★★★★Kirsty M.
Lovely idea and well put together. A few activities skewed slightly old for my two-year-old, but they are easy to swap between days.
The Twenty-Four Day Toddler Calendar
It earns its place if you have ever started an advent activity plan and quietly abandoned it somewhere around the eighth of December.
$9
- Excel and Google Sheets both open it — .xlsx included
- Nothing to install, nothing to subscribe to
- Opens on your phone
- Instant download after payment
- 14-day refund, no questions
Forty low-cost activities already written, matched against the twenty minutes you really have on a Tuesday in December. It tells you which days do not fit before you promise them to anybody.
Most advent calendars are written for a child who does not exist
The ones you find are aimed at a five year old with a free afternoon and a parent with a laminator. Ice rink. Grotto. Gingerbread house. Ninety-minute craft with a printable template. Two hundred dollars gone before the eighth, and a two year old who wanted the box more than the thing in it. So they collapse, always around day six, and the collapse gets remembered as something you failed at rather than something that was never going to fit into twenty minutes between tea and bath. The problem was never a shortage of ideas. It was that nobody checked the ideas against the actual evening.
Three checks, run on every day
Toddler minutes against the minutes you said you had that day. Longer, and the row turns pink. Four pink days on a first pass is normal and ten minutes to fix. Paint on Saturday and salt dough on Sunday is a lovely idea and a bad weekend. The second one gets flagged so you can move it three days along. Every activity carries the youngest age it really suits. Above your child's age and the day is flagged — not refused, just marked as a two-person job.
Forty activities, and seventeen days that cost nothing
The bank is already written: a torchlight hunt for a paper star, sorting the baubles into colours, washing the toy cars in warm bubbles, posting one card through a neighbour's door. Each has a cost, a realistic number of toddler minutes, indoors or out, how messy it is, and the youngest age it suits. Most of them cost nothing, and that is not a compromise. A torch and a paper star behind the curtain genuinely beats a grotto for a two year old, and it beats it again at bedtime when they tell you about it. Add your own at the bottom of the bank and they appear in the dropdown on the calendar straight away.
What's inside
- Start Here
- The order to do things in, and one honest paragraph about why the cheap days are the good ones.
- Setup
- The child's name and age, the first day of the countdown, how many days you are doing, and what the whole month is allowed to cost.
- Activity Bank
- 40 activities with cost, toddler minutes, indoors or out, how messy, the youngest age it suits, and what you need. Add your own at the bottom.
- The Calendar
- One row a day. Choose from the dropdown, type the minutes you really have, and the fit check, the mess warning and the age flag run themselves.
- The Month
- The total, the cost a day, the free days, the hours, the outdoor days that need a plan B, and every warning gathered in one place.
- Print Calendar
- Twenty-four boxes on one page with the day, the activity, the cost and the minutes. Cut them up and put them in envelopes if you like.
How it works
- 1PayCard only. No account, no password, no address. Two fields and a payment box.
- 2DownloadThe link appears on screen straight away and lands in your inbox at the same time. It does not expire.
- 3Open itDouble-click for Excel, or File → Import → Replace spreadsheet for Google Sheets. Every formula carries over.
Specifications
- Formats
- Excel (.xlsx), Google Sheets (.xlsx) and a printable PDF guide
- Tabs
- 6
- Works in
- Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, LibreOffice
- Opens on
- Desktop and phone
- Delivery
- Instant download, plus an emailed link that does not expire
Who this is not for
If you want printables, templates and a laminator, this is the wrong file. There is not a single thing in it that needs a printer to do — on purpose, because anything requiring forty minutes of preparation is a craft for the adult, not the child.
It is built around a one to four year old. A seven year old will find half of it babyish, and you will spend the month rewriting the bank, which is allowed but is not what you paid for.
It earns its place if you have ever started an advent activity plan and quietly abandoned it somewhere around the eighth of December.
Before you buy
Do I need to pay for Google Sheets?
No. Google Sheets is free with any Google account. If you would rather use Excel, that file is in the same download.
My child is four, not two.
Put 4 on the Setup tab and nothing is flagged as too old. The activities still work — a four year old does the same pine cone hunt, just for longer and with more opinions about it.
Can I add my own activities?
Yes, at the bottom of the Activity Bank. Fill in the cost, the minutes, indoors or out, how messy and the youngest age, and it appears in the calendar dropdown straight away.
Are there printables and templates?
Deliberately not. Everything in here can be started within two minutes of deciding to do it, which is the only kind of activity that survives a real December.
What if we miss a day?
Then you miss a day. Leave it blank and it drops out of every count on its own. The one thing worth not doing is trying to catch up two on the twenty-third.
Can I do twelve days instead of twenty-four?
Change How many days on the Setup tab. The calendar shortens, the print sheet leaves the extra boxes empty, and every total follows.
What if it does not work for me?
Email us within 14 days and we refund it. You keep the file. We would rather have the feedback than the nine dollars.
Reviews
★★★★★Hannah
Two under four. Half of these need nothing but things already in the house, which is the only reason we are still going.
★★★★★Sophie L.
I have abandoned an advent activity plan around the 9th of December two years running. The difference here is that the activities are honest about how long they take and what you need, so I stopped planning a craft session for a Tuesday I was working.
All ten holiday planners — $39
The gift budget, the Thanksgiving timeline, the blended-family gift tracker, the remote Secret Santa kit, the cookie swap planner, the two-families travel budget, the fifty-card Christmas list, the mixed-diet menu planner, the toddler activity calendar, and the ninety-day January debt reset. Bought separately they are $90.
Get all ten — $39
