Advent

Advent is always a special time of anticipation and excitement.  I love Christmastime so much and it's easy for me to get caught up in all of the fun traditions of looking at lights and watching movies and baking cookies and giving (and getting) gifts.  So I like to have some sort of Advent devotional to walk through.  I've done various ones over the years and the last few years I've done Ann Voskamp's The Greatest Gift that walks through the Jesse Tree.

This year, David and I looked through several reading plans on the Youversion App and found one that we are both doing.  I also randomly signed up for the Gentle Leading Advent Devotional last week.  They are delivered to my email inbox every morning and I am loving them.  They include a scripture reading, a short devotional (most--if not all-- are by moms as this is a devotional for moms) and then a few questions for reflection.  It's been a good way to start my days so far this month.

I thought about different options for advent for Cooper and I have lots of ideas saved for when he's a little bit older, so I wasn't planning on doing anything this year.  Then on Wednesday of last week I started thinking that it could be fun to do a different Christ-related Christmas song every day in December.  We sing to him at naptime and bedtime and throughout the day and he loves music.  So every night last week, I had been asking David what a Christmas song was we would could sing.  And suddenly I thought, we could have an actual list and work our way through several of them this month.  So Wednesday night, David and I made a list of songs to use and ordered them 1-25.

 Since it started on Friday, I spent all of the short naptimes on Thursday putting it together.  We could have done just a list and that would have been totally fine!  But I found this free printable advent calendar for the numbers and I figured we could put the song names on the back.  I ended up googling and finding a few verses for each song to put on the card since we sometimes find ourselves coming up short on all the words.  I glued the numbers and the lyrics to some cardstock (that was already cut into a perfect 4x6 size!) and hung up a ribbon I had for us to tape them to as we go through them.

So every morning I pick out the day's card and look at the song.  Usually I'll find a version or two of the song to play on Amazon music while Cooper plays in the morning.  Most mornings, we look at books between his breakfast/snack and his morning nap--so I've been using that time to sing the song to him and usually I will talk to him a little bit about the song and what it means.  He obviously doesn't understand most of what I'm saying, but I'm trying to get in the habit of talking to him about God, the Bible, and the Gospel now so that it will continue as he gets older.  In case you're wondering, this is his favorite thing to do while we sing:

I also sometimes get the figures from our Little People nativity if they correlate to the song and hold them up or let him hold and chew on them while we play.

Then we sing the song throughout the day at naps and bedtime.  At the end of the day we hang up the card in the living room:

It's just been a simple way to share Truth with him this Christmas and for me to be reminded of all of the truths that are in these Christmas hymns.  And it gives us something to do during playtime!  I'm loving this part of Cooper's first Christmas celebration--and I think he is too!