This December has been super busy – I’ve blogged so little, because I’ve been racing around doing the 101 other things that make life productive and interesting.  This post is an attempt to capture some of the moments (as yet, unblogged) that whizzed by this December…

Kathy’s baby shower … I love first time baby showers – the gifts are always cool and we get to oooh and aaah at the newness of it all!

And with a family like Kath’s, creativity is the key, like this sock posy her mom-in-law made for her baby girl (Caitlyn) to come…

Busy Kids ended for the year – we had a last craft and fun day at Ingrid’s house (mine was overtaken by fresh paint on walls and a playroom full of freshly painted drawers)…  This is also the end of an era – no more Busy Kids ever as some move overseas, others head to Big School and others focus on Big homeschool

Much of the first week of December was consumed by some home maintenance – this was one of my projects: sanding down and repainting the girls’ bedroom drawers.  We swapped the boys and girls rooms around, which required a new coat of paint on the walls of each bedroom, a complete wardrobe overhaul and much moving of furniture, toys, books, curtaining and bedding – I’ve still got a few finishing touches to do to both rooms, before I’ll post pics for you still see, Kel!

The girls made these sweet candle crafts at Lunch Bunch – they made a beautiful table centre piece for our dinner one evening. 

We celebrated Dad’s birthday on the 8th with a morning tea at our house, with a cake that I made… that literally fell apart.  Big clumps of cake broke away as I tried to decant the baking tin (I’ve since been told that flour really is the best tin liner there is)!  So, in an attempt to salvage it somewhat, I plopped it into a bowl and covered it with cream and chocolate and passed it off as a pudding (thanks mom for the idea!)

Mom and dad took us all out for dinner that night at Kelvin.  A splurge that they felt was fitting since next year Craig and Kerry will be across the ocean.

Craig spent some good time with the kids despite the busyness of the first couple of weeks of December – buying us KFC one evening as a surprise and making the kids pancakes.  Micah is fully into pancakes, it must be said!

We had a lot of year-end celebrations, including our Lunch Bunch, Craig’s work functions and Busykids.  We also wrapped up the year of home groups with a big group final meeting at the church… 

We went to the Uncle Willy’s Christmas party – hopefully I will get around to posting more pictures in days to come – but in the meantime, here is a taste of the fun we had …

We did manage to squeeeeeeeeeze in making an Operation Christmas Box each from the three eldest kids. After my major room change for the kids, I stayed in Spring Clean mode and ended up overhauling the entire house (I still have 2 cupboards left).  The plus side is that I feel ready to begin next year.  The minus side is that I didn’t get to spend as much time with family and friends as I would have liked and many other Christmas-time activities got seriously side-lined.  But, we did manage to squeeze this one in.

While I was ignoring my children in my Great House Overhaul, the kids were keeping themselves entertained — well, some of the time.  I don’t have photographic record of the trillions of whines, moans, arguments, fights (read: Katie running after Kiera with a knife shouting, “I’m going to murder you!”)  that happened in this time.  Strange how one doesn’t really feel a great compulsion to produce the camera when a screwed up face before you yells incoherent unhappiness at you….  Not so strange, how the fun, happy moments does cause one to reach for the camera.  I prefer recording the happier times, it seems!  Here Kiera smiles with her Sonlight shapes – she had a ball playing with these creating a town, road and boat in perfect symmetry.  And when Katie re-discovered our scary front teeth gag teeth-set, the kids all decided to dress up as varying pseudo-religious mythical characters – aka Santa’s helper, the Easter bunny and Rudolph!

Craig held a thank you dinner for his HODs at the most beautiful venue – Bloemendal’s in Durbanville.  It has the most magnificent view of Table Mountain and much of the rest of Cape Town.  It was a lovely evening out.

We celebrated our 11th Wedding anniversary on the 12th – the kids were ably babysat by Granny Bev and Gaa.  We did a whole bunch of fun things, including meals out and a drive through town late at night to see the Adderley Street lights.  We were so impressed that we brought the kids back the following week.  First we visited the Waterfront for some frozen yoghurt (and, unexpectedly, some fun rides, too) and then headed to see the lights…

This time around, however, Adderley Street was closed to make way for the street festival.  It was so late by then, that we just drove to the top and bottom parts of the light displays and then headed home.  With the FIFA World Cup featuring here in 2010,everything has a soccer theme to it – even the Christmas lights.

Besides all the Christmas shopping, we also created some gift tags by doing some marble painting outside.  Sam started out in clothing, but ended up completely naked thanks to his inability to stay paint free.  By the end of our 1/2 hour activity, he was covered in paint as were the bricks (note to self: do even outside activities on old newspaper!) – the kids needed a bath and the bricks a scrub.  Katie did the scrubbing, but only after donning the appropriate attire: her Cinderella outfit

That night I spent ages wrapping gifts.  In trying to keep to some kind of conservative budget this year, and in an attempt to give meaningful gifts, I made calendars with pictures of our family members done up with digital scrapbooking software.  It came out better than I ever expected, even if it did take 100 times longer than a quick visit to the shop!  We wrapped them with newsprint/butcher paper decorated with gold hand drawn paper, some red raffia and our homemade gift tags.

This Christmas, we managed to get a family portrait by the tree – a few self-timed shots and we will have to make the best of it!  Sam was definitely not into smiling naturally this year! 

More on Christmas festivities in the next post/s and thereafter?  Hello 2010!