Co-op Christmas

Last Friday our co-op ditched our regular classes and met all together to do some Christmas crafting and cooking. IT WAS SUCH A BLAST! We had such fun being all together, younger ones and older ones, doing different things and just having fun together. We did two crafts and two cooking projects. And we managed to have devotions in spite of the banging and pounding from the basement as the furnace installers worked on our new furnace!

The first craft was a foam photo frame that could be given as a Christmas gift. We all brought embellishments for the frames and this was a big hit.








Our second craft was making orange pomanders by pushing whole cloves into small oranges. This was harder than it looks! We had a few bruised thumbs, but my house smelled wonderful!





Meanwhile, in the kitchen we worked on two different recipes for Christmas candy. The first type of Christmas candy we made was reindeer chow. You can find the recipe here. Super easy and very fun to make!








Each family went home with a large ziploc bag full of this. Doesn't it look yummy?

The other candy we made was Orange Balls. You can find the recipe here. It was really fun for the kids to hit the ziploc bag to break up the vanilla wafers, and who doesn't love rolling things in powdered sugar and getting it everywhere??! (literally, EVERYWHERE!) :-)





In between all the crafting and cooking, some of us just had fun playing.




Here are the other wonderful moms who make up our co-op. This is my friend Angela. Her family are only in their second year homeschooling, and they have taken to it like ducks to water. Angela and I have worked together in MOPS/REAL moms at church for many years and her sweet spirit and desire to obey God are always an encouragement and inspiration to me.


Here is my friend Sally. Sally and I have been friends since before we had kids, which means we have known each other practically since childhood. ;-) Sally has stood by me through thick and thin, and we have been privileged to be at all of each other's children's births except for our first born, as they were born just one day apart (I don't know why you couldn't have come on over to my hospital when you were already a whole 22 hours post partum Sally!). In this picture, Sally is helping one of Angela's daughters with her frame.


And here is my new friend, Lisa! Lisa's family are also in their second year homeschooling, though Lisa herself has been well known in our local homeschooling community for several years, as she is the homeschool band teacher. I have been blessed to see the gentle way she interacts with her two daughters, and what fun and smart girls they are! They have also transitioned to homeschooling virtually seamlessly, and I'm so glad they joined our co-op this year!


Interestingly, all 4 of us are using Tapestry of Grace for our history studies, but we are at 3 different places in history so we are unable to have a Tapestry co-op. However, we are like-minded in many ways, and we all had the same goals for our children this year regarding the purposes of forming the co-op we did. I am continually blessed as we meet together each week, and I thank God for His goodness in giving us these friends, both the mom friends for me, and the kid friends for my children. God is good!