There’s cookie dough chilling in the fridge, presents are all wrapped, paper snowflakes are bobbing in the air-con breeze, advent activities are all but finished and I am ready to crawl in to bed – never mind that it’s only 4pm. I am exhausted and, frankly, over it.

Amelia and I both had a momentary cease-fire and a lapse in bad moods where we seized the opportunity to sit down and do some Christmas craft. I am pleased to say that this has been our most successful joint crafting session to date. Amelia’s attention span and my tolerance span seemed completely in-sync and a fabulous sticky, sparkly mess was made. We created little wooden peg angel dolls. I was wildly inspired a week or so back when I saw Kath’s post on peg dolls and her link to Monkton where there are the most beautiful, simple little dolls. Here are my two favourites from today. Amelia’s on the left, mine on the right:

And you can find a snaps of all of them on flickr. In the catwalk photo, you will see mine in the top row and Amelia’s underneath. You can see that Amelia has great flare – a truly original, couture approach to dressing her dolls where as mine are a little neater and far less inspired. You can see she is exploring the themes of facial hair and big bows for belts in her collection. I love every single one of her little beauties and don’t know how we will part with them as they are intended as gifts for family members.

These are two photos by Amelia. This is the first time she has played with our camera and watching her stumpy, sticky little fingers grapple with the easily-smashed-to-smithereens gadget nearly sent me berserk but she produced a few classics. I am not going to publish some of the delights she took of me and my expanding belly, but here are a couple of the more successful “thank you” photos. The first is a gift she received from Melissa who sent her a cow girl ornament to go with her cow girl from Christina. I bought one of Melissa’s delicate princess ornaments so both are now happily bobbing around amongst our other treasures. The other is a shot of her foot in the foreground and one of Lyn’s beautiful sleepy rabbits in the background. She arrived in the mail today and is instantly loved by the whole household. Amelia is totally convinced she is a cat and so her name is Janey the Cat. Thank you my dear blogging friends!

Our tree is looking trim! Thank you Theresa (above), Hillary and Christina for contributing ornaments to our plastic tannenbaum.

I am working working working up until Christmas, but I have discovered the wonderful world of podcasts which make the days fly by. Today I downloaded the first installment of ‘A Christmas Carol‘ read by Geoffrey Palmer from the Penguin podcast page. It’s great! I have also been enjoying Crafty Chica Podcast and the Ricky Gervais Show (which comes with an ‘Explicit’ warning) — and there’s still one Sunday Night Safran available on Triple J’s podcast page. Have you any other favourites I should be listening to?

See more of our beautiful ornaments beyond…
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