Christmas

As usual, Christmas was at my parents' place, with Micky's family too. Gifts with morning tea (or rather champagne), fruit cake, mince tarts, nuts and ginger. Louka scored stacks of books, and quite a few clothes. Pasta with pesto al fresco for lunch. Dinner with a huge spread: turkey, ham, ocean trout, duck, paté, salads, followed by flaming pudding, cream and icecream, then coffee and chocolates. Louka dragged me off to bed for a nap at about 3pm, though she didn't sleep all that well.


Boxing day dawned sunny and bright and we went back for breakfast of mangoes, cherries, croissants, home-made fruit toast and coffee. Yum. Louka wore the pretty "flower-fairy" top she'd received from Micky and family. She looked extremely pretty.

The cutest reindeer of all

There was a face-painter at the shopping centre today. I wasn't sure if Louka would sit still to have her face painted, but the painter said she could do it as I held her, and she did. There was glitter on the red nose, but it must have tickled because Louka promptly rubbed it off on my shoulder.

Louka at the park

Louka sends away the clouds

At our mothers' group christmas party, Louka was given a bath toy. It consists of foam pictures which stick to the bathroom wall when wet. There are three background pictures and a lot of individual pictures like beach balls, sailing boats, kites and clouds.

Louka very quickly discovered that the individual clouds had the same background colour as the sky. So if she turned them over and stuck them over the existing clouds in the background pictures, they would cancel out the clouds and make a blue, cloudless sky! I would never have thought of that.

Louka the artist

Louka's latest activity is drawing. We got her some crayons a while ago but she wasn't interested, but recently she'd been drawing a lot with a graphite stick so we dug them out again.

Today we went into town to buy christmas cards at the Unicef card shop. While there she found small containers of nice chunky coloured pencils, so I bought her some, and a colouring-in book to draw in. This kept her busy for at least twenty minutes in the foyer, before we were due to meet Daddy for lunch.

I love how she's concentrated all the colour in the tail of the bird.

Potty tales

I'm pretty impressed with Louka's ability to hold on these days. For the past week her nappy has been dry in the morning. She does a big wee in the potty first thing in the morning. We've even had a couple of nappies that have lasted more than one day.

We'd had no pooey nappies for weeks, until yesterday. She was actually saying "poo, poo", but I was busy and wanted to finish what I was doing. Silly me!

She also tries to do wees in the big toilet so I try to take her there while we're out. It seems we're getting there at last. I can't wait to get her some ordinary (non-absorbent) pants!

Update 14 December: I think I jinxed us by writing this on the web for all to see! The last three nights we've had wet nappies, and we've had wet nappies on outings too.

Mothers group Christmas party

We'd been discussing and looking for a good venue for the Christmas party, but when the time came it was wet, so Sarah hosted it at her place. Thanks very much Sarah!

The children weren't as scared of Santa as they were last year, but most were still a little wary. Louka at least said "ta" though she wouldn't say "hi" to him. Unfortunately most of my photos were blurry.


We then tried to get a group photo of the kids. Ha ha ha.


A few more photos.