Countdown to Christmas: Week 2

It has been a difficult week.  Tiger has been very ill with high fever and severe headache all this time.  It took three visits to the GP to find out that Tiger has a middle ear infection, which most likely resulted from his weekly swimming lessons.   There is no a lot to be done apart from taking the prescribed antibiotics and waiting for the bacteria to be gotten rid of.  The infection is a nasty one, causing such a spliting headache for Tiger that he (and consequently, I) has been woken up by the pain several times in the night for the past week.  Hence, all external activities have been cancelled, with Tiger spending most of his time lying on the sofa.  He is only well enough today to play with LEGO and his train set.

Compared to how active Tiger normally is, this week has been very boring for him as all external activities have been cancelled due to his being ill.  With all my not-so-well-planned December plans out of the window, luckily we have been able to manage some continuity with the daily unwrapping of Christmas-related storybooks.

  and rewatching a Christmas classic:

When he felt well enough to get off the sofa, we continued to look through the RI space-themed advent calendar, watched the second week of the Angel Trail, and made tin can lanterns that turned out to be very pretty.

At the very beginning of the week Tiger felt really terrible so in order to distract him from the physical pain that he was experiencing, my husband had the brilliant idea of introducing Tiger to a classic movie that he (my husband) has always wanted them to watch together:

No, Tiger will not be getting any Star Wars-related presents.

Countdown to Christmas: Week 1

The best way to describe our first week of Christmas countdown is that it's a mixed bag.

After announcing that I am not going to come up with 24 different activities this December, I found the advent calendar that my mother-in-law bought for Tiger when he was a baby and thought it best to take it out and use it before Tiger's childhood is over.  So, I stayed up on the night of November 30th to do some last minute brainstorming and managed to stretch my initial short list of activities to fill 24 days.

Since I have the habit of over-preparing than under-preparing most of the time, I wrapped the Christmas-related books that I borrowed from the library in Christmas wrappers to act as another form of advent calendar (just in case the other one doesn't work, for whatever reason), so that Tiger can unwrap one book each day to read a Christmas-related story.  That's the least we can do, if we don't do anything else for the month.

I really needn't worry, because the RI has a space-related advent calendar ready so we have been unveiling it each day, after I read aloud a section from our spine book for the month, The Christmas Almanac.  The book covers a broad spectrum of Christmas-related issues from history to traditions, both religious and secular.

There is a section in the book explaining the origins and different ranks of angels in the Western tradition which coincides with the weekly video of the Angel Trail organised by the National Gallery, so we watched the first episode of that.

The rest of the week was interspersed with the making of mince meat,

as well as mince pies.

We would have done more this week if Tiger hadn't been ill with high fever most of the time.  In fact, he spent most of the week lying on the sofa, recovering from nights of broken sleep.

He is still suffering from fever as I type.  We are taking him to see the out-of-hours doctor in a little while, since our usual GP does not work on weekends.  I hope next week will be a better week.


This post is linked up to Christmas In A Box ~ Week 1 Link Up.