just another morning here

… because we have had such a lovely few days at school, and I have a fab set of photos to prove it! Unfortunately a lot of the students have been off ill, so they’ve missed all the fun While that admittedly does make life a bit easier for us all, we’re genuinely missing them and want them back. Today we baked stained glass window Christmas cookies, had our Christmas dinner, which included re-filling party poppers with flour and shaving foam and having a very raucous time (no alcohol involved either!), which the kids thought was hilarious. We raced wind-up reindeer from our crackers, watched a DVD and had a quick practice for our carol service tomorrow. Just lovely. And here’s a photo of yesterday’s sock snowmen – a hit all round.

Dead easy, too – acquire a white sports sock (I bought mine but if you have odd ones lying around they’ll do!) and paint the elastic part. When that is dry, fill with rice up to the heel, and tie a knot in the top. Fold the elastic part back over the knot and this makes the hat, then simply add a scarf to form the head and body, and decorate. It was a hit all round.

Before all of that we had a delicious breakfast for Abbie’s birthday, and she looked pretty excited to see everything in her Chemistry set – she’s dashing off out to Panto rehearsals in a minute so we won’t see much of her this evening but she’s had a good day Happy Birthday!

The music is simply the best bit about Christmas. Everything from full on choral carols to cheesy pop tracks. Amy Grant and Michael W Smith remain my ultimate favourites, with the soundtrack from The Preacher’s Wife coming a very close second. I may even have to listen to Psalty’s Christmas Calamity once before the season is over It’s a week of carol services/concerts etc. and I love it all – unfortunately won’t get to go to Josiah’s as it’s in school time, but hey ho – I will have to send my bah humbug husband to listen to it on my behalf!

I’m also loving this last week of term at work. I have stacks of paperwork type teacher stuff to catch up on, which I probably could do some of this week – but I have decided to leave it all until the holidays and actually enjoy the final week of term with the pupils in class – they are a lot of fun to be with when you’re just doing Christmassy fun stuff and not trying to ‘work’ too hard. Today we papier mached the last layer of a giant beach ball sized orange (we’re having a Christingle service and making a huge Christingle to be ‘made’ at the front of the service as it goes on). We also made place mats for our class Christmas party, made party food and ate it for lunch, then had a DVD in our little sensory area. Well, some of us did; I took one student down to watch his brother in the rehearsal for the lower school nativity – my excuse to get to see it!

Tomorrow I’ve agreed to have one of my favourite (no I know you’re not meant to have favourites; they’re all my favourite, honest!) children from lower down the school in with us, as she Really Doesn’t Want To Be In The Play and is very vocal about it. I love her to bits, so she can come and make a sock snowman with us – we’re having a snow day tomorrow. After we’ve finished with oranges and Christingle making we’re going to have the fake snow out to play with and make snowmen pictures and sock snowmen. And finish the party food, since we had loads left over!
I have so many lovely activities planned and we’re never going to get time to do them all – but never mind, it’s going to be a lovely week. We’re playing fab Christmas music in class all day every day, too, so everyone is singing along and very jolly with it. And the paperwork can wait

It’s the most wonderful time of the year … with the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you be of good cheer! But that was before they tried to find a parking space in town – not one but two days running – which was most definitely not a very cheery experience! We cheated today and parked at the Cathedral – well, some of the parking was in support of chorister duties!

It’s been a weekend of concerts and general ‘gearing up to Christmas’ activities; it’s the first Sunday in Advent, and from now until Christmas it is getting a bit daft with concerts and services here there and everywhere. Anyway, very proud of the children who have coped with a weekend full of it, and not much downtime inbetween. I did video the cello/piano concert but then realised that my fingers must have touched the microphone because the sound is rubbish so I’m not posting that, and the best bit of Anna’s was this little out-take anyway. I did have to laugh when she played the piece, as I had *never* heard it before in my life – so who knows when she practised it!

Abbie had some time at home today but Josiah was out all day with a service/suzuki group sandwich! Anna was involved too, so she came on a bus in to join us once she had finally found her music I managed not to put my finger in front of the microphone today, so here are a few snippets of the Suzuki group concert that they were practising for last week, and here is the big kids’ quartet. We stuck Anna on a bus back home afterwards and stayed in town for the Advent service at the Cathedral.

I did get some work done this morning but still have more to do, as well as lots of laundry to fold … such is a Sunday night with no snow on the horizon!

Time to make way for New Year! We took the tree down today and I must say I wondered why I’d bothered to put it up, since we had hardly anything underneath it anyway! Still, it was sparkly, I suppose.

We’ve done Not Very Much this week, some shopping in town, a lot of lazing around (definitely turned into a teenager house as we’ve only managed to be up by 10am on the one day I had a friend coming over!), eating, playing games, but it’s all been good.

Anyway, realised that I’d forgotten to blog this vid while it was still in season, but better late than never, a montage of the kids’ Christmas music this year, only the choir stuff unfortunately missing.

So the only debate for tonight is: twenty-ten or two thousand and ten? I’m using both at the moment! Whichever it is, I hope your celebrations tonight are fun and that the year ahead is filled with good things, challenges, excitement, and geocaches