Over the weekend the girls and Thomas had no less than three birthday celebrations to attend. For one of the parties the girls had to dress up as a favourite character in a film. Putting the dress-up we bought for the medieval festival to good use, C12 dressed up as Hero from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, whilst L12 dressed up as Maid Marion from Robin Hood. I had to smile. My girls are so home schooled (and putting their history to good use!):
How gorgeous do they look? Gary was one proud father dropping them off at the party.
This week I had planned a lovely mix of lots of work, lots of play, and lots of Christmas preparations. It was a good plan as the children have happily played together and worked together:
Christmas has well and truly landed at our house this week. We have all been busy making long colourful paper chains (along with rather a lot of mess) in anticipation of the Mr Men Christmas tea party:
They have wrapped the advent books and filled the advent calender full of activities to do for the next four weeks. I have finally gone through all our Mr Men bits and pieces:
Speaking of which, the girls continue on with their Mr Men school, asking to do activities each day:
T has kept himself gainfully occupied as always, putting together his latest venture into earning his fortunes washing cars. He has planned it all thoroughly, has potential clients all lined up and has created and printed some business cards which he has been handing out to anyone who has shown the slightest interest.
This week has seen the temperature drop and a distinct chill to the air, especially as the nights close in, so we have been lighting our wood burning stove each night. Our cats have especially loved the warmth it has provided and are gradually losing their hair because they sit so close they get singed:
Would you believe those cats are almost 17 years old? George (big one in front of picture) is still as handsome as the day we got him.
We mixed up some of our old favourite dough to make lots of lovely cinnamon scented Christmas decorations. Hopefully they will be dry before Saturday’s decorating fest:
We also squeezed in our yearly Country Living Magazine and hot chocolate night with my older girls, ending it with our traditional viewing of The Good Life Christmas special. I had prepared for this in advance with some posh hot chocolate, some star shaped macaroons and of course the very latest Christmas edition of Country Living.
Whilst I was popping the little ones into bed and tucking them down for the night the girls got busy preparing for my reappearance. I was under strict instructions to wear last year’s Christmas Pajamas (panda onesies). Can I just say how grateful I am that this year’s pajamas are lovely red cotton and not in the shape of a furry mammal – next year I will look suave and sophisticated for our annual Country Living night. This year, not so much:
They’d set our little table beautifully and were all ready for me:
We supped our hot chocolate, flicked through magazines, ate chocolate macaroons and chatted. Here they are looking very twin-like:
Then we watched the Christmas edition of The Good Life. I have seen this dozens of times and it makes me laugh out loud every single time:
This brought the conversations round to making our Christmas a home made Christmas next year. I had really wanted that for this year but it just didn’t happen. So I introduced them to pinterest. They are a tad too young to have their own pinterest account but I created them a board each on mine and we spent the next hour googling home made gifts and Christmas cards, pinning galore. Such good fun!
Each year this gets better and better. Although it is bittersweet to watch as their childhood disappears before my very eyes, I am really enjoying them growing into (sometimes) elegant young ladies with minds and opinions all of their own.
And finally, just in case you were not already all Christmassed out, we started to prepare for our decorating the tree day, which traditionally happens on the first weekend of December. We will be using the rest of the posh hot chocolate, so the whole family made some marshmallow and candy cane stirrers to turn our hot chocolate minty:
First we stuck a couple of marshmallows onto the end of a candy cane, and melted some chocolate:
We crushed up some peppermint candy canes and we were set. The children dunked marsh mallows into melted chocolate:
And finally we pushed the end into some crushed peppermint candy cane. They have all been stored in the fridge for Saturday (we left as much of the candy cane wrapper on to stop them going soggy in the fridge):
We just have the ginger nut cookies to make and we are all set for decking the halls on Saturday. This has been a really lovely week.
