A Christmas Tea Party and Planning Session

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In the space of the next two weeks, I have a massive list of things to get through.
A boy's 8th birthday part tomorrow with no less than 17 children.
A family party on Sunday (the actual birthdate), to sing Happy Birthday - which means 2 cakes to be made.
I also have prizegivings and morning teas at school next week, and a Christmas Party on Saturday night that I am hosting. Following that, we are packing up for a Christmas at the beach, and all the little things in between, such as hospital appointments, sailing lessons, baking and wrapping and shopping that need to get done.... so last night Rob and I sat down for our first, of many, planning sessions
Homemade hot chai, and Christmas cake from Bakers Delight.....

And before we knew it, it was half gone already! Ooops.
But it was so easy. Light and nutty and spicy and fruity, it was so easy to have another slice. If you don't really like heavy fruit cake, this would be perfect.

Today, Alice and I finished it off with a couple of mini Christmas cake muffins. Our own little Christmas tea-party. There was a powercut here, right through the city, in the middle of a storm too, and at 2pm in the afternoon it was a little dark and brooding for this time of year, so nice to warm it up with hot tea (and milo) and Christmassy food.

Alice rather got into it!

My Favourite Christmas Tree Ornaments This Year

I am loving pinterest.com this year. It is giving me so many ideas for Christmas and for my Christmas party coming up in two weeks time.

I saw this on pinterest and loved it.

Source: personalizationmall.com via Rachel on Pinterest

But unfortunately with the cost of postage and the exchange rate, it's not going to be possible. If I only had one child, then I could have done it, but......

So I got to thinking  how I could do it in an easier and cheaper way, when I saw these balls at Farmers Department Store at half price, and they were just crying out for a Sharpie pen to decorate them.

So this is what I made! Here is the front.....

And here is the back...

It may not be as professional-looking as the one I pinned on pinterest, but at least it records the important information. And I kind of love it. And I'm thinking that next year I can get a different coloured ball. White and red is my theme this year.

The other ornament that I am loving this year is this ...

The Christchurch city cathedral, now lying in ruins thanks to the earthquake. I ordered this almost exactly a year ago from The Christmas Hut at Northlands Mall, and it didn't arrive until after we had moved here to Tauranga. I've had it sitting on my kitchen windowsill all year, and now it is on the tree.

And here is my tree. This is for our Christmas Party, as we are going up to the beach house for Christmas Day, and taking a smaller white Christmas tree for decorating up there for our beach Christmas.

Christmas Card Photo Shoot

I aim to send out Christmas cards at least every 2 years, and if I get it done every year.... well, that's a bonus.

In late October we were sitting around one weekend morning, and it was a glorious day outside. One of those perfect Spring days with no wind and only sunshine and the trees with their fresh Spring covering and the lovely new grass and flowers just starting to bloom, and Rob and I looked at each other and both said, 'let's do the family photo shoot this afteroon."

It's never an easy thing to get four children all smiling and cooperating at the same time, and believe me at the end of this, we had some grumpy faces!

But we went up to Rob's brother's place to take the pictures. They have a beautiful garden, and we were looking after their elderly cat, Jag, while they were away overseas.

For the family photo shoot, I put the camera on the timer. All the kids wanted to have a go at pushing the timer button and running back to lie on the grass with the rest of us. We did laugh so hard quite often - and this photo is actually my favourite of all the pictures I took that day...

"Hello Jag!"

I also took the opportunity to take individual photos of the children.

And because you've seen Alice's photos in this post, here is a candid shot of her.

And here she is reading the Farmers Toy Catalogue...

 

From the individual shots, we moved on to a few group shots - but that's when everyone started getting grumpy.  Still, they did quite well, I think.

This was a bad-lighting failure photo, so I put a special edit on it, and now I love it.

And this is the family group shot we eventually chose - the one that was the closest to having everyone with decent smiles on their faces... (I couldn't resist putting a little edit on this bloggy version).

Once it was all done, we came home, and then tried to find a card format. There is so much to choose from. My favourite sites are snapfish.co.nz and shutterfly.com. We actually went with shutterfly in the end, but we had fun choosing. Here are some of our finalist choices...

And this is the card we went with!