Blogging the 12 days of christmas. 4

is there a more enticing smell on a summer's evening than barbecue?

I'm sitting on my balcony with a lemon squash trying to work out where the barbecue smells (especially the onions frying and the garlic bread) are coming from. If I can work out which neighbour it is i'm going over there to introduce myself.

Have established it's not the neighbour with the baby elephant, which is a shame cos i want to check out the elephant close up.

Not particularly christmassy but brings back memories of summer holidays camping on the foreshore at McCrae where (on non total fireban days) dad would be in the charge of cooking, which usually meant us & the campers on the next site eating (almost burnt) sausages in bread.

Good times

Blogging the 12 days of christmas. 3

A festivus miracle.

Since I fractured my shoulder one of the tasks i've found hardest to do is dress myself.

In the 5 months since 'Fi V Tree' I have managed to reduce the time taken to don a short sleeved tshirt from 45 minutes down to less than 1 minute. (that is with minimal pain).

Like with tshirts the most comfortable (& least painful) clothes to dress in are anything with an elastic waist (currently leggings and skirts)

Anyhow on Christmas day I achieved something that I hadn't been able to do since July.

I wore a dress.

And I put it on all by myself. And it only took 30 minutes to do it.

My family was so proud...

My sister was on standby to come round early to help me if needed but all i needed her for was to do up my necklace & bracelet clasps.

Mind you undressing was a bit (lot) more problematic - it took me 45 minutes to get the dress off and required painkillers to achieve.

Still it was good to be wearing something other than my usual uniform of tshirt, leggings, & elastic waisted skirt.

I try to find a positive (and journal it) for my shoulder everyday.

The Christmas Day Dress is a major positive as far as I am concerned.

Blogging the 12 days of christmas. 2

so a couple of days before the 18th december (the day we were having our family christmas) i was surfing the interwebbys looking for info (for a genealogy post i was writing) on one of the primary schools i attended.

as i was wading through the search results i came across a link to a pdf about the football club my father started in 1969 so that my then 5 year old brother could get a game of footy.

The pdf had photos of dad in it (and photos of 2 of my brothers). From 1969 until we moved to Sale in 1973 the footy club was an important part of our family life.

Anyway the pdf was 45 pages so I downloaded, had 6 copies printed, had each one bound and gave each member of the family one for Christmas.

I even gave a copy to my youngest brother who wasn't born during the 'Donny Heights' era.

We were all involved with the club. 2 brothers played for the 'tackers'. Dad was secretary &mum ran the match day canteen.

my sister and I were club statisticians, helped out in the canteen, occasionally ran the boundary and did anything else that needed doing.

My mum was so rapt to be given the book. It prompted a lot of reminiscing, family stories and anecdotes over the christmas table.

I'm going to contact the club and see if i can get copies of their photos and offer them copies of our photos of the club.

Blogging the 12 days of christmas. 1

We had our official family christmas last sunday as brother 1, s.i.l 1, nephew 1 & niece 1 were going to perth for Christmas.

I drew S.I.L 1 in the family kris kringle and gave her a bottle of her favourite perfume. The nephews were easy.

I bought mr 14 an itunes card and a 'cool' tshirt.

Master 6 got some beach clothes (he's having a growth sport), some gel pens, a book about science and a zac power book.

Master 4 has requested a 'very fast' scooter. Apparently his existing scooter doesn't go as fast as master 6's new (in october) razor scooter. I suspect that the weight to speed ratio of tall, solidly built 6 yr old versus average height, slightly built 4 yr old has something to do with it but master 4 says no it's the scooter. So i got him a razor scooter (and it goes very fast).

Almost 12 yr old niece received a dance bag and a bling case for her ipod touch.