Another great resource we love is the Holy Heroes website which has an Advent Adventure for families.  It is free to sign  up and each day our family gets an email with the next day's adventure lesson.  My children love to watch the children on the videos and hear the Bible stories and history of Advent.  Holy Heroes also has a Lenten Adventure in preparation for Christ's resurrection at Easter.  We participated in the Lenten Adventure for the first time this past year and we are enjoying our first Advent Adventure so far.   Holy Heroes is a great and fun resource and our family has learned so much together as a family about our Catholic faith with Holy Heroes!

So if you are looking for another great way to enhance your Advent season with your family, check out the Holy Heroes website and enjoy your adventure!

I am thankful for Holy Heroes and for my friend A.R. for reminding me that Holy Heroes is definitely a great website to share with others who visit my blog! 

We will also be decorating our Jesse Tree and reading scripture as our children put on one symbol per night on our "tree" (which is a branch we found in our woods in a pot covered with purple cloth).  Our symbols are made out of paper and our children colored each picture. I then laminated them and punched a hole to tie a string to the paper.  I made copies of these symbols from this page on Domestic-Church.com  . We have enjoyed reading The Jesse Tree by Geraldine McCaughrean in years past and we will continue with this tradition this year.  We read one story each night which relates to the Jesse Tree and its symbols. 

If you are like me, you may have a lots of Christmas books that you have collected through the years.   A few years ago I found a great way to read our religious and secular Christmas books and at the same time have my children anticipate Jesus' birthday.  I wrap up each book with purple wrapping paper.  I usually find the purple paper in our local Dollar Tree store.  Then beginning on Dec. 1st, one child opens one book and we read it as a family.  Then on Dec. 2, our next child opens a book and so on.  My children really love this idea of opening their Advent Christmas book.  I have a small "Advent tree" in our great room decorated with purple balls and under this tree is where we have our wrapped Christmas books.  This small Advent tree goes up at the beginning of Advent and then we buy our real Christmas tree sometime later in December.   
I also number the books and put each child's name on the back of the wrapping paper so I don't have to remember who gets to unwrap the next book!
The season of Advent is such a special time and I am thankful that our family celebrates the true meaning of Christmas by doing several fun and meaningful Advent activities to prepare for the day when we can sing "Happy Birthday to Jesus!"

Then we made "I am thankful for..." turkeys where they wrote one thing they were thankful for on each feather.  I was so happy to see that my oldest daughter wrote that she was thankful for her "faith", which is written on the red feather on the lower right side.  I hope this will always be something she is thankful for!  I had the turkey head, body, feet, and feathers already assembled since this was a craft that I had extra copies of  from a last year's homeschool gathering.  The children had fun writing what they were thankful for and taping the feathers on and the googly eyes. 


I am thankful for all of God's blessings in my life!  May you have a happy and blessed Thanksgiving with family and friends!

Also, I am thankful for my blog nomination for the Homeschool Blog Awards this year!  The winners have been announced and all the nominees are listed here.  Even though my blog didn't win in the "Best Encourager" category, I am thankful that my blog was listed with so many great blogs and thank you to all those that voted for my blog!  Congrats to all the nominees and winners! 

I am thankful that each year we celebrate the day each of our children were baptized as infants into our Catholic faith.  We have always celebrated this special day in their faith journey, but this article,  A Universal Call to Party:  A New Family Tradition, from The Word Among Us publication has given our family great ideas to keep this tradition alive and fun!  I found this article in 2006 and have been using it as a reference for each baptism anniversary.  To remember each baptism anniversary, each of my children have a gold/silver platted candle stick holder with their name and baptism date engraved in it.  This has been a meaningful and great way to remember yet another important date in our families' lives!

So on Thursday, November 18, we celebrated our son's baptismal day with dinner as a family, lighting his baptism candle, singing "Happy Baptism Day to You", reading Scripture passages related to the sacrament of Baptism (Matthew 19: 13-15, John 3:5, and Mark 1:9-11), as a family we renewed our baptismal promises, and then we concluded with an "Our Father" before we ate our dessert to celebrate his special day.  This year our children recited the "Our Father" in Latin ("Pater Noster") since we have been learning it in our homeschool days.  It's amazing how much my children retain with only 10 minutes of Latin vocabulary each day!

Happy Baptism Day to our son!

It was three years ago today early in the morning (1:41 AM to be exact) that our 4th "cupcake" was born!  Like Cupcake #1 and #2, she was born on the 19th of the month.  What are the odds that three out of four of our children were all born on the 19th day of their birthday months? 

We are thankful that God blessed our family and friends with our beautiful gift and she is looking forward to her Princess themed birthday party on Saturday!  She loves to dress up!  Can you tell?

I am thankful for witnessing how much fun a dirt pile can be for my children and their friends in our homeschool group!

After our family trip to the NC mountains in the Fall, I blogged about it in this post, Camping,Vomiting,and Fun All at the Same Time!  One of the places we visited was the Bon Ami Mine in Little Switzerland, NC.  This visit was very educational and we learned alot.  I had never heard of Bon Ami cleaning products until this trip. When I returned home I was telling my mom about the Bon Ami Mine and she told me my grandmother used to use Bon Ami as my mom was growing up!  "Feldspar (white) was the primary product of this mine, and was used by the Bon Ami Company as an ingredient for their polishing cleaner."  Bon Ami was advertised from the early 1900s to the 1960s before the mine shut down.  Bon Ami is a natural cleanser and does not scratch surfaces.  The product is similar to Comet, but it's all natural.  Bon Ami Company used a baby chick coming out of an egg for its mascot because the woman in the museum told me that a chick does not scratch during the first 2 or 3 days after coming out of its egg. This product works, but it is also gentle on your hard surfaces and leaves no scratches behind.
The Bon Ami Company saw my blog post in cyberspace and they sent me a free gift package of all their products as a "thank you" for sharing about the mine!
I am thankful for their fabulous customer service and I quickly learned that Bon Ami has fabulous cleaning products!  Here is what they sent me in a durable, cloth Bon Ami tote bag:
The tote included:  a bottle of Bon Ami Tangerine Thyme Dish Soap, a bottle of Bon Ami Tangerine Thyme All-Purpose Cleaner, a bottle of Bon Ami Tangerine Thyme Liquid Cleanser, and a can of Bon Ami Powder Cleanser.

Recently, I got to work and did some cleaning specifically in my kitchen with my Bon Ami products to see how well these products handled my frying pan that had leftover food stuck on it. I always have a tough time getting out food that sticks to the bottom of my frying pans so I thought I would try the Bon Ami Powder Cleanser because on the can it says you can sprinkle a little in pans, scrub, and rinse. 



To clean the countertop, I first used the Bon Ami Tangerine Thyme All-Purpose Cleaner.  The cleaner smells so good and made my counter shine, although there were a few streaks left after I wiped it with a paper towel.   Then I sprinkled some Bon Ami Powder Cleanser on the counter and not only did it remove the streaks, but my counter was sparkling even more and the powder cleanser did not scratch my counters!