My Month in Numbers - December 2011

Whilst surfing UK Scrappers for some inspiration to write up my blog regularly I came across this:

http://notesonpaper.blogspot.com/p/months-in-numbers.html

I really like the idea of blogging by numbers and I’ve decided to join in for 2012 and see how I go. Even if it means all I do is blog once a month that is once more often than my current average!

So December wasn’t planned so it is a bit haphazard and has not photos but here goes:

18 as the 18^th of December was Allie’s Birthday. As it is the week before Christmas it can be difficult to arrange a party or get people to buy her two presents rather than joint ones but we did go out with my best friend Kath and her daughter Kaitlyn on the following Wednesday for pizza and a movie.

14 oh my!! Baby Allie is now 14 years old! I was dreading her becoming a teenager last year and there have been times I’d quite like the little toddler back but all in all I am very proud of my grown up daughter.

4 duck breasts for Christmas lunch. None of us are particularly bothered about turkey and we usually do a full roast once a week, normally chicken so to have something different we get a duck for Christmas. However, the past couple of years we have had a full duck and not really enjoyed it – there isn’t quite enough meat to get your teeth in to! This year I bought four duck breasts from Waitrose (they came in packs of two so had to buy four for three of us!) and I did them with all the other trimmings (we still have pigs in blankets LOL). The meat on the duck breasts was lovely and Allie finished off the fourth one as her supper that evening!

15 air cadets. Allie is an air cadet of 2056 Knutsford Squadron and Jeff and I are Civilian Instructors (CIs) so we get quite involved with the running of the Squadron. As a Christmas treat the Officers and CIs took 15 cadets to the Trafford Centre for a Chinese meal, a round of crazy golf and a game of Laserquest. I must admit at one point we were sat in traffic with two cadets in our car and I thought why are we doing this a week and a half before Christmas at probably one of the busiest shopping centres in the country but we all had a good evening and managed not to loose any cadets!

3 carrier bags of clothes and toys. I finally persuaded Allie to have a sort out and by that not just tidy her room but actually put stuff out for the bin / charity / re-cycle and we ended up with 3 carrier bags full. There could have been more but one step at a time………

6 frogs. When my grandparents moved to the care home they left their room at home almost as if they had just got up and walked out. There is very little room in the home for ornaments so they only took a few precious ones leaving everything else for my parents to sort through. When I was younger my gran had always collected ornamental frogs and it became a ritual for all the family to buy her a frog whenever they went anywhere. It grew in to quite a collection. As part of their moving in to the home my grandparents wrote a “living will” leaving certain items to various family members and the frog collection was left to Allie! She was quite sensible and decided we didn’t have room for all of them so she took a few she wanted and asked if I would like any so I actually kept 6 – there is no particular memory of those 6 I just liked them the best. My mum is going to see if she can auction the rest of as a collection along with many other things left in the room when my grandparents moved out.

So that is December in numbers - I have already started thinking about January and hopefully this will encourage me both to blog and take more photos.