Oh Christmas tree

The Christmas tree is up, the decorations are up and there is Christmas spirit in the air! This is only the second year that we have had a tree and daddy went off on Saturday with the boys in tow to go and choose a fitting one for our house. Santa doesn't make an appearance during our festive celebrations but we are carving our own family traditions and the next week or so will be full of them, helped by daddy having four days off work (yippee!)

Today we went to the Booth Museum in Brighton, inspired by the boys interest at the recent dinosaur and taxidermy and stones on display at Summer's Place, a nearby auction house, we ventured out to find more of the same and we were not disappointed. It was a friend who mentioned that museum to us and how she had spent many an hour there with her son enjoying the natural history collections and draws of specimens of eggs and butterflies and bones and feathers and fossils and glass eyes! Each showcase of taxidermy provided enough scope for the scene of a story and there was no shortage of those. The smalls were all taken with the collection of skeletons from the huge to the tiny and Pumpkin announced, 'i want to come here everyday!' so a revisit is definitely in the diary. We bought a few items from the shop on the way out, Bean linked up a range of interests and found some fools gold in a pirate bag, joining his interest in stones with that of pirates and Pumpkin found a dinosaur fossil kit. We were interested to read that dinosaurs  were first found in Sussex and the very first tooth dug up in a village that we had driven through on our way to Brighton.

We went down to the seafront to picnic, we ate in the car and watched the waves crashing onto the beach. It has been a very wet and windy day and grey grey grey, not long now until the winter solstice and it is grim and cold and miserable out there....but hey, who wouldn't want to go for a walk on the beach in this weather? Well, mummy actually, and i exercised my right to stay in the car for once and daddy took the keen and excited smalls onto the beach. They were so excited by their walk that they returned to the car and insisted that i went back with them. This time it was just mummy and the boys and they showed me their game of running away from the tide, the only rule being that if you got your shoes wet you were out. The waves were monstrously fierce, averaging as tall as mummy (5ft) and we had a roarcous time playing this game, even when we didn't see one tide coming and all got very wet, there was laughter and joy. And we were once again glad that mummy carries spare clothing around in the boot of the car. Well done mummy.

guinea pig skeleton