December 2011

I am so far behind on blogging, that I'm not even going to try and catch up. We'll just start with all the happenings in December (or most of them) and go from there.
Niel's birthday was a quiet affair with just me and him going to a new restaurant at the Wild Life Zoo close by us. Half of the room is taken up by a giant fish, or rather shark tank, and we were so lucky to be seated right next to the tank!

The food was awesome, too, and we couldn't even finish half of what was on our plates..

Strydom was very happy about this, since he was the recipient of the "doggy bag".

Those ribs were HUGE!!!

This year we celebrated Christmas a little differently ..
Instead of exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve, like we have been doing for 20 something years or so, we got up (were forced to get up, by Danille) early Christmas morning, had breakfast, and opened gifts.

We agreed that everyone should buy each member of the family a gift, of no more than $5.00 each. This way it wasn't just Niel and I who bought gifts, and the kids learned how to budget their money, and think of giving , and not just receiving. It was a lot of fun, and done mostly for Danille's benefit. She is still so excited about the gifts under the Christmas tree, and the whole ceremony of it all.
Strydom took the "frugal gift" idea to the maximum, and got us all stuff...really practical stuff, from the dollar store. LOL.
Niel got a can of sardines, and a tongue-scraper, and De Wet got a coffee mug and cotton buds to clean his ears with!

We did make an exception with Danille's gift, which was an Amercan Girl doll, and 20x more than the allowed amount, because, well, she is the youngest and the boys both still received bigger gifts up until last Christmas.

Every year, Danille gives Shadow one of her old soft toys, since he "loves" them so much.
He now has an almost bigger selection than she does!
This year, she wasn't ready to part with any of her current soft toys, so Shadow just got a card from her... ;-)

Chinese crap Dollar Store toys for Danille from Strydom. De Wet She loved it!

Even Shadow got to try the glasses..

Half way through the mornig, Danille started feeling bad about not giving Shadow a gift, and decided to give up the little brown monkey in the pic above..

Shadow is not overly impressed. Too little, too late? ...

We had a very leisurely rest of the day. ..Sunshine, beer, wine,  a leg of lamb on the grill, and each other's company...Perfect!

 Well, almost perfect...

A South-African Christmas with all of our family would have been perfect.)