Babyhood

P. took the children to the Christmas party at his work. I was sick with tonsillitis, so didn’t go. It’s the first time I’ve missed it. They had a great time. They were given an enormous afternoon tea and watched a very funny clown show. Pauline and Kevin are now old enough to tell me all about it themselves, and even acted out some of the funny things the clown did. They didn’t stay for Father Christmas this year though, it’s always a long, hot and tiring wait too late in the evening for the little ones. P. sneaked their 'comité d'entreprise' presents home and they will open them on Christmas day with all the others.

I felt well enough in the first week of December to get straight back into the routine and even started my Christmas baking and assembling little baskets of jams, chutneys and biscuits for presents. Sarah, my Australian friend, brought her children Nina and Flynn over for lunch. I made pumpkin soup with bacon bits, mussels in parsley and garlic, green salad, chocolate and orange marmalade cake and ice-cream.

We decorated cookies to hang on the Christmas tree. All the children spread the icing extremely thickly (yuck!), and although they had a lovely choice of coloured sugar, chocolate hail, hundreds and thousands and silver cachous to use, this is what they did: Flynn’s cookies were all blue, Pauline’s all pink, Nina’s all had chocolate hail on and Kevin dumped fistfuls of every colour all mixed on every cookie!!
When Kevin and Pauline hung theirs on our tree, they were all at the same height and on the same branch. At night I arranged them a little more symmetrically and aesthetically. However, they all mysteriously disappeared within a few days, so we had to make some more!