Christmas Prep

Aren't the love-heart curtains adorable! 

The start of Christmas is always marked for me by our annual Gingerbread housing session which took place on Monday.  I love this tradition - there are generally 5 or 6 of us, lots of wine, christmas music (Emma treated us to her recent download of cats meowing carols - I don't recommend it!), thousands of lollies and after a couple of hours we find we've created a christmas village which unfortunately I didn't manage to photograph this year.  The kids were ridiculously excited the next morning when they woke up and spied the house declaring it the best one I've ever done which I think means it's got even more lollies on it than usual!  

One of the benefits of not working is that I have time to "foof" (play around with my interior design).  Those who know me well will appreciate that foofing and general interior design is not my forte but I've been devouring magazines and trying to gain inspiration/ideas - so far my creations involve various branches gathered from local bushland (environmentally friendly), carefully placed ornaments and thousands of christmas lights (potentially tacky but I really don't think you can have too many over Christmas).  Overall I'm fairly pleased with my efforts and have survived the general eye rolling which accompanies my creations/arrangements!  

Andrew and Marianne came to stay for the weekend.  The girls immediately disappeared and we didn't see them until a couple of hours later after they had caught up on all their news.  It was stinking hot on Saturday - 35 degrees - so the kids spent the morning in the pool, we then took them down to Clontarf for some beach action, and we came back for more swimming in the pool.  In my opinion the solar heating has already paid for itself in terms of how much the kids use the pool.  

Baby possum on the roof next door unfazed by Floyd's barking

We also had Floyd for a couple of days (we've been practicing for a full house!) and the kids loved sharing the responsibility of looking after him.  Tom was on breakfast duty because he's the earliest riser and Tess was on dinner and bedtime walk duty because she's the last to bed.  

On Sunday, once Andrew and Marianne had left we put up the Christmas tree.  This can be a fairly stressful experience for me as I do like it "just so" and have been known to totally rearrange all the decorations once the children are in bed.  However, this year they were amazing - the tree looks fantastic and I've not had to make any changes at all - they understand that their charming handmade but non-colour compliant decorations go at the back, together with any other non-colour compliant decorations and they also understand the concept of spacing, using stools to get to hard to reach places and standing back to assess the overall impact on a regular basis.  My work is done.