a good day!  It was an important reminder for me about, well, about what's important!

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