We had a letter each from Santa.

Yeah, a real one that the postman bought and everything.

He seemed to know an awful lot about us, and told us that he was doing final checks on the sleigh and that he had a new 'Santa-nav'

And he told me that he likes to tell lots of jokes and was about to put my presents on the sleigh ready for delivery. Exciting or what!!!

I've been a little bit concerned with an advert on telly though, it says that because of global warming santa's take-off runway is melting. Mum says not to worry about it and Dad says it's okay as Santa goes to hot countries too where there isn't any snow at all and he manages just fine. Having said all this, i'm not so sure about the whole Santa thing really. First of all, I can't see how he has the time to get around to everyone in just one night (unless he stops time somehow?) and secondly Mum is being very protective of whats under the bed...makes me very suspicious that does...is she hiding..............Presents perhaps? I think i'll go along with it for now all the same.

We had our school nativity play on Wednesday morning, Mum got there nice and early and bagged front row seats for Ellis and Dad. I was so pleased they were at the front for once and gave them a big old wave.

I gave a big shout for Ned as well, he liked that.

I got to sit next to Louise at the back, we were quite a double act during the song and dance numbers and I was really getting into it:

I even sang the songs that were for the other classes as well. The whole thing went really well, so well that Mum decided to even have a little cry.

We had our school Christmas dinner afterwards. It was really good although not as good as Dad's it has to be said (there was only one pig in a blanket for a start). We had crackers and Christmas music though so it was still good fun.

And what did I get to do while Ned was enjoying his day at school? Well after nursery (where I had soaked myself playing with water) Dad and I went to B&Q and Halfords to buy various light bulbs....wow!
Thursday was non uniform Christmas party day. i didn't win the dancing contest and quite frankly it ruined the whole day for me. I'd tried really hard and got nowhere. Dad's pep talk wasn't that inspirational to be honest and did little to help.

We went into town in the evening and we ended up going to Mum's office for a bit. It was brilliant, we punched loads of holes in paper and did some good drawing.

Andy came round for tea in the evening, which of course meant Mum and Dad were going out. Mum went to the ballet, and didn't take me!

Dad went to the pub for his work Christmas party.

We had a great time with Andy as always, thanks Andy.

So friday then was our last day of term. I made sure I told all the teachers and kids about the Santa tracking system on the NORAD website, they loved the idea of that. It was also Mrs Douglas' last day as our teacher as she's moving to the junior school after Christmas. She gave all of us a little cuddle as we left for the day. We weren't sad for long though as Hugo and Matice were coming home with us (due to the early finish).

We had to go and get Matice from Neds old classroom in reception, he was pretty pleased to see me (and the others I suppose).

We got home and went crazy for ten minutes, bombing about and jumping down the stairs before we settled down for a game of Wii Party:

While Matice and I played with Poppy, I think he's over his fear of cats now.

Once they had gone we were pretty tired out so we watched our Mr Men and Noddy Christmas DVD's and a had a snooze.

Dad got a christmas present at work with two pretend poo's in it. They were very lifelike. So lifelike in fact that I thought Poppy had had a poo on my chair when I went to sit up for dinner. I couldn't believe it when Mum picked it up and chucked it at me!

The weekend then, and it snowed...quite a lot!

So once we'd had some breakfast we kitted up and headed out with the sledge to Northcroft.

Andy turned up for a go too, which was good for pushing and pulling purposes:

I loved the two goes I had down the hill but pretty soon I decided my feet were cold and i'd had enough.

So after Mum had a go with me she took Ellis back to the car for some warmth.

Yeah, she put her gloves on my feet which made me look really funny but was lovely and warm.

The boys stuck it out for a bit longer but were soon enough back at the car.

Once we were home Dad finally got the Christmas tree sorted out, about time too:

Here we are snipping it out of it's bag.

We decided which side looked best (a rather difficult task as it turned out) and slid it into position ready to be decorated.

After a nap of course.

I stayed up really late to watch 'Take me out' I love that show but feel sorry for the man if all the lights go out and he goes off alone.

Nothing much happened on Sunday as we were waiting to go to the Panto in the afternoon. It was a good turnout for this one, Auntie Christine, Auntie Trish, Andy, Owen, Hannah and Laura with her little bump. My first Panto then and I loved it, totally lapped it up and sat on the edge of my seat, wide eyed for the whole thing. I was so good and enjoyed it so much they said I could go to the ballet with the girls next year!

Monday then, Mum was off in the morning.

No nursery for me then! I made the most of it by having an epic lie in.

While I played Lego Star Wars on the Wii, my new favourite winter activity. I am actually addicted to it I think, but it is brilliant.

We had a craft morning with Mum yesterday:

Made a nice santa bag:

In the afternoon it was decided that it was high time we built a snowman:

He's a pretty good effort I think:

After that it was my nursey Christmas sing song. I'd missed the last few rehearsals but I didn't need them really as I have bags of natural talent. I got to nursery in plenty of time to get changed into my fancy new Christmas fairy outfit and get into position for my performance:

We were all very good and it was really fun to do with all the mum's and dad's there, the room was packed!

Even I quite enjoyed it and decided i'd sing along too.

We headed into town afterwards for a bit of food shopping and I managed to save Christmas by finding a large untapped seam of Yule log.

My good run of trampolining club came to an abrupt end last wednesday when we got to Northcroft to be told that all sessions were finished until after christmas. We thought better of standing about arguing about it like some of the other Mums and went for a play in the park instead. We saw a cheeky little squirrel as well, running along the fence and then off up a tree, I loved that.
I came home from school and got back on with my christmas card writing. I'm upto 19 cards from my friends now!
When we went to pick Mum up from work we didn't go straight home, we went to the market place instead...to have a ride with Santa in his horsedrawn sleigh:



We had a lovely time riding around the market place and waving to everyone:

Santa told me I need to tidy my room too, it's almost like he can see all my mess somehow?

I had an unexpected treat on Thursday morning when Mum had a morning off to look after a leaky radiator. We had to wait for the plumber man to come and take it off without letting hundreds of litres of water slosh everywhere. I was really rather interested in what he was doing.
While all this was going on, I was off on my school trip to the panto in Basingstoke at the Anvil. We had a double decker coach to take us and I got to sit on the top deck so things got off to a good start. When we got there my teacher asked me if i'd like to go up on the stage, so of course I said yes! I wanted Teagan to come up with me but she didn't fancy it for some reason? So anyway, during the show I got to go up on stage with none other than PC Plum (out of Balamory) for a few questions (Name, School, what i wanted for christmas) and to do a bit of a dance routine for a song. I loved it of course, especially all my mates giving me the thumbs up sign all the way through. I got some really cool colouring books and a puzzle book with plenty of word searches in it....result. There was also of course the bad fairy in the story, Abi Titmuss apparently...I liked her. The teachers couldn't wait to tell Dad what i'd been up to when he came to pick me up.

We're well and truly in the Christmas spirit at School, we had our Christmas Bazaar on friday afternoon.

We always love the Christmas Bazaar. The first thing we got involved in was like a treasure hunt where you had to find 10 christmassy stamps around the school grounds. Once you had collected them all you could claim your prize of some sweets!

Yeah, we loved this, I don't think there was a prize on offer for fastest completion but the speed I was running around the grounds I would certainly have been in with a shout if there was.

There was plenty of other games and things to get involved in too of course, I just liked wandering about the school though to be honest, getting a feel for it for when I start myself next year.

After we'd had our fill of home made cakes and sweets, bought back the fudge that I made in class last week and spent all of Dad's money we rounded off the afternoon with a trip to see Santa in his grotto. We were almost the last ones of the day to go in so we were hoping he hadn't promised all the good toys to everyone else.

Ned wanted to go in alone so I went with dad, which was just as well as I made him do pretty much all the talking.

Auntie Christine was coming round to babysit in the evening, obviously that was going to be cool.

Yes, she arrived bearing christmas goodies of course, we made some cards and played Christmas snap.

We were so enthused with the christmas snap that we had a game in bed with Mum and Dad on Saturday morning.

Before we got headed for town to see the ice sulptors.

They had a massive great big lump of slippery, shiney cold ice and they were chipping away at it trying to turn it into the shape of a man (Jack O'Newbury by all accounts). I was intrigued by the whole thing really, like how they were doing it, how they got the ice into town in the forst place and who had a big enough freezer to make it at all?

Rather brilliantly we were allowed to help and have a go for ourselves:

I really got a taste for it:

And could quite happily spent the entire afternoon chipping away, especially once i'd managed to convince the man to lend me his lovely warm waterproof gloves to wear as well:

We didn't get to see the finished article as it was taking a while, but i'm sure it will be in the paper on Thursday.

We had more pressing issues to attend to anyway, like our christmas tree.

Yeah, we went round to Alan and Hayleys as they we were going over to Yattendon together. Alan was playing a game called Call of Duty Black Ops on his PS3....it was awesome. Guns, explosions, blood and guts and bad language. I'd never seen anything quite like it on my DS or the Wii thats for sure!

Anyway, the main event was of course tree shopping, as usual me, Ned and Mum settled on pretty much the first one we saw while Dad spent ages rooting about through hundreds of trees trying to find the perfect specimen:

We got it in the bag of the car with no problems at all, unlike Alan and Hayley who had to shoe horn their monster tree into the back of the Gayo....

We got out and about for a little while on Sunday with a visit to the Discovery Centre in Thatcham. The playground was good as always but the lake was really smart....

......as a lot of it was frozen! We fed some ducks with some bread donated from someone else's mum (we were not organised enough to bring our own):

Quack!

We marvelled at the birds standing on the ice out towards the middle of the lake:

Mum took an arty picture with the sun shining off the water:

And we headed off for a lap, which turned out to be well worth the trip as the ice on the opposite side was really thick. We had great fun throwing twigs and stones onto it, watching them slide off across the ice and make funny echoey noises if thrown really hard.

When we got home we had a lovely snooze before Dad finally gave in and we went and out up the outside lights.

Yes, we were most helpfull, even if we did leave all the doors open and nearly froze Mum to death.

Today was the first day of our school nativity play, Dad recieved two glowing reports of my performance from two of the Mum's in the playground at home time (one of which was a music teacher and everything). I can't wait to do it all again tomorrow.

But even more exciting than that was our christmas disco after school. I had my snazzy new shirt to wear and I was raring to go. We had cool music (Black Eyed Peas, Cheryl Cole of course), sweets, crisps, free drinks and glowing bracelets. What more could we want?

A swift video to finish with this week I think:

Still managing to go trampolining, there were four of us this week so I got to share my trampoline with another little girl which was lovely. As usual I was used as the class instructor and pulled off my best moves (seat drop, tuck jump, scissors, star jumps and twists. As a result we only got quarter of an hour in Bumpers afterwards. It turned out to be plenty of time to get Dad up to the top of the climbing frame before I cleared off into the distance leaving him to make the twisty and difficult descent alone.

I took my lovely Nativity book that Nanny bought me years ago to school on Wednesday so we could read it in class. It's a really nice pop up one and everyone else seemed to like it too.

It wasn't all brilliant at school though, I sucked the end of a permanent marker pen for a dare and then my 'friend' Ellen told me that I would die in three days time. I was pretty worried about this by bedtime but Mum managed to convince me i'd be okay (i've managed to last a week so far so I think i'm over the worst of it anyway).

I bought my delicious gingerbread man home from nursery on Thursday. I told Dad that there was a bit for me, him, Mum and Ned but by the time we pulled into Tesco carpark i'd sort of eaten the whole thing myself. Well, he was delicious and beautifully decorated it seemd a shame not to wolf down the lot.

Of course it had snowed a little bit too, not enough to get us truly excited like last winter but there was enough to slide around on and have a snowball fight after school with the Halfords.

I had a very uncharacteristic wobble at breakfast club on Friday morning and got proper worked up and didn't want to go. It made things a little bit hard for mum I think but she needn't have worried as I got over it really quickly and it was all forgotten about until Dad asked me if everything was okay, and then mum got home from work and asked me all over again.

We took the cat to the vet for her jabs in the afternoon, she did a poo in her box just as we set off in the car...it smelled really bad. Poor cat, she mustn't have liked Dad's driving very much that's all I can say. I was really good at looking after the cat while she was on the vets table and kept stroking her while she was being prodded and poked at. I also answered all the vets questions about how the cat was doing and what she was eating and drinking so I was very helpful.

When I got home from school I got the choice of baking or christmas card making....Card making it was! (Well, Dad and Ellis had only just been shopping and we were well stocked on sweet goods). We got all the shiny card and glue and sticky shapes out, lovely!

Yeah, I really enjoyed it too, Ned really is an inspiration for my art work.

I was sooooo tired that I fell asleep in the car on the way to collect Mum from work and i was so tired that I slept through tea and then got carried to bed where I slept right through to the morning.

While Ned was in bed snoozing I got the Mum, Dad and the Wii to myself. We played Wii party, we had a controller each and I won! Perfect.

Saturday was JJ's day, we hadn't been for aaaaaaaaages so we were well up for it.

Here's a picture we haven't had for a while, me on the blower:



My hair still looks cool on this.

We had a great time, I tool Ellis on a guided tour of the big stuff now she's big enough to climb properly.

Yes, I love my new found scrambling ability honed in Bumpers on Wednesday afternoons. I'm not quite as quick as Ned though and i'm quite happy to explore at my own pace.

I made a friend, Evan, we went off exploring and dropping down from the top of the big slide.

We even got to have lunch there, it must be winter desperation kicking in.

We called into Sainsbury's on the way back to pick up some stuff for sunday on the way back.

And I got to buy myself a rather smashing christmas fairy outfit that i'll no doubt be modelling at every oppurtunity over the festive period!

We made a mk2 chocolate cake when we got home, this time with Mum's input over the chocolate choice for the icing, she certainly knows her chocolate.

The chocolate cake? it was for Grandads birthday lunch on Sunday, well we needed something to stick a candle in didn't we?

Grandad, Anne, Alan and Hayley came round. It was lovley to see them all as we haven't seen them for a while. We had a pretty good dinner actually.

Yeah, we even had some special pre-christmas pigs in blankets.

Shame I let myself down having a massive strop during Wii party.

School business then, i'm starting to get a few christmas cards from my friends now (even though they've scrapped the school post box this year). So i've started writing my own to give out.

We've also started rehearsals for our christmas show in earnest. As usual i'm coming home full of my new songs and can't wait to get on the stage.