• christmas books for kids
    Book Reviews,  Holidays,  Homeschool,  Lifestyle,  Winter Fun

    Our Favorite Christmas Books

    In case you didn’t know, we love to read. Claire has always loved being read to, even as a baby. I remember her as a 14 month old, sitting and looking at books by herself for 30 minutes at a time. Clearly, I passed on my bookworm tendencies. Last week, I shared about some of our Christmas traditions and ways we are making Christmas special this year (you can read more about that here). One of the things I mentioned was that we were reading Christmas books every day. Some of them were ones we’ve read before, but a lot of them were new to us this year. I thought I…

  • Christmas traditions
    Holidays,  Life Updates,  Lifestyle,  Winter Fun

    Ways Our Family Makes Christmastime Special

    Ah, Christmastime. If you’re a parent, you’re probably always looking for ways to make this season even more magical and special. In the past, our family has always done advent calendars. We began this tradition when Claire was two years old. I made an advent calendar to hang on the wall and each day had a Christmas activity and a Scripture to read. Fast forward a few years to 2017. I hung up the advent calendar, but we rarely opened the envelopes. Last Christmas was a very stressful season for our family, so that was probably part of the issue, but I also think it was difficult to maintain a…