Elf on the Shelf

This year we decided to start the Elf on the Shelf tradition with Ava Kate. She is still a little young to get the whole idea that her elf goes back to Santa each night to report on her behavior but she loves looking for her elf, who we named Buddy, after my favorite Elf played by Will Ferrell. So our day 3 advent activity was reading the Elf On the Shelf book together. And yes I realize we are a little ahead of schedule on our advent activities but we will be traveling to be with family later in the month so this will give us the chance to take a couple of those days off from our activities. This year I also decided we would read a short passage of the Christmas story out of Luke each day of our advent. This makes the passages shorter for a little one who doesn’t have a very long attention span especially when reading out of a book without pictures and it also helps bring our focus back to the real reason we celebrate the advent season each day. As Justin was reading the passage from his Bible, Ava said “No, not that book”, what a hoot she is these days! Thankfully she does like her picture book Bible. I also bought a little advent nativity calendar and so she got to open the first window last night. She loves popup books and just couldn’t understand why we didn’t get to open all the windows on the advent calendar last night.