Christmas festivities

This was the last week of school for Leilani and she spent most of it doing fun Christmas things.  In fact I don't think they did any work at all this week!  She has been coming home everyday telling me they've been playing games and watching movies.  On Monday she had the annual trip to the cinema and then to Mr Chips for lunch.  And then on Friday she had her Christmas dinner.  She has loved every minute of it and especially likes being in charge of the countdown at home -we have a little blackboard that Mom gave us a few years ago that has "days til Christmas" written on it with a space to write in the days and Leilani's in charge of changing it each day.

It's taken Zach a couple of weeks to get his head around the idea that you only have one chocolate from your advent calendar a day...  We've also had some Christmas parties for Zach and Tilly.  First was the one at Sunbeams toddler group - the NCT group that Angie runs.  Except Angie turned up in the morning telling me Oakley had chicken pox so she helped get set up and then left me in charge of doing the party!  It was a little bit daunting at first because the first few people that came hadn't realised they needed to bring something to add to the food table and it looked like we weren't going to have much more than a couple of packs of chocolate buttons for each child.  But it worked out ok in the end - the late comers brought some more food and it worked out perfectly in fact, each child had a full plate of Christmas junk food and there weren't too many leftovers either.

At the Sunbeams party

On Friday we had the children's centre Christmas party with Santa and presents, bouncy castle and party food.  There was also a table of craft things to make party crowns, but my two weren't interested in that.  They spent most of the time on the bouncy castle.  Zach loved Santa but Tilly was scared of him.  Zach got really upset when Santa left because he didn't manage to get off the bouncy castle fast enough to shout goodbye to him.  SO I told him to shout it anyway because Santa was magic and could hear him anyway, so he did.

Last Saturday they had the primary Christmas party where they had a pantomime put on by the Burns' (who do shows for a living).  They loved it except the only food they got was a hotdog.  In the evening we had the branch activity, which Adam and I ended up doing at the last minute.  Originally Gail had been doing it, but Sandy fell over and badly injured her hip - at first they thought it might be broken; it's not but she can barely even move.  So Gail took on doing the primary one in the morning for her and also primary on Sunday the next day.  So on Friday we took on doing the evening branch activity.  It turned out really well - we had food to start with (with some contributions from people and a load we'd bought at Tesco whilst the kids had their primary party in the morning) and then once people had settled down from eating we did the activity and Mo and Gail took the kids to do some things.  With the adults, Ad and I alternated between rounds of quiz questions and Minute to Win it games (thanks Sara for the idea! She gave it to us for easy FHE games a few days earlier).  We did 5 questions on a theme for each quiz round eg pop culture from 2010, film and tv, Christmas etc. Then the minute to to win it games were fun quick little competitions to do in a minute eg keeping 3 balloons off the ground for a minute, blow bubbles to hit a target, eat a strawberry lace with no hands etc.   I was a little worried people might not want to do the silly games, but actually they did really well with them and everyone got stuck in and competitive.