Unwrapped!

The holidays are officially over for us... parties are all done and no more Christmas presents to wrap and unwrap!

Miss Yules loved unwrapping presents this year and stole all my joy. Last year she could care less and I had the pleasure of unwrapping all her presents! She also really wanted to "help" wrap presents too! So I let her wrap some left over Halloween candy to occupy her while I wrapped the real presents. Here's some tips if your little ones want to wrap presents too:
-Give them something small and easy for their little hands to hold... like left-over Halloween candy ;)
-I gave Yules green painters tape... because removing scotch tape from wherever she gets it stuck is a friggin pain in the butt. You can totally be "trendy" and let your monsters wrap with brown craft paper and cute washi tape. Maybe next year...
-Yules is also starting to learn some of her letters, so she put an alphabet letter sticker of each persons name. Surprisingly, she was able to remember which present belonged to which person. This present was for her Papa, so I told her to put an A for his name. She searched for a foam A sticker (which is a hot commodity and we actually didn't even have any left) and came back with a V that she held upside down. I was so amazed that she was able to make that connection!

She really enjoyed wrapping and sticking the letters on the presents. I loved doing this activity with her because it was a real and concrete opportunity to teach her the alphabet. She made real connections and there was no boring, developmentally-inappropriate rote learning involved! She had a second opportunity to make those connections when she had to go and find each present and hand it to the correct person!

Yules also received a present from one of her buddies this Christmas and it was by far her favourite. The gift was a kinder surprise egg which she didn't care for because she doesn't yet know it contains delish chocolate and a toy! Haha! She actually was more obsessed with the way it was wrapped because it had her picture on it! Being completely ego-centric, she carried it around telling everyone who it was from and stared at it all day, everyday!

This idea is so genius on so many levels that I am so stealing it if I am that on top of things next year! A photo helps the child with facial recognition and allows them to know who they are handing it out to! And an added bonus is the recipient will loooove it if they are conceited like my monster! Soooooo smart that I'm jealous I didn't think of it!