Nearly December!

Can't believe how time is racing by. It'll soon be time to make the annual pilgramage up into the loft for advent calendars and assorted trees and decorations. With Emily's birthday just a week after Christmas, that's rolling round alarmingly fast too. We've finally made a decision about the birthday party issue - by moving the party from 2nd January to 12th January it means that more of Emily's friends can come (two being away for New Year) and it also means that we don't have to run around like loonies on New Year's Day trying to get everything ready.

It also means, of course, that Emily gets to enjoy two exciting days instead of just one ;-) When I first hit on the idea of moving the party, she wasn't at all keen for reasons she couldn't really explain, but she's very excited now, bless her heart. It's going to be an Ancient Egypt theme, so I'm busy brainstorming ideas for transforming our big room into an Egyptian tomb ;-)

In the supermarket this morning, Jon bumped into the mother of a friend Emily had at school. She mentioned to him how she always thinks of us as she has to drive past our house every school morning. He innocently remarked that we're usually not up at that time ;-) Not strictly true (well, not always) but it's nice to remind harrassed school Mums sometimes that stressing yourself and your children out trying to get everyone out of the house at an appointed time every day isn't necessarily a positive thing to subject everyone too.

It's been a busy week here: we've got loads and loads of writing deadlines still looming, there was an extra last minute contract from the press agency, more work to do with the hopefully imminent Astrologer's Toolkit book, plus Grandad to drive around to various appointments. Emily went to yoga on Tuesday evening and to tai chi on Thursday morning. We've also been swimming - Emily swam a whole "length" (it's actually a width, 'cos it's a weird shaped pool, but it's 50m) of the pool non-stop :-)))) Very proud of her. She won't win any points in a style contest, as she currently does a weird combination of doggy paddle, breastroke and front crawl all in one (!) and sometimes her legs are angled downwards quite a bit, but she's getting stronger and faster all the time. She also started to learn to swim underwater in the little pool.

We've also had huge internet problems this last week or so, only able to hold a connection for ten minutes at a time, constantly. Big thanks to my Dad who eventually sussed out that it was our long extension phone cable that was the problem and rigged us up with another one :-)

Today we've had friends around for the day; Emily, Mei Lin and Jasmine have giggled themselves silly all day, inbetween a bit of maths and some watercolour mandala painting. Yesterday we'd planned (after a few false starts due to organisational chaos at this end!) to go to see Hazel, Romy and Tansy, but in the end we had to put that off until early next week when we'll be going swimming together and hopefully having a good play and early Christmas craft session for the girls.

Instead, yesterday afternoon Emily and I went out to Hemswell antiques centre, where, as luck would have it, we ended up buying quite a lot of things from a discounted Egyptian stall - just right for Emily's birthday party bags. We also found, again discounted, two one metre tall blow up Egyptian Gods which will help me no end with the somewhat tricky decorating challenges this party is going to present, lol! We were tickled pink with the blow up Gods and spent the rest of the day doing silly voices for them :-))