Our Candlemas...

Candlemas was February 2nd. We celebrated last night, the 3rd. I'd like to be able to blame our belated celebration on there being a newborn in the house.... but, really, its just that I'm not all that good at getting things done on time.... oh well... Aurora doesn't know the difference, yet.

So, this was our Candlemas: rolling beeswax candles and a candlelit Pancake dinner... simple, but still very fun. We also talked a bit about Spring being on its way, and the return of the sun and why we celebrate those things with candles and pancakes. Aurora understood more of this than I had expected and commented that when Spring came, the bees would come, and we could thank them for our candles.... Oh, my sweet girl, you are always melting my heart :)

Rolling her first candle

Counting the candles... one for each of us, including Liam

Her first candlelit dinner

Our Candlemas table (we ate on our coffee/playtable, because our dinning table's covered with stuff at the moment)

And, for good measure, a picture of the babe this morning. I can.not.believe. he's going to be two weeks old tomorrow!!! His skin seems to be fairer than Aurora's and he's definitely more prone to baby acne and newborn rash... hence the redness in his face. His eyes are lighter, too, so I'm thinking they'll stay blue~ just like Daddy's :) Time will tell...

New Years and Epiphany/Three Kings Day

New Year's for us this year was kept pretty darn simple. We had some yummy (although store bought) pastries for breakfast, switched the calendars and Around The Year book over, lounged around and then Rory and I made this special candle. We will light it on the first day of each month, and then next January, use it to light the new New Year's Candle. The idea being that we will watch it grow smaller as the year progresses. We used clay punches to punch shapes from beeswax decorating wax strips and Aurora chose where to place them on the candle. Easy peasy and lots of fun.

And, today we celebrated Epiphany/ Three Kings Day for the first time. We took down all our Christmas decorations last night, and Aurora was none too happy to see the tree go... It helped that we had this small celebration to look forward to today. Given that I am ahem rather large with child at the moment (and contracting regularly, but not enough, apparently... whole other story), this celebration was kept pretty small as well. I had originally wanted to at least bake a tree kings cake to have for breakfast this morning... but last night, rather uncharacteristically, I actually recognized my limits and decided to skip any baking/further crafting, and stick to a paper crown and the three small gifts we had chosen for Aurora. And that was truly plenty for this year. It was a very sweet morning.