Christmas swing-set

We had guests over Christmas, so while the kids were overwhelmed with the usual abundance of gifts, I had a busy time in the kitchen fixing up our turkey for the 24th (yes, most french families do the whole big dinner the day befre), with taro stuffing, bread-sauce, seurettes confit (done up something to taste a bit like cranberry sauce), roasted yams, braised red cabbage, no brussel sprouts, tropical mince pies and a 'buche de Noel'. For the actual Christmas day we did a slightly more relaxed barbecue style meal. It was fun, but I'm enjoying a well earned couple of days rest before we have a Brit-style re-run on the 30th......

The girls had a great day, LOTs of rather silly toys, lots of princess girlie stuff this year, but the highlight was definitely the swingset that I got sent over from Tahiti - its just like Tahiti now that we have our own playground! 

It took Viriamu and Pierre (a manually inclined guest - what a stroke of luck!) a good while to get the thing fixed up and modified to their liking...

 

....with the assistance of a bit of Hinano

 

All in all it was a merry Christmas!

Matotea discovers Moorea...

 

Before we got swamped in Christmas cheer, the grandparents, the girls and I all took the plane over to the big smoke (aka Tahiti), before waving granny and grandpa back off to Wales, taking the opportunity to do some Christmas shopping at the same time as discovering the many and varied slides and playgrounds of Tahiti....

...we also took a few days out to pop over to Moorea, it was a bit of a nostalgic trip for me, and Matotea was just super excited about the whole thing - some of the highlights were taking the boat over to Moorea........

........going to our old favorite beach-spot ........

.......cheesburger and chips at the 'Blue Ananas' (as well as patisseries from Caramelines and 'Allo pizza take-out)....

.......before hitting the swimming pool....

...spotting dolphins....

....and just hanging out in our bungalow.......

The Christmas Tree!

As is our tradition, Viriamu and the kids headed up the mountain to
cut down a caribbean pine for our Christmas tree, then we loaded it
up with as many sparkly things as we could find, as well as cinnamon
star biscuits, chocolate baubles and later 'papillotes' (sparkly wrapped chocolate covered marzipans) gifts of our one of our guests, all the way from Grenoble! The pictures are not great but it is VERY shiny...........and Matotea loves it!!!!! She's been singing "Petit Papa
Noel" all day!

Pirate treasure!

 

Among other things, we spent a lot of time in early december making treasure-hunts for Matotea, I just happened to have a tonne of pinata pirate treasure in stock, so I thought it might be fun. Poor granny spent ages carefully setting the whole thing up, painstakingly drafting up treasure maps.

Matotea has seen it all on Peppa Pig, but had never actually done one before, she really loved having a map to follow, she enjoyed it so much that we had to re-enact the same treasure hunt multiple times!!!!