Our Christmas Break Week

This has been a nice, mellow week.  The girls have done a little cleaning, played a few games, and made a few projects.  

3 of Katie's projects in one picture.  The pipe cleaner candy canes looked better before Grumman got to them.  Grumman has A Thing for pipe cleaners.  

When Katie showed me her reindeer, my first question was, "Whose hands are those?"  Neither of my girls has 10 fingers.  Katie used Hannah's hand, and Hannah suggested she fold the paper to make 2 hands in one cutting.  I was pretty impressed with Hannah's reasoning skills here.  

I've been feeling very grateful for our library peeps this year.  I dropped off a card and some Christmas print masks in one of our bags of returns, to let them know they're appreciated.  I thought it might also brighten their day to have some artwork adorning the incoming book bags.

Hannah and I collaborated on this one.  Now I need more ideas for what to have them put on the next bags.  

Hannah said this started out as a monkey (hence the banana) but looks more like a cat.  

Grumman looked like he was posing in front of the tree, so I snapped this.  

Speaking of trees...  

A couple of the adult children have sent me pictures of their Christmas trees, which warmed my heart.  

After Christmas, I cancelled holds on several Christmas books that didn't make it to us in time.  I also got to cancel a book I was #124 (out of 149) on the list for, because Paul gave me the book for Christmas.    

The girls each got several books as one of their Christmas gifts, too, so we've got plenty to read.  

I'm really pleased with this.  The girls have drawn several African animals recently, but one at a time.  I asked them to use multiple pages of a "how to draw" book to create a scene with several animals in it.  This is Hannah's finished project.  Katie didn't quite understand what I was going for, and made a cartoon, with talking animals instead of a nature scene.  They're really good at following a guided drawing prompt to make something exactly like an example, so what I wanted with this assignment was to challenge them to take those technical skills and pair them with some of their own creativity.  

One of Katie's projects that required some assistance from Daddy.  

Another guided drawing from Art Projects For Kids.  I've already got a couple of these printed off for when we get to India in a couple weeks.  

Processing the second bag of Book First book packets.  

I ran the completed book packs up to Sac this week.  These will go into the hands of low income first graders in January.  

Hannah's African mask.

I made 3 book pickups this week, and the library was closed an extra 2 days for Christmas.  I may have a problem.  All things considered, I feel like it's an okay problem to have.  

Snow globe drawings, using a plate to get a nice, round circle.  Christmas trees are really hard to get symmetrical, so this was challenging.  

Hannah found a bookmark project in a craft book, and I remembered that we have bookmark blanks in a variety of colors, so I pulled those out, and lots of Christmas stickers, and the girls made bookmarks.  I think this was Christmas Eve, or the day before, and I said, "You can make them for yourself, or to give as gifts; you can do one, or as many as you want."  They each made one.  Katie chose to give hers to someone else.  Without them being in school, there's no one to say, "Hey, make your mother something for Christmas."  This year was kind of rough, with none of the adult children home (and my love language being gifts).  

The annual faux gingerbread houses.  Josiah has a strategy.  His houses never fall down.  

We're trying to grow Katie's hair out.  Not sure where her barrette went.  

Hannah's annoyed because one of the walls kept falling over.

Speaking of pandemic hair.  I think I need to buzz this boy.  I should have had him turn the plate a little.  The front row there is actually Teddy Grahams with Pocky rifles.  Jack built an armory.  

This is my "van full of children driving past Christmas light displays."  The marshmallow snowmen were Josiah's idea.  Instead of the full on nativity this year, I just did a stable with a lion and a lamb.  

White board art work from Josiah.  💙 

My "everybody" shrunk considerably this year, in the Christmas Eve "Everybody sit on the couch for Christmas pajamas!"  Pretty sure Jack went from Star Wars jammies to Christmas jammies.  

Christmas morning.  

Background is my new ironing board cover.  I've ironed over 700 masks this year, and Grumman loves to perch on the ironing board, so between the scorch marks and his scratching, there was a worn through patch in the cover I got for Christmas last year.  

The pens were also a gift.  You may remember when we got Crayola "people colors" markers and tried to find our skin colors.  We didn't really match any of them.  So I had these on my wish list.  The 2 outer columns of colors are Crayola.  The center column, with the numbers, is the new markers.  We were comparing our arms to the new colors and decided I'm somewhere between the 800 and the paper.  Might be time for an iron supplement.  

Looking forward to getting back to our school routine tomorrow.  I hope you had a Merry Christmas.