Silent Sunday ~ 91st Birthday Celebrations
Category: family
Christmas 2023 ~ and that’s a wrap!
Christmas at my house is choc-full of fun, food and festivities. The main instigator of preparations, which begin in early December, is my daughter, child number three, a December girl who waits a whole year to celebrate both her birthday and Christmas. My Sagittarius is a whirlwind, the one in the family with the loudest voice, sparkling eyes and the biggest heart; you know when she enters a room without looking, her presence is so strong. For the past month, I have been “organised” by my daughter to go shopping for the ingredients we need to prepare a Christmas feast … and more!
A few days before Christmas, my five grand-babies came to my house for the annual Kid’s Cooking Day. Not a lot of actual cooking is done, it is pre-prepared for the little ones to have some fun. Chocolate Crackles require no baking, they are set in the fridge after the children help Aunt Em count out the cups and spoons full of ingredients, mix, and place them into patty pans. Emma and I baked cookies for them to decorate a few days before, and I also had a Christmas craft kit for the children to make decorations with.
This year, I made matching aprons for the children to wear while cooking, which Master Seven and his little brother, Master Two, modelled for me to take a photo.
I have lost count of the number of years Emma has baked and decorated a gingerbread house for Christmas. She gave up on perfection after her nephew, Master Seven, first decided he wanted to help with the decorating. As more children have come along, Emma has been happy to sacrifice her ideals of perfection for the little ones.
By the time the big day arrived, I was exhausted. This year, we had twenty guests here on Christmas Day consisting of my four grown-up “children”, their spouses, my five grandchildren, my ninety-year-old mother-in-law, my son-in-law’s sister and her daughter, and my daughter-in-law’s parents. It was a relief to finally relax, sit around the pool, and enjoy the garden where I spend so much of my time working!
As soon as the deck chairs were empty though, this cheeky pair grabbed them!
Being a hot day, this year we spent most of the day outdoors. The children loved playing in the pool and had fun setting up a picnic area on the grass, in the shade, where they ate their Christmas dinner.
The three older generations enjoyed our Christmas meal at the table!
December has been quite a busy month. It’s fun, but I have to admit that I am pleased there is only one Christmas in a year. The preparations are worth the effort though when I see my family together, relaxing, enjoying the day … and acting like total clowns!
And everyone celebrating, having fun, making memories, and feeling comfortable in the home my four children grew up in. 🙂
‘Twas the Night Before Christmas …
Just an hour before Christmas Day arrives here in Australia.
Merry Christmas to all my blogging friends. xx
The things you find under the carpet!
As this is my first post for 2022, first of all, I would like to wish everyone a very happy and prosperous new year. Hopefully, this will be the year that the world regains some form of normality. But let’s not talk about that.
I made a very interesting discovery yesterday which I would like to share.
Since the last of my children moved out of home (then moved back again – twice – with promises that it was definitely his last move home,) we have progressively renovated the house. Last year, the old kitchen was completely ripped out and replaced. We have also repainted rooms, replaced the old, worn carpet with wood-style planks, and installed deeper, older style skirting boards in each room.
The latest room to have a spruce up is the lounge room. Over the years when the children were little, I told them the lounge room is otherwise known as the quiet room, and they have all adhered to the rules – no boisterous playing and no food in the room. It is in this room I have French polished furniture which I bought many years ago when we lived in Sydney. It is also the room with the most bookshelves, so could also be known as the library. The antique piano lives in this room, so if anyone feels inclined to make a noise, they are welcome to play the piano, gently.
Before Christmas, we repainted the lounge room, so all the room needed was new floor coverings, and yesterday was the day the installers arrived to continue the wood-style flooring into the last living area of the house. Exciting!
One installer, Zac, had been to my house before, to replace the floor coverings in my office. They had only been here long enough yesterday to remove the old carpet when Zac asked, “was this house built in 1994?” I told Zac that we had built the house then and had lived here ever since. He told me he had found some newspaper under the carpet, dated March 1994.
Apparently, before real newspapers were mostly replaced by online news subscriptions, it was common practice for carpet installers to put a current piece of newspaper under the new carpet so future occupants of the house knew either when the house was built, or when the last floor coverings were laid.
The carpets were laid throughout our house before we moved in, therefore, I hadn’t known the installers had slipped a tiny piece of history under the flooring, to be found at a later date. But of course, I insisted Zac leave our find in place!
We now have a new, tightly secured floor, except for just one plank. Zac left the fifth plank along the north-eastern wall loose. If he had glued the plank in place it would have destroyed the paper, and that just wouldn’t do!
Approaching the middle of winter
It’s a glorious time of year in the subtropics! Each night is cool enough to warm the house with our fireplace, I can wear cosy winter clothes for a few weeks, and on Monday I spent the whole day gardening without breaking out in a sweat at all.
Today we had our third day of rain for the week, so gardening has been put on hold. It wasn’t too difficult to stay indoors to keep dry and warm though. The valley – and most of our garden – has been hidden by mist all day, so todays photo of Mount Warning is one I took last week.
It had been overcast weather all day, then as nightfall approached, in the distance, beyond the mountain and grey sky, a strip of light sky appeared. It was a stunning sight, and something a bit different to our usual sunsets.
“Life” has taken up more of my time than usual recently. What with final university assignment writing at the end of semester 1, and various family events, my blogging, and visiting blogger friends’ sites had to be put on hold. Also, my son, daughter-in-law and two of my grandsons have moved in recently. They sold their home, put a deposit on a new home, but when the building report on their prospective new home wasn’t up to par, they pulled out of the sale.
Meanwhile, houses in our area are in high demand. With more people buying than selling, house prices are on the rise, and Covid 19 is the culprit. People are selling up and leaving the capital cities, where covid “lock-downs” have become a regular occurance. Many people are relocating to areas such as ours where we have been virtually covid-free from the beginning of the pandemic, searching for freedom.
The changing market has forced many locals into a similar situation, so they simply have to be patient. The right house will become available for my son and his family eventually. In the meantime, I can enjoy grandson-cuddles every single day, which isn’t a bad thing at all! ❤
I have one last photo for today of a pair of kookaburras, taken last month, looking at something that obviously caught their eye. They are gorgeous characters, these birds. 🙂
Hopefully by tomorrow, the weather will have cleared and I will see the mountain again!
In My World 