Meet The Troops

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Advent Season!

It's finally that time of year! We LOVE the Advent season in our house and after all the fun we had last year with out Advent Activity Calendar I knew we had to do something like it again this year. But I didn't want to do all of the same things we did last Advent season, so I set out to try and find some new ideas and plan a calendar full of family fun.

Something new I found this year is Truth in the Tinsel. It's an Advent calendar all planned for you! Complete with bible verses, activities and lots of ideas. It's wonderful! So this year for our family advent activities I decided to use some of the Truth in the Tinsel along with some of my own ideas and I think it's going to be really fun!


I know this is getting posted late, but if you haven't planned to do anything for Advent with your kids yet, you should check it out, it's very complete with lots of ideas for things to talk about and do so you can pick and choose which ones would work for your family and do as few or as many as you'd like. Advent Activities shouldn't be a burden or a stress, they are suppose to be fun so don't put pressure on yourself to do it everyday if that's too much for your schedule, but even once a week leading up to Christmas helps make the season even more special as a family so I highly recommend it and encourage you to try a few things with your little ones to help celebrate the season!  :)

Monday, November 28, 2011

Popcorn Sensory!

We've had a bean bucket for years that the kids love to dig and play in, and we've done rice buckets for play and many other things, but this week we tried a new one...POPCORN!


I filled two bowls full for each of the little ones to play with during school time, but even the big kids were asking to play with them after they were all done with their work! 


There is something strangely therapeutic about running your hands through popcorn kernels (seriously, you should try it)...Mommy enjoyed playing in it too!  :)



Yes, it makes a mess, but we just sweep it up when we're all done...and like most fun things...The mess is usually worth it.  :)

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Craft Fair....and Another Missing Tooth!

Joy came and helped me all day at my table at the craft fair here on post today and it was tons of fun getting to spend the whole day with just my oldest princess! The night before Thanksgiving she lost the first of her top teeth and then today, only a few days later, her 2nd top tooth fell out! So now she has a REALLY big gap, and it's all on one side! LOL!

Friday, November 25, 2011

Decorating for Christmas!

After a full day of fun on Thanksgiving, the next day we pulled out our baby 'Korea Christmas tree' (since our big one and all of our decorations are in storage back in the States) and set to decorating it all up. Since we didn't bring any of our decorations with us to Korea, last year we made everything on our tree and around the house...you can read those old posts here if you'd like. The kids had fun pulling out our little box of handmade ornaments and remembering some of the fun projects we did. 



Joshua was excited to find our KMart ornament from Papa's work and a few other store bought ornaments we got as gifts last year. 


Samuel was big enough to help decorate the tree this year and he's rearranged our ornaments everyday since! :) 


We decided that we needed to add a few more ornaments though so the kids got to work making a few new creations to decorate the tree. These ones are lids with buttons glued on....


Faithy said hers was a 'cookie' ornament so Daddy tried to eat it....   :)


We've got plans to make several new ones over the next month so I'll post more pictures as we create them! But here's our tree so far, it's the tiniest little thing and certainly won't be voted 'most beautiful' -  but it's been made up with loving hands and it's helping make our 3 Christmases in Korea feel more like 'home'.  :)


We pulled out a couple of our other favorite decorations we made last year and saved. Our sparkly snowflakes...you can read about when we made them last year here.


And our reindeer family we made with our hands and feet had to be put back up too! The kids especially liked seeing these again and seeing how much their feet and hands have grown in the last year. The post for this one from last year is here


We had so much fun with it last Christmas, we'll definitely be doing an Advent Activity Calendar again this year with very few repeats in activities from last year! I'm getting excited about it as I plan it all out! :)

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving from the Adams Family!


Miss Joy and her missing tooth that fell out last night! :)


Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Flowers in Korea!

A few days ago we went to a little flower market for a field trip with some other homeschool friends...It was probably the BEST smelling place in Korea that I've been to so far. The market was on the 3rd floor and as soon as we walked into the elevator we could smell the sweet flowers. :) It was amazing after just coming in from outside where all you smell is kimchi and fertilizer most of the time! LOL!

Right away the kids had their noses in the flowers!




Me and the crew... I am so blessed. :) We came home with a ton of flowers that we got for amazingly cheap prices to decorated our Thanksgiving table. 



Joy and her sweet friend Kayden...


On the way home we saw 'Batman's Lair!' LOL! Who knew he had a place in Korea?! :)

Pinnacle Park

Earlier this week we took the kids to Pinnacle Park in hopes of getting a family picture to use in our Christmas cards this year...a place we'd never been, but had seen beautiful pictures of from some of our friends. Well, the day we decided to go was the day our temperature here in South Korea dropped drastically! The day before we were playing outside in warm sunshine without any coats and then we woke up and went out....not realizing that this happened and we were FREEZING! Thankfully, we had grabbed our coats,  but boy was it cold...beautiful and sunny...but COLD!


We walked up this 'ZigZag Way' which was a much easier walk than it looked from this angle...


There were some fun things to see along the way....




Faithy especially liked the little garden house...


It was gorgeous, but we were all too cold to enjoy it very much.  :( We pretty much ran up the hill, just to try and stay warm!


The wind was blowing and just cutting right through us, but we kept on....


About halfway up there is this 'water garden' that is actually on top of the building that held the restrooms.....we see some strange things here in S.Korea!


It was surrounded by this little wind chime fence and they actually sounded very pretty this day because the wind was blowing so much!




We hiked some more stairs....(I'm sure all the grandparents are laughing by now thinking of how we are torturing our kids with this 'Family Walk' through the park in the freezing cold! LOL!)


We went all the way to the top to see the waterfall....that was so pretty....but again, WAY TOO cold out to enjoy! So we are definitely going to go back and try this again in the spring or summer, because I'm sure it's much more enjoyable when your teeth aren't chattering!


We never did get that family picture for the Christmas cards, the wind was even worse at the top of the hill and we were all getting blown over! But Daddy did manage to make the kids stand for one picture before they all started saying "I thought this was supposed to be fun?!"  :) LOL! Poor kids, the things we make them do sometimes....they were actually pretty good sports about it and we all ran down the hill, jumped in the warm van and went home for some hot chocolate afterwards!

Monday, November 21, 2011

Thanksgiving Printable

Here is a Thanksgiving printable we are using this year to record some special thanks from 2011. I'm going to pack them away with the fall decor. I think it will be fun to pull them out next year and see what each of the kids was thankful for the year before. Feel free to use it if you'd like, you can find it over at The Printable Share or click on the picture link below to download. Enjoy!

Saturday, November 19, 2011

"They're" Home!

He came home this week!



Our whole house is thrilled to have Daddy home! Of course that's the most exciting part...but it sure is nice to have my camera home too! :)