Sunday 30 November 2014

How to start Advent

This is how Advent should be started:

By playing with rockets on the Moor:

And then by having friends for lunch and eating cheeses brought back from Paris:

Yes, of course that's reblochon.

And then by cycling to the Steiner Advent Spiral:

For the uninitiated, this festival entails sitting in the cold, dark gym while singing Christmas carols to the accompaniment of a group of musicians. Then, one by one, each child walks through a spiral laid out on the floor with greenery. In the centre, they light their candle (wedged in an apple) from the central candle and walks out again, placing their lit candle on the ourwards spiral. By the end you get a spiral of light. Its rather atmospheric!

Then coming home and making the advent ring, known in our house as the Advent Tray due to our inability to find oasis in a ring shape!

Tuesday 25 November 2014

Teeth

One of Nathaniel's teeth started wobbling while we were in France, but it didn't seem at all keen to come out, so we just concluded that he was bound to keep his baby teeth until he was grown up. Therefore when he claimed that his still not much more wobbly tooth was going to come out today, I declared that it was unlikely.

Clearly I was wrong.

Monday 17 November 2014

Being three

For months now, Thea has been telling anyone that'll listen that she's having two birthdays this year like the Queen. And so it was fortunate that her birthday spread itself out over a whole weekend!

Thank you for all her lovely presents!

She had some friends round for playing and cake and the most important commodity of all - balloons.

Ian created exactly what she had requested - a chocolate cake with green sweets on!

We rounded the celebrations off with a meal of Thea's choice - italian pasta with tomatoes and mozarella by candlelight. Not bad!

Monday 10 November 2014

London

Ian has been away all week with important work:

So I thought that I would take the kids on an adventure to London! It almost didn't happen - a freak rainstorm (requiring changing of all clothes down to underwear) delayed us on the way to the station, but we did manage to catch our train. Thanks to Nathaniel's running, we actually had 5 minutes to spare, but the train was late anyway......

The kids made up for my grumpiness towards the couple who sat in our seats and declined to move by being charming and playing nicely and holding adult conversations with the surrounding passengers.

And then as the train emptied out, played jungle explorers down the carriage (complete with swinging from vines) until they hurt themselves and I got disapproving looks from people!

Nimmy and James kindly met us from the train and helped us home and the kids enjoyed their transport options as usual.

The next day Nathaniel planned a complicated route through London using the most amazing number of different tube lines.

It all came a bit unstuck when he got totally overwhelmed by Baker Street station, but we managed to press on by a new route which was fortunate, otherwise we would have never accidentally run into the Lord Mayor's Show parade!

The Butchers

My favourites were the Modern Livery Companies (I enjoyed the accountants), and no-one forgot the farmers!

Then we got to our goal - the DLR - and managed to get the front seats so we could pretend to be train drivers all the way to Greenwich.

We had some lunch and a brief play in the Maritime Museum (just enough to make us want to come back to do it properly), and then decided we were exhausted and went home! The important thing was that Thea got to do lots of Tube surfing (which she is pretty good at), and everyone got their fix of interesting stations (I like Canary Wharf) and trains (many, many metropolitan line trains!).

The next day we got to Kings Cross early enough to have coffee in sight of the Eurostar trains and the rather fine architecture which everyone was pleased about.

And then we went home. For about 2 hours. After which we needed more stations, so we went back to pick up Ian!

Sorry about the blurry pictures - not entirely sure about my new phone's camera yet......