Advent

In our effort to make Christmas more meaningful in our home, we started celebrating Advent this year. To be honest, I didn't know much about Advent until a few years ago. I knew it had to do with something about a wreath with some candles or a cute calendar or something like that. Turns out it's not really, those are just things people use to celebrate. Advent as we are celebrating it is just a time of waiting or preparing our hearts for the Lord. For the entire month leading up to Christmas we are celebrating Advent during our normal bedtime story/prayer time. We looked into a few sources for an Advent study and finally decided on this one (theologically sound, but pretty traditional and feels kind of official). It provides a little snippet of Biblical background, scriptures, a child's prayer and adult's prayer, and song for each night. The problem is we have a one year old. So we are modifying it greatly. We are trying to make it more kid friendly (like using a touchable nativity) and by the end of the season we will probably just have our own family study (and will hopefully post next year). The study we are using as a guide only has 4 studies a week though, so we just read from our Toddler's Bible and sing our own songs on other nights. We also don't know all the songs the study provides but we just sing something we do know instead. Seth is so cute trying to sing. I think that is his favorite part. We didn't really dig the whole wreath and different colored candles thing so we just use one flameless candle that we picked up at the Dollar Store. We thought that might help Seth differentiate that this time is special. We hope that it represents a sweet time with family that focuses on the gospel and God's greatest gift during the month of December.