A Ladies Lunch

Yesterday, I had a few friends round for coffee and lunch. It was a great day, lots of chatting and laughing. Everyone bought something with them so we had...vegan carrot and leek soup made by myself, freshly baked corn bread, chicken, rice balls, a lovely chestnut cream roll and Christmas Pudding - ohhh how good! Nor and Tami hadn't seen the Christmas pud before so of course we had to pour over brandy and set fire to it, purely as a cultural lesson of course ;o). I also got to meet another blogging Montessori mama and she is lovely as are her kids. I hope we can get together again so we can have more 'chat' time :o)
Whilst we were sat round the table I realised that all these ladies except for my Japanese neighbour I had met via the internet, I am thankful for this modern bit of daily life, I have met so many lovely people, in fact many of my friend in Japan were internet buddies first. When I think back to when I first came to Japan and had no computer, I don't know how I survived.

So, this week we have been busy cleaning out the cupboards and sorting out the decorations, Ebi-kun decorated a tree. This was easy to prepare and great for fine motor skills. I covered a polystyrene cone with green felt. Then gave him some sewing pins and a pile of sequins. He pushed the pin through the sequin and then into the cone. As it uses fine motor skills he found it tiring but did a good job. I might ask him he he wants to add more at a later date.
We then set up the 'winter forest' well, it is more of a spinny at the moment, I hope we can add more trees each year. He made the tall tree at the back last year (hmm, I made it, he decorated it)
This is the main tree, there is no 'theme' for the tree this year, which bugs me, but since we forked out for the tree, I couldn't afford to go out and buy a loads of themed decorations to put on it. 
And this, I LOVE. It might end up there all year! I wanted to hang something here last year but never got round to it. This was quite easy to do, I don't know why I didn't get round to doing it last year. I made the little birds and the 'stick' if from the florist and I used fishing line to suspend it.
Finally, these are the Christmas cushions I whipped up. I should have used different motifs on each one but I was lazy and uninspired so a set of trees it is.

Todays mission is to wrap and pack all our gifts to send home tomorrow plus a pile of things I have sold that have been cluttering up or cupboard. I'm not really feeling up for it since a certain-little-somebody was up in the night with a big nose bleed so I ended up (not) sleeping in his room but a gals gotta do what a gals gotta do....