Christmas @ our place

Christmas has come and gone way too fast! This year we spent Christmas at home with no other family or friends around - just Leon, me and the three kids. We had so much fun and really spent a lot of quality time together.

This is my Goofy Teenage Santa:
And these are his little helpers:



On Christmas eve, the kids and I decided to do a nativity puppet show. Leon was the only human in the audience. Celine decided that all her stuffed animals had to come watch the show as well. I was the director. Michael was the narrator and Céline and Marco the puppet masters.

The narrator:

The cast:

The props and cast back stage (behind the bar counter):

The audience:

After the show we had Céline's favourite food - lasagna - for dinner. After dinner I took the kids out for ice cream and a drive around town to watch all the Christmas lights that the people have up in the gardens.

When we got back home it was time for Santa's little helpers to hand out the gifts.

I usually have sweets and an extra little surprise for the kids in their Christmas stockings on Christmas morning. This year I had an extra surprise waiting for them - a Christmas treasure hunt. I hid 17 different clues around the garden which they had to search for before they found their "treasures".

Céline got a new cellphone while the boys got a Wii. They had so much fun doing the treasure hunt and were over the moon about their extra gifts.

I feel so relaxed! Last night I even had time for a little scrapping. I finished this page that I started with a while ago at scrapclub.
Today I plan to do a little re-organisation in my scraproom and hopefully get a little more scrapping done too. I also want to pay a visit to as many of my bloggy friends blogs as possible.

I hope that all of you had an equally great Christmas with your families.

Catch up

I'm so not a good blogger! I don't even know where to start catching up. These past few weeks have been a big rush. Barely touching ground and feeling overwhelmed and stressed most of the time. Lots of good times in between as well, which kept me going though.

We had my moms 80th b-day party on 28 November. This is what the table looked like - we only had one loooong table, so all the guests could sit together.
It was a really special day for my mom and she loved seeing all her friends and family that she haven't seen in years.


This is me and the boys with the birthday girl.

As a birthday gift to her, I made her an album with photos of her with each of the guests as well as a handwritten message from each and everybody there. I did 24 pages. for the album. Unfortunately I never had time to take photos of the album before I gave it to her. Will do so later.


Then on 7 December, my god daughter Annalize's little baby girl Leeloo was born! I looked forward to this day sooooo much and despite everything on my plate, I just had to go and meet this little angel as soon as they got out of hospital.

Leon's birthday was on 13 December, and I wanted to make something special for him. I decided to make a painting of his idol - Mark Knopfler. I wanted to make it large, and ended up with a huge 1.5m x 1.1m canvas. If it wasn't for my art teacher's confidence in me, I never would have even attempted something as big as this. Unfortunately, even after I took an entire day's leave from work to work on the painting, I couldn't finish it in time for his birthday and only finished it yesterday. This is what it looks like:

He is very chuffed with his work of art in his bar.

This is the birthday boy on his b-day last week.

Since I finished the painting and wrapped most of my Christmas gifts yesterday, I feel much more relaxed. I even had time to make this wrath and Christmas tree that I wanted to make last year already.

And this is our Christmas tree .

Two weeks ago, we had friends over for Sunday lunch. Leon cooked some excellent food and I had a ball decorating the table. I found these old silver wine glasses in one of the antique shops in Parys a while back and since then I wanted to use them as individual flower vases.

For desert Leon made this absolutely gorgeous Amarula Cheesecake. I only helped a little with the decorating.

Unfortunately I'm one of the "skeletons" at work and business isn't as slow as we expected. I have to run around between three desks trying to keep everybody happy.


So there it is - what kept me occupied for the past couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to a peaceful Christmas with my family now.

I hope that each and every person who reads this post will have a wonderful Christmas filled with love, peace and hope for the future. Keep the real reason for this day in your heart and it will be filled with His love for you! :)