Less than 10 days 'til Christmas!

I cannot believe it is Christmas!  We have a busy one planned...  For the past few years I've done the Christmas cooking / hosting, which suits The Daddy and I just fine.  We like specific foods and certain ways of doing the Christmas meal, so having it at home gives us Ultimate Control!  And The Daddy loves hosting because it means we don't have to drive anywhere.  However this year, we are doing the 'drive around' style Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, we are having my parents, sister and aunt and uncle (my mother's youngest brother and sister, who are around my age) over to our house for lunch.  For such a small group, I think I'll do a rolled turkey-stuffing thingamajig, on the Webber, with roast vegetables and of course pudding and custard to follow.  I made 6 puddings this year (I make them traditionally, with suet), so there are plenty to go 'round during the season.

On Christmas Day, in the morning, my parents and sister (9 years old) are coming to our house to open presents and see Tabitha get confused by Christmas.  I suppose I'll glaze a ham the night before and do ham and cheese croissants for breakfast, and perhaps some egg nog.  Our local butcher, Glenferrie Gourmet Meats, stocks nice free range hams.

For lunch on Christmas Day, we are going to my uncle's house (my mother's slightly younger brother) to celebrate with mum, dad, my sister, my uncle, his wife and their two little girls, my aunt, her partner, her three children, my grandmother and her husband, and all of my uncle's wife's family too!  That should be fun, lots of little girls running around.  I am taking the pudding and the custard.  The largest pudding I do is 4kg and easily feeds over 20 people, but I think I will need approximately 6 litres of custard!  That is a LOT of eggs.

After the lunch, we are going to The Daddy's aunt's home for dinner, to celebrate with all of his family.  It will be lovely for Tabitha to get to see so much family in one day!

For Boxing Day, we are celebrating with The Daddy's father's family, and Tabitha will get to meet new parts of the family who she has never met before.  Believe it or not, the day AFTER Boxing Day, we are celebrating once again, with my father's mother and sister.  This time, we are going to Melba at The Langham.  The Langham used to be a client of mine, so I dined there quite a lot.  It really is a great place - it is an 'interactive dining experience' which basically means a buffet, but lots of dishes are cooked to order at chef stations, including a Japanese chef preparing sushi and sashimi to order.

In other news...

My gorgeous new woven wrap, my Vatanai Maruyama, arrived, and I am slooooowly getting the hang of it.  Apparently it's like skiing - tricky to get the hang of to start, but once you pick it up it comes naturally nice and quickly.  It was VERY hard to get a photo, since Tabitha loves trying to grab the camera, but I think it's such a pretty wrap:

To be honest, the photos don't really do the colours justice, it is a rainbow of beautiful purples, pinks and dusty shades.  How cute is my little cockatoo?!

In the mail today, Tabitha got some mail from Paris - her 'Great Aunt' Penelope, my mother's friend, a fellow ballet teacher, and a long time friend of mine, sent a very sweet postcard, wishing her 'a little kiss from Cupid':

Speaking of ballet - my parents gave Tabitha some sweet ballet slippers as a little baptism gift - I know there are a lot of adult women out there who would like a pair of these in a large size!

The aforementioned Penelope is trying to convince me that I ought to send Tabitha to ballet classes at her South Yarra school, instead of to my mother's school nearer to us.  Hmmm.  Well, if Tabitha really loves ballet she can do classes at both schools I suppose - although if she's anything like me, she will be dreadful at ballet and will be expelled several times for naughty behaviour!

The Plague

Argh.  Sick house.  The Daddy has a dreadful cold.  Tabitha has a cough, though is otherwise in good spirits.  I am feeling a little off, but seem to be treading water - I feel no worse today than I did yesterday, so hopefully my body is kicking it.

Tabitha is SIX MONTHS OLD today.  Shocking.  It seems like a few weeks ago that I was holding this tiny, helpless baby in the middle of the night, gentle mewing noises, still smelling like fresh baby and birth.  Yet at the same time it seems like I have had her forever; I've grown another limb, and I cannot imagine being without it.  We have our 6-month health checkup today, so I will report back with height/weight findings.  Last time she was on the 99th percentile for height (super-duper long) and around the 65th percentile for weight (so thin-ish compared to her length).  6 months is a time when breastfed babies tend to naturally slow down their gains, so I wouldn't be surprised if she's dropped down a little from those high centiles.

Now that she is a Big Grown-up Baby of 6 months old, I tried introducing a potential allergen into her diet - so far she's only had meat, fruit and vegetables.  This morning we tried some toasted white bread, cut into fingers.  She was thoroughly impressed to be eating the same thing as Mummy for breakfast - she kept squealing and waving her toast at me and grinning when she saw my toast!  She sucked and gummed each of the four toast fingers and it seems that she ingested some.  Soggy bits of toast kept sticking to her sleeves, and she seemed quite alarmed by these barnacles, trying to shake them off.

I have noticed that Tabitha is growing out of some of her summer clothes already, which is frustrating!  This is because I bought a lot of her summer wardrobe in September, when she was three months, because we were going on holidays for two weeks to Port Douglas and Palm Cove.  She still has lots of nice things that will fit her for the rest of summer, but some of my favourite pieces are getting too small, which is very sad!  Hopefully we have another girl baby!

I've started booking our accommodation for our US trip in May.  New York will be AKA Central Park (though I am still umming and ahhing over whether we should split the stay, doing one week there and one week in Greenwich Village).  Boston I think we will stay in a suite at The Lenox, which looks really nice.  DC I'm still unsure about - I have on my list The Dupont Hotel, The Georgetown Inn, Morrison Clark Hotel, Hotel Rouge and a few others.  Not sure whether we should stay in Georgetown or closer to the monuments etc.  I do love Georgetown...  At any rate, I'm starting to get quite excited about the US trip, which is for the entire month of May.

Oh and in just a few weeks, early January, we are holidaying in Tasmania for 10 days!  That will be brilliant, hopefully escaping any Melbourne heat and enjoying some down time with The Daddy.  We are staying in Launceston, Freycinet and Hobart.