Christmas Celebration

Firstly I would like to apologise to all the children in the rest of the world.  Santa had to wait for our girls to finally fall asleep last night and finally managed to do his thing only at around 1:30am (yawn!).

We started off our day skyping with my mum and we took the opportunity to open the presents she sent us all the way from South Africa.  Paul, I think you'll like this present my mum sent me :-)  I guess I'll now find out if it is indeed as easy as you say it is...

And later on we had a quick Skype chat with Terence's family.

The girls absolutely loved opening all their presents and were thoroughly spoilt with the presents they received from family, friends, Santa and us.

 

Bianca was extremely excited that Santa finally brought her the cell phone she's been begging for.  I guess Santa thought since she is starting to walk to and from school all by herself that a cell phone might not be such a bad idea.

  
And Maa,  Bianca loved the Times Tables chart that Mrs Clause sent her :-).

 

Today we had some friends sharing the day with us.  There was Peter and Klara.  They are both from Hungary and Peter works with Terence.

Then there was also Wikus and Suret and their daughter Melissa.  Suret and I were together at high school and it was only through Facebook that we discovered a few years ago that we both lived in New Zealand.

Today was a lovely and relaxing day.  The Kapiti Coast put on a beautiful summer day with blue skies and lots of sunshine.

 
We played a few games of Dominion.

And Wikus had lots of fun playing with his present.

Wikus was highly impressed with Terence's Tropical Fruit cider.  Terence's new hobby is to do home brewing.

We decided to do a Christmas dinner rather than a lunch and Suret and I prepared our Christmas feast.  Wikus really liked the pumpkin fritters I made (which is a recipe my mum used to make) and I managed to make my grandmother's fridge tart.

 

Of course we ate way too much so I'm thinking I'll probably have to do quite a bit of work on the exercise front from this coming week again.

We have some tired little girls in our house tonight :-)

Tonight Wikus and Suret and their daughter Melissa will be staying the night and right now we are just quietly watching "Oh Shucks here comes Untag" an old South African movie.

We had a lovely day today.  I hope your day was lovely too!

'Twas the night before Christmas...

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse
Except two little girls as excited as can be
Hoping that soon Santa they'll see

The stockings were ready, milk and cookies put out
Two little girls up and about
Can hardly wait, the night dragging slow
"When will Santa make his big show?"

"Go to sleep now" said mum, "it really is late"
"It's bed time" said dad, "I know it's hard to wait"
"We'll wait up for him" the little girls said
"Quietly here lying in bed"

At some point the little girls drifted to sleep
No more giggles, or talking or waiting to see
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse


In our house tonight we have two extremely excited little girls.  It is now 11:35pm and the girls are still wide awake and can hardly wait for tomorrow morning.  Somehow I think this is going to be a very long night...

Just a little message...

I'm finally starting to catch up a bit.  Slowly but surely.  I feel horribly disorganised and most definitely not ready for Sunday.  Not yet anyway.  I guess it is going to be one of those "if it wasn't for the last minute nothing will ever get done" kind of moments.

Terence doesn't have leave at the moment, but he is very much looking forward to working from home the days between Christmas and New Years and the following week which will again be a short week.  During this time they are replacing all the trains with buses as far as I understand and he was most definitely not looking forward taking the bus all the way to the city.  I'm not really sure exactly how much work Terence will really get done because next week both kids will still be home and the following week while Caitlyn will be going to daycare Bianca will still be home.

Can you believe that it is so close to January already?  For most of it it should be a fairly quiet time for us.  Caitlyn will go back to Daycare from the 4th again (only for a month and a half about before starting big school).  And Bianca is looking forward to Camp Quality from the 17th to 22nd of January.  It is going to be a Harry Potter theme and Bianca cannot wait!  On the 11th we have her next hospital visit.  But I'm not worried about anything so am expecting it to just be routine more than anything else.

Am not sure if I'll have much to blog about the next few days, so want to wish you all a very happy Christmas.

And to those of you spending Christmas without your loved ones, will be keeping you in our thoughts and prayers.  This Christmas is a mixture of happy and sad for me - happy that Bianca is doing so well, that she is simply a normal little girl right now, but feeling really sad for the parents we've met (either in real life or virtually) who lost their kids to this horrible disease or whose kids are currently living on borrowed time. To you all - I pray that you will have strength and comfort during this time.

Snippets of our Monday

• Yesterday we had a lovely time at the Johnsonville Swimming pools.  Terence's company booked it out from 3pm - 6pm and the kids had the best time ever!  

• This morning I had to sort out fights and arguments three times between the girls (and we're only on the first day of the holidays...).  They love each other to bits, but sometimes they get on each others nerves.  And it didn't help that I was feeling rather flat this morning (thankfully they are old enough to entertain each other).

• 6 Days until Christmas and I don't feel 100% ready yet.  Getting there, but not quite.  I better not be this disorganised again next year!  Are you all ready?

• Today I got the most amazing Christmas present ever!  My mum's passport arrived back from immigration with the residence visa sticker inside.  By next year December she'll be here!!!   

• This afternoon my friend Rose and her daughter came for a visit.  And we had a lovely time just catching up.  

And that was pretty much our Monday, hope yours is / was lovely too!

Today 12 years ago...

On the 18th of December 1999 Terence and I got married.  Of course Terence says that if he was in jail for some of the other criminal offence he would have been out by now :-)

Here are some photos.

We used the flowers above the door after our wedding ceremony and took it along to the reception hall where we put it on the bridal table.  My dress was made by my mum and her friend.  I saw a picture in a bridal magazine that I really liked and my mum replicated many of the aspects including sewing hundreds of tiny little beads all over the dress.  My poor mum and her friend spent hours and hours over many weeks making my dress.  They did an amazing job!

 We made all our own invitations.  I found some really nice handmade paper from one of the local craft stores and this worked perfectly.  It was a big job making about 120 - 150 invitations and thankfully some of our friends jumped in and helped.

I most definitely did not want a traditional little man and woman on top of our cake.  The restaurant where we held our reception had mostly an African theme we sort of went along with this theme.  My mum even made wine bottle covers looking like giraffes.  My grandmother baked the cake and my aunt decorated it to go with our African theme.  And I managed to find a lion and lioness to go with our cake (instead of the little man and woman).  Was a mission and a half to try and find a lioness ornament that did not have lion cubs with her.

This was the song that played when we walked into the reception venue:

This was the song that played for our first dance.  Or rather same words, same melody, but our song was faster.  Unfortunately I cannot find the faster version on Youtube. 

Before we got married Terence and I both did some ballroom and Latin American dancing lessons.  So we learned to do some basic steps in the cha-cha, western swing, eastern swing, tango, rumba, samba, foxtron, waltz, merengue, boogie and mambo.  And one of the dances we were okay with was the eastern swing which is a faster dance, but with only a few steps we looked half impressive and so this is what we did for our first dance.