Beginning Advent

 Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.  Completely unstaged.  And hilarious. 

I just have a minute, because, as is apparent from the pictures above, we added a little girl to our family for this weekend and it took me almost the whole time I have to just upload these pictures with our slow country internet.  Even as I wrote that last sentence, another girl woke up.  

I am excited to try doing the Jesse tree idea this year along with Ann Voskamp's new book, The Greatest Gift.  I had never heard of this tradition but with its focus on the whole of Scripture pointing and leading to Christ during Advent, it fits perfectly with my favorite way to celebrate. In the same vein,  I am also reading one story a day to the girls through The Jesus Storybook since they will understand that more.  They are really too little to understand (and maybe even sit through) the devotional part of The Greatest Gift but they can participate in the Scripture verse and hanging the ornament.  I do think this is one tradition I would like to intentionally put in place for our family.  It has a lot of meaning (although I do have a fun activity-based Advent calendar I made last year that I am excited to get out.  

This weekend was the time we had marked out to go get a tree and decorate it so we did that yesterday.  With three little sets of hands to help, I mostly passed out ornaments and Jesse helped them hang.  Oh goodness, I was just cracking up after everyone went to bed and I looked at the tree.  It definitely looked like three little girls hung the ornaments:  some branches had three or more ornaments on the ends and every time you brushed by the tree, one or two ornaments fell off.  I redistributed some and they are all safely hanging in a slightly more eye-pleasing fashion.  Sweet memories.  (I also didn't even bother trying to figure out how to take good quality pictures during the tree decorating process... but capturing the moments was way more important to me than artistic quality at the time.)

Off to get Lyddie's favorite breakfast together... pancakes, coming right up!