Joy to the World...

...the Lord has come!!

We're really enjoying getting ready for Christmas at the Rowe house!! Though we JUST finished decorating (I know, ridiculous!) and are still a little behind on our shopping, we're really hoping for this year to be the most our hearts will be ready to celebrate our Savior's birth!!

We've been busy playing with our Nativity and baby Jesus! This is one of my favorite things we get to do each year...Scott reads the Christmas story from the girls' Bible and we get out our Nativities! And it's really the only thing the girls want to play with all day. Emerson loves to tell the story for Hayden and Hayden loves to push the button that plays Away in a Manger. Of course, I'm not sure they should be fighting over who gets to hold Baby Jesus so much, but it could be worse ;).

And a few nights ago, Em asked her daddy to fix Him just like this so that she could watch him from bed. Silly girl. I love that when we talk about Christmas, she knows that this story truly is the reason we celebrate.

At our MOPS meeting last month, the craft girls helped us prepare these fun little Countdown to Christmas calendars/activities. We've had fun finding a special little craft or activity to do each day...thanks to those sweet girls for putting this together!!

Last Saturday night, we headed over to the Old Towne Christmas at Murphy Road Baptist. They had a live nativity to walk through, cookies/hot chocolate and a storyteller for the kiddos. It was definitely chilly, but so worth it!! Em was SO excited to see the angels, the shepherds, the wise men and her favorite...baby Jesus!! She kept asking if she could go touch him ;). And Hayden kept saying "moo" to the poor donkey...easy to confuse, I say ;). It was very fun and we will definitely do it again next year.

But my favorite thing we've been doing this year is our Advent Jesse Tree. I had seen the idea here last year and loved the idea of counting down the days until Christmas with Scripture and the anticipation of Jesus' birthday! We are using a combination of this and this as our guide and it's been really fun to do this as a family. Each night after dinner (or sometimes in the morning if we had a late night), Scott reads the Scripture reference and we talk about the symbol and it's significance before we hang it on the tree. Obviously, Hayden is a little young to understand right now (she just enjoys getting to sit in daddy's lap) , but Emerson is LOVING our preparation for Jesus' Birthday. And she really is remembering what we've learned just by looking at/playing with the symbols on the tree. It's certainly not a very fancy tree and I didn't get started on the symbols quite early enough for them to all be nice, but I do know that the Lord is blessing our family as we go through this together. Take a look here at some of what we've done so far.