We collected a lot of toilet paper rolls and were not sure what to do with them… eventually I suggested some sort of temporary mobile for the baban-brother-to-be. Lo drew 5 snowmen, helped to wrap gold around the cardboard rolls and we taped it all together. It’s fallen apart 2 times so far so I suspect it won’t be around when baby gets here.

The excitement in the lead up to Christmas is getting unbearable.... tears and tantrums everywhere. To occupy Eilir, I suggested that we make sock monsters. Eilir has been wanted to do this for ages, having seen the instructions in a magazine, but we hadn't yet got round to it. I selected a long stripy sock of mine that had lost its pair, but Eilir wasn't impressed ("too stripy"). He went off to his own sock draw and picked out a really scraggy pair of aquamarine coloured socks that had seen better days. I got Eilir to chalk the outlines of where we needed to cut out, and then I did the cutting because all the sharp scissors had disappeared, leaving us with a fairly blunt pair. I set up the sewing machine and demonstrated how to guide the material through. Eilir had a go, but was not keen to continue, and suggested that it would be better if I did the guiding while he controlled the foot pedal. As we were sewing Eilir got very concerned about my fingers saying "You're terrifying me!", but once he got the hang of easing the pressure on the pedal so that the needle worked slowly he was much less worried about the danger of sewing my fingers!

We stuffed our socks with cotton wool, pushing it in with our bamboo skewers for the fiddly bits (like the arms). Eilir's arms were made from the other sock in the pair, while mine were made from the fingers of my gloves, which were riddled with holes anyway (I hoped Santa had picked up on my many hints for new ones!). Next came buttons for eyes. Eilir rummaged around, and decided that buttons of similar size were more important that matching colours. In the end he found a nice brown pair that he was satisfied with. I made lots of suggestions for what he could do for the mouth, including a line of beads, but Eilir opted to use some t-shirt pens we have to draw one on. He first had a go on a piece of paper, and announced that he was "taking a risk", before drawing on his mouth. All this activity was accompanied by a soundtrack of Eilir singing festive and made up songs. Eilir was a bit concerned that the sock monsters weren't 'Christmassy' enough for the blog, so we used some mini bobble hats that were decorating the tree to finish them off.

Christmas Eve, and a pleasant day spent visiting friends.  Happy in the knowledge that we had found the ripe plantain for the Christmas breakfast, and that the peas were slow cooking themselves for the rice and peas as we went about our business, we could relax.  G announced that she would be leaving sustenance out for Father Christmas and his reindeer, in the shape of biscuits. 'Not the spoon it out kind, the kind you can cut out'. I began to look out for cutters of a vaguely Christmas theme, however, G said she wanted stockings and Christmas trees, and she would be cutting them out with a knife. We both made a mix simultaneously in our separate bowls, mine was too wet and surely of the spoon it out variety.  In fact it was pronounced that I had made buns. We began to pay a bit more attention to G's and she triumphantly managed to turn out a soft dough onto a heavily, maybe some would venture a little too heavily floured table.  Despite the fact that we were working in conditions where health and safety would demand some kind of mask, we managed to see enough through the billowing clouds of flour to pat out the dough and G set to work cutting her shapes.  She actually did really well, cutting stockings, crescent moons, stars and Christmas trees, as well our favourite, snowmen, which we said we would ice white. However when they came out of the oven, we found we either could not be bothered to get the icing out, or as G said 'we want them to be healthy don't we, for the reindeers? Concern for the hardworking reindeers' dental hygiene demanded we leave them exactly as they are..........