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.

It’s that Chrimbo limbo time, the presents are all open, but we still have family to visit, leaving on the train tomorrow for three and a half hours of quality time together, people watching, pulling faces at other peoples too loud phone conversations, doing puzzles, reading stories to whoever has to sit by us, and wondering if we can afford a something from the trolley.  Cherries picked from the 'whoops' selection in Asda's need eating and G suggests a chocolate cherry bun recipe, as she particularly enjoys de-stoning three or four and then leaves the rest for me.  We decided to make them look like Christmas puddings by turning them upside down and icing them with a thick blob of white icing green glitter icing holly leaves, and berry sugar balls. G did a lot of it herself, I was chief get the eggshell out of the mixture monitor, and do the final stirring when arms get tired and fancy pogoing around the house on the new bungee bouncer that Father Christmas supplied. This is fitting as on the actual Christmas day, me and G served the pudding and custard by that very transportation method of pogoing it from the kitchen to the living room to our assorted diners. Possibly that cherry beer had affected me a little more than I had thought at the time......but it was G's suggestion, and we are a team.

Eilir has never had a proper Christmas stocking. In our household we've always used pillow cases, so when I suggested that we make one, Eilir was over the moon. On Christmas Eve we still hadn't started, but the sewing machine was still set up from the sock monsters and I thought it wouldn't take us too long (that was a mistake!). We chalked out a stocking shape on an old green sheet folded in two and cut it out. I got out lots of bits of material (cut-offs from curtains etc), and suggested different ways we could decorate the stocking, including cutting out letters to make words that we could sew on applique style. Again Eilir had his own ideas, deciding he wanted stripes of different materials the length of the stocking and a length of red fun-fur at the top (left over from an old carnival costume of his). Eillir arranged the stripes and I tacked them on while we watched Matilda on the telly.

We then went back to our team approach to the machine work, Eilir on peddle and me on guiding and calling out commands like "Put your foot down", "Step on it" and "STOP". Eilir was getting really into using the machine and taking a great interest in how it worked, he loved it when we had to refill the bobbin - "Wow! That's really cool!" By this time it was getting very late (and me a little worried - I hadn't even started wrapping any presents...!), so Eilir got ready for bed while I persevered in finishing it off. It was eventually done at 10.30pm, Eilir took it upstairs and promptly fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

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..........

We watched Mister Maker and he was using my most favourite material of all (apart from hessian), masking tape! Anyhow, highly influenced by him, the boys (at just about bedtime) got excited about doing a painting using tape.  Lo wanted pink and red and Rohan opted for blue and yellow. After the work dried, Rohan did not want to take the masking tape off so, that aspect of the Mister Maker-inspired-thing was defeated.  Nevertheless it was work that they unanimously agreed ought to be featured on the BLOG.

Okay, I’ve postponed it for long enough. Christmas is officially around the corner. Advent calendar down to one more door to open and we have to fulfil Lo’s request from the very start of this project, to make snowflakes.

I’m not in a very good mood at the moment and finding this process slightly frustrating. I ended-up folding the paper and cutting out the shapes (because the folded paper was a bit too dense for little hands to manage effective cutting), while Lo diligently folded paper into a miniature hat and coloured it in and Rohan took turns with me to use the scissors. He cut straight lines out of another piece of paper and then stuck tape onto it.

I suggested that we paint the patterns onto black paper using the snowflakes as templates. With my weary eyes and aching ribs we resorted to just gluing the shapes onto the paper. Logaan said “I just want to do it the quick way.” Fully agreed!

Rohan was my star at gluing and sticking the patterns on. He loves to sing while he works. Glue finished now. Lo arranged them in the order to be hung. Not such a bad day after all.