Hello friends!
It’s been a while, we’ve been (good) busy over here, hope you have been spending your time meaningfully too.
October is a hectic month for us, with multiple birthdays, the school year coming to a close, work events, and more. I’m taking some time away from all of that to write this newsletter because I have something exciting I want to share with you! (So as not to clutter this newsletter and your inbox, I’ll share my birthday reflections in a separate newsletter, but you can read last year’s here.)
If you’ve followed me on the blog or IG for a while, you may recall that in our home, we usually do something special for the season of Advent. Advent is the season leading up to Christmas (traditionally it starts on the 4th Sunday before Christmas). I’ve been sharing about our home practices to inspire other young families to be intentional around this season, but I’ve always wanted to do more. Last year, I had the idea of writing out our Advent readings and somehow packaging it to equip other young families, but I didn’t know where to start.
Some months ago, I received a DM on IG from Joanne. She said she had found my blog while researching about travel to Kyushu, and stumbled upon my post about how we celebrated the Advent season two years ago. She shared that she had recently left her full time job to run her e-commerce business, Rey’s Little Loft, and to stay home with her children. Because of the extra time she had, she was able to be intentional about their family practices during the season of Advent last year, and it brought a deeper understanding and joy to the celebration of Christmas for them.
Rey’s Little Loft had always been a side hustle, and Joanne would curate quality products for fellow parents. However, since leaving her full-time job, Joanne now had more time to think about launching her own products, and she reached out to me about precisely that.
Imagine my surprise and delight when we spoke and she shared her heartbeat for this project! It was most certainly a divine appointment, meeting at the right time. Joanne also enlisted Kim (@kimsimplejoys) to work on the project together. Joanne had the business knowhow, Kim the designer eye, and I, the words. So, over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work, and are almost ready to launch this little project into the world.
Take a peek...
The Family Advent Activity Set will be available for pre-order next week (keep a lookout for it here and on IG). It is meant to be evergreen and suitable for families of all ages. The set contains a custom fabric calendar, a Scripture reading guide, ornaments that accompany the daily readings, and some little extras for the magic sparkle of the season.
The Scripture reading guide provides plenty of ideas and guidance on how to prepare your home and your hearts in this special season of Advent, including practical tips on when and how to get the daily reading done as a family. The reading plan itself contains readings of Bible stories for each day of December leading up to Christmas itself (25 days total), with suggestions as to how to adapt the difficulty level of the readings according to your unique family situation.
For those in The Ordinary Matters, I will be releasing an exclusive soft copy of the reading guide plus accompanying bonus resources for you, so keep a look out for that!
Any questions, just reply this email and ask away!
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Blessings,
P.S. Even if you don’t know the Christian God personally, if you would like to build some family practices with intentionality around the festive season, while learning more about the Christian tradition, this is for you too! The guide contains all that you will need to start, and you can always reach out to me if you have any questions at all.
P.P.S. You’ll hear from me via this newsletter, or you can follow along on the blog or Instagram. If this email landed in your junk mail, please remember to mark this my email address as “safe” or add to contacts so that it won’t happen again!
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