Gingerbreadmania

Gingerbread creations were, well, created. Gingerbread men...



...and Gingerbread women.



Also dinosaurs (or dinosours, depending on which child is spellling).



Not to mention trains.

And of course...


Gingerbread Daleks.

V&A Visit

Today I met up with my friend Julie at the V&A - normally I would not go up to town two days running, but as she lives in California and is only in London until Thursday, exceptions were made...

Disappointingly, as she is a fellow quilter and thus interested in textiles as well, the textiles gallery and the clothing gallery were both shut. (The clothes until 2012, for refurbishment - the textiles, who knows, there was no sign, just a closed door. Sigh.) However, there's still lots of fun stuff to see at the V&A, including the revamped ceramics gallery, which I hadn't yet seen, and which included this lovely little collection of pots and beakers - which reminded me a bit of the view from the window:




I do love chimney pots!

Also found these pieces really interesting...



I did resist taking photos of the billions of other things I liked - one always takes tons of photos in museums, and then never looks at them again!

Birthday...

There was present opening (this is an Obi Wan Kenobi outfit for his teddy bear),



there was travelling up to London to eat in Gourmet Burger Kitchen (walking past London Eye & Big Ben)




...and through Covent Garden where this gentleman was singing La Donna e Nobile, among other things...



I looked in a few windows, and eventually, we found ourselves here:



It was excellent!

8 years ago...

I do have a photo of him newly born in hospital, but frankly, it's not a great photo - this one, which is probably a few days later, is much better...

Happy Birthday to my (not so) little birthday boy!

Volcano, Bridge

The Island of St Lucia now has a volcano on it. I'm going to try to flog Olivia's model to the St Lucia tourist board when she's finished with it...



One of Sarah's. Done from a brief glimpse of a scene on telly, then drawn from memory.

Welcome to St Lucia...

...I wish. It would be nice to be somewhere warm. This was the state of the model of St Lucia when I got home - subsequently, it acquired a volcano. A second one is under consideration...

Sofa bed

I promise there is an actual sofa bed under Alex's collection of stuffed toys. Of course, these aren't the really special 20 or so, who live on his bed itself...

Still life with packaging

Sarah's art assignments are sometimes a little odd. But then, perhaps teenagers would rather draw packaging than fruit.

Mickey Mouse March

Olivia's band had a concert tonight - postponed Christmas concert from before Christmas - we got snowed out before. Luckily, they dropped the Christmas music. I promise the flutes are actually playing here, and you could hear them in person, though the clip seems to be all brass...

Blast from the past

I never seem to blog much over here - guess our life isn't that exciting! But recently, I've been organising old photos - I had a ton of CDs from the days when you sent your film off to be developed and could get it back on CD for only a little extra, so I decided to move all those photos (24 per CD!!) onto the computer and then back them up with the rest of the photos on my memory stick. Consequently, I've been having a look at some of them, and thought I'd share some from time to time. This one is from December 2002 - I remember fairly clearly as we were going to a wedding and I was about a million months pregnant (ok, about 8) with Alex. The girls looked gorgeous, though, even if Mummy looked a bit like a beached whale...

Merry Christmas

Some lovely Christmas bunting, which was a gift from my BQL (British Quilting List) secret santa...



Alex waiting to open presents - I had to threaten to take the presents away to get him to pose without sticking out his tongue. Sigh.



The girls won't like this photo, I'm sure!



Ready to eat.

Merry Christmas all!

Christmas in the West End

The kids and I had our annual trip up to town to look at the Christmas windows and pop in a few shops and browse around. Last year, we missed the windows as we weren't able to go up to town until the 27th, and the main shops (Harrods, Selfridges) had their windows papered over with sale signs by then - very disappointing! So this year, we made sure to get up BEFORE Christmas.

Harrods' windows were quite good this year - some years they have been a little disappointing, I thought - this year, there was a Peter Pan theme, with lots of little faeries, feathers and other miscellaneous bling.



We loved some of the little details like these gorgeous birds (Cloisonne, perhaps?) - there were some hedgehogs in the same style on the ground of the displays - quite small, the birds were maybe 4 or 5 inches beak to tail and the hedgehogs were even smaller. Lovely.



I liked these two pirates, both of whom were wearing slippers in the display - and I also liked the reflection of the passersby in the window behind (it's very hard to photograph windows, even with the flash off...)



This is the mermaid from Peter Pan - her tail was superb, but I didn't really manage to get a good photo of it, due to angels and window glass and stuff.



We then walked along Knightsbridge to Harvey Nicks, where the windows were just kind of bizarre, but in a fun, holiday-type way.

After that, we popped up to Hyde Park Corner, debated poking through the Winter Wonderland, decided against it and instead grabbed a bus to Oxford Street to check out the windows at Selfridges.



This, I think, was my favourite, though there were a lot of good ones with funky monster toys and stuff, too.




And we liked the Barbie Christmas tree.



This photo was taken inside Selfridges - standing at the bottom of the escalators, looking up. The disco balls raised and lowered (some of them, anyway). I always like to hit the Christmas shop at Selfridges as everything is at least 50 per cent off by this time of year. We always pick up a few ornaments. This year, we got a snowglobe with a polar bear inside for less than half price.

Finally, a long walk down Oxford Street to Oxford Circus, where we headed down Regent Street to have a poke around Hamley's.



The lights in Regent Street were great, I though - these big nets of lights, which looked abstract from a distance, but from underneath, were obviously stars. Fun!

Who needs presents?

All you really need for hours of enjoyment is a rather large box (this one had a chair from Ikea in it). This box is big enough for two of the three kids to get into at once, provided one of them is Alex... (I've just been corrected by a small boy who is sitting reading over my shoulder - apparently, both the girls can actually fit in this box at the same time. So there you go - once again, Mummy knows nothing and children know everything...)

Christmas baking

Here's this year's selection. Some more successful than others (the knack - in the paper cases - didn't set. Tastes gorgeous, but is rather messy).

Blizzard

About 11.30am. Luckily, it only snowed this hard for about an hour. We still had a pretty good amount of cover (6 inches, maybe). It was supposed to start again later, but so far, it hasn't. Which is fine. Though my eldest, who still has a day and a half of school before her Christmas holidays is hoping for more tomorrow!

Mmm, Starbucks

Some Christmas decorating was done

...amidst all the coughing and tiredness, we did eventually get things a bit more festive!

More snow

This is my back garden this morning - though actually, it's still snowing at least a little, so who knows what it will look like in another hour or two. It's very fine snow, though, so it might not make any difference...




Here's a photo of it coming down on the way home from school Monday - believe it or not, this photo was taken at about 4pm. Or earlier. I know it looks like night time!




We had a visitor to our garden this morning - he didn't find anything to eat, though, so he left. But he had to go over the other side of the fence, which is a bit lower, after trying to get to the top of this one several times. The cats can do it, but he's a bit bigger & heavier!

Foggy morning

It was very foggy yesterday.








The sun was trying to break through...

Visit to Costa Coffee

Meant to post this before, but the pictures were on my phone... Alex had a Rocky Road Cupcake. This will surprise no one who knows him.



But really, we both just liked the sign!