Hyacinth Bouquet!

Last week, a friend delivered a Christmas present - a basket of bulbs.

This morning, when I came downstairs, it was lovely to discover the hyacinths had bloomed. They are filling the house with their beautiful perfume.

The delicacy of the individual flowers on each stem is amazing - and the colour is stunning. It is hard to get the camera & PC to do it justice.

What a super gift!

I went to the library this morning, to try to order a couple of books. But their computers were down and nothing was working. I felt very sorry for the staff, who were struggling to get everything straight before Christmas - and a number of them are off sick too.

I have prepared a special dessert for next week, and put it in the freezer - but giving away no details, as Liz & Steph read this blog and I do not want to spoil the surprise!

Now I have to get back to preparing my Sunday School stuff for tomorrow's "Praise Party". I am using a lot of the resources from the Spurgeon's Childcare site.

They produce some excellent material and there's a clever drama, and a fun story, along with colouring sheet and other useful ideas.

We will also do a Pass The Parcel with Christmas forfeits [either answer a simple question eg 'who was Jesus' Mum?' or an action 'make a noise like a donkey' etc] and a Disappearing Camels Game. This is more commonly known as Musical Islands, and involves jumping around on sheets of newspaper- but the Christmas twist is that the children are all wise men, but can only continue on the journey when they have a newspaper camel!

The theory is that the children spend all the morning service in the Hall downstairs, whilst the adults can have a more reflective worship/communion service. Our worship group are leading all the service [apart from Communion and the Sermon] which is a welcome relief for Bob [who is still quite poorly]

The evening is the Candlelight Carols - one of my favourite Christmas services - really looking forward to that one...