Category: Holidays

Holiday Planning Progress

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place BlogLeave a comment

How is everyone doing? I hope we all made it through Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday without any serious damage. I also hope everyone has a good plan to get through the next month… we have definitely had some unexpected challenges around here like my oven and some sickness but we will survive!

We’ve been enjoying our Advent Study by Amanda Bennett with the lap book and other Christmas activities that we have been doing. The kids have been reading ‘A Christmas Carol’** aloud and doing a unit study** that goes along with it and we plan to watch the movie when we finish the book. **You can find the unit study HERE.

So far this week we have been able to gather all of our notes, menus, and lists from Thanksgiving to add to our Holiday Planner. We have put away the Thanksgiving folder and have pulled out our Polar Express folder, St. Nicholas Day notes, and of course our Christmas. I also probably need to pull out the New Year’s folder too but I haven’t just yet.

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Free Printables for Holiday Shopping plus some tips for buying for special needs kiddos!

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog8 Comments

It might be a little late in the game for these goodies but I needed to make some for my Holiday Planner anyway and I figured I’d share them here just in case anyone else could use them. They really aren’t anything fancy but I did try to make a couple of festive options to help you feel a little more in the Christmas spirit.

We plan to start implementing the 3 or possibly 4 gift rule in our home because things are just so expensive and our kiddos really have everything they need and a lot of what they want so we don’t want them asking for tons of things that they won’t or can’t use. We really want them to stay focused on the reason for the season … we are dedicating these weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for an Advent Study. We also want them to think about gifts and appreciate the time, thought, and money that goes into each gift they receive and not what they expect to find under the tree.

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Getting Ready for the Holidays Week 7 (The Week After Thanksgiving)

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog5 Comments

Thanksgiving is over but there’s no time to rest yet as the real preparations are beginning for the holidays! One of the biggest things we need to do is to take time to sit down and evaluate how our Thanksgiving was. What was everyone’s favorite part? Was there anything that didn’t work well? Do you need to set up a rotating schedule to have dinner at other family member’s homes? (Odd year here, Even year there, or every 3rd, 4th, year?) Would it be better to have a potluck-style meal where everyone brings something? Was there anything you would like to do differently? Start now for your planning for next year so you don’t forget these ‘little things’! We will also be getting all of our Fall decor ready to be put away next week so we can start pulling out the Christmas decor.

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
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The Thanksgiving that I broke the oven!

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog4 Comments

We pray that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that you didn’t go over budget with the Black Friday spending. We had a beautiful day and we were so blessed to have family and friends to enjoy it with.

The kids did a lot of work to help with our Thanksgiving dinner and preparations. We counted it as Life Skills and they were happy that it wasn’t ‘bookwork’. They have asked if we can have more lessons like this.

The weeks before Thanksgiving the kids helped to plan out the menu, check the pantry for supplies, and help order the groceries. Then they helped to organize the recipes and pull out the dishes and serving trays that would be needed. They did a pretty good job as you will see in the pictures below.

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Orange Congealed Salad

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog8 Comments

This recipe was so good and so easy to make! This will definitely be making many more appearances on the menu! You could easily substitute other fruits and flavors to make it your own as well as add in other things similar to Watergate salad... let your imagination run wild with flavor combinations!

Orange Congealed Salad

Ingredients:

  • 2 small packages of orange-flavored Jello
  • 1 16 oz container of cottage cheese
  • 1 14-16 0z can of mandarin oranges, drained well (you can save the juice for something else like homemade cranberry relish)
  • 1 16 oz container of Cool Whip, thawed
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