Santa Photo 2011

For the last few years we have visited Santa at Harvey Norman and they have a beautiful backdrop and a big white leather chair for Santa and the kids to sit beside him. I found out a couple of weeks ago that the store I normally go to weren't having Santa visit and/or Santa photos which I was extremely disappointed about. Prior to that I had been going to David Jones with the fake blue brick wall as the backdrop and was thinking I would have to go back there. While we were away at the beach we popped into the local shopping centre to go to Coles and we found Santa with a beautiful big Christmas tree behind him. It was perfect as there was no queue and a big jolly fellow who handed the kids a reindeer nose and reindeer antlers each. I jumped at the opportunity to get our Santa photo done.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

Had a little play around with the camera tonight to try this little "out of focus" trick on the Christmas tree lights. You can get some amazing effects and I'll give it a go another night but for now I'm off to bed. We taped Polar Express last night and sat down together to watch it.

Birthday Celebrations

It's my mum's birthday tomorrow and since she has a Christmas Party to go to, we celebrated her birthday today with a lunch of prawns, crusty bread rolls, avocado and camembert followed by a chocolate birthday cake with a singing candle. We all had a great day and once her birthday is over it's means that Christmas is just around the corner.

December Daily

Here's a few random pages which I'm working on at the moment for my December Daily. I've put together the rest of Day 1 with a little collection of our night out at Tim's lights complete with kids eating sausages while we were there. The picture at the bottom is of the kids making healthy yoghurt berry ice cream and we put them into Santa, Reindeer and Gingerbread men moulds. James is pouring the excess into ice cream cone shapes.

December Daily - Day 7

Today I finished putting up our Christmas decorations around the place and attempted to photograph them. I don't think I would get a job for a magazine however, I was thrilled with my photo of the corner with the lamp and my new rustic wreath which I purchased after Christmas last year. I saw it at Wheel and Barrow (my favourite shop since finding out about them on Bert Newton's morning show when I was living in Melbourne about 8 years ago). Luckily for me a few years later Wheel and Barrow came to Brisbane and I cannot walk out of there without buying something. I saw the wooden wreath and was going to buy it however I had bought quite a few Christmas presents and I didn't have any more hands to carry it and I was tired so decided against it. Luckily for me after Christmas it was $15 off which was much more reasonable. How's your decorating going?

Getting into the spirit of Christmas

Sienna got out her little piano tonight and wanted to play a tune. I found the little music sheet recently which had numbers on it so you hit the 5 key or the 7 key. No on one in this household can read sheet music so the numbers are very handly indeed. Anyway she kept asking me for my reading glasses because the numbers were so small and I explained to her that they wouldn't help her but she kept insisting so I looked at the sheet and boy were those numbers tiny. I could hardly read them myself even with my glasses on. I ended up writing them down on a paper of A4 paper so she could play the tune. Just because the song was "Happy Birthday" doesn't mean anything as we still did it around the Christmas tree. James got in on the act as well and wanted to have a go.

December Daily 2011

A couple of my photos for December Daily.