Remember to buy in bulk

Check out my jar of CHOCOLATE.

70% cocoa, delicious and healthy.
Haha, well, apparently a SMALL amount a day is healthy.

My plan is to only ever use the good stuff so my kids get used to eating that and will hopefully reject the crap stuff.

Is it wrong of me to request of family at Easter that they only give the kids dark chocolate? It doesn't need to be the highest quality, just not the sort with lots of extra sugar.....the sort which I used to LOVE (milky bar anyone?).

My smarties obsession maybe coming to an end too, as I move on to REAL chocolate. It's going hand in hand with my cupboards slowly emptying of anything with a complicated ingredients panel on it.

I'm trying to follow the "if my great grandmother wouldn't recognise it as food, don't eat it" way of eating. I also keep hearing "if it wasn't around 10 000 years ago don't eat it".

Did they have chocolate around that long ago? If not, I'm sticking with the grandmother eating idea.

Setting up the Christmas Crib

We have a very basic Christmas Crib
(is it called that here, that's what we called it growing up in Kiwiland...)
and it consists of just a few figures that remain from a much larger set.

So the kids and I made a couple of new ones:

This snazzy looking guy is Joseph



And this bright little fellow is the Drummer Boy



Er, without his arms and his drum, which was to be made from a gum nut. Master 4 who was doing the artistic direction (hence the multicoloured punk hair and green leopard duds) does NOT want pipe cleaner arms or a drum. So it will be.

They will soon join the existing crew, see below:



Mary is on the right and Amahl on the left has been standing in for Joseph.



And sometimes they are visited by some other random lady with her baby, her puppy and her pet tiger cub. And a lego knight drops by occasionally too.

Mary and Amahl were made by my mum many years ago and are the perfect solution to crib figures for small children. I think we'll make some new ones every year, as happened when we were kids.

Hmmm, who to make next?
I have a faceless body on my work table awaiting a personality.....

These are my boys, all shaven and shorn...

Gee, I let hubby out into the back yard to shave his head.....he gives himself a no' 4 in the summer (I DO NOT cut his hair, scarred from the one and only time I DID do it...)

And this is what happens:

Ok, Mr 4 was due for his buzz cut, but my blonde fluffy haired baby!!! Check out his hair in my previous playdough post, (20 months old but still my baby...)

Oh my gosh, he does look cute, his sqidgy baby cheeks are showing up again, but still, hubby cut my baby's hair WITHOUT TELLING ME!

Oh well, easy for summer, right?

The above photo was taken just a short while after this one...

I thought 4 1/2 year olds didn't get eggs on their heads any more. Well, when they're spinning round in the kitchen and slam their head in to the corner of the cupboard, they still do.

Gee, it has been a busy, busy day, so nice to sit down in front of my pc and catch up with the world :)