So Farther Christmas, is he real?

Well it’s as far as Daisy is concerned it’s upto us really, now most people just assume you’re going to make father Christmas real, and if your not then you are the most evil parent in the world ever.

Ruth for a while has been worried about Father Christmas; if you tell Daisy that he’s real and then she finds out from another child that he’s not, will she ever trust you again? A bit melodramatic ? Maybe, but it is a worry.

Then you have the flip side, If you tell Daisy that father Christmas is made up, Daisy is the rotten child who tells everyone else. Not a problem for us (unless angry parents come a knocking) but it may drop Daisy’s popularity and party invites down a little.

We did consider (well not consider as think it would might be funny) to make Father Christmas into this little charity figure. On the telly, the bobbinogs where telling us how baby teeth fall out to make way for grown up teeth, and when the fall out…. (Kevin makes up story from here), you put them under your pillow, and Farther Christmas comes, and takes them away to make toys for poor little boys and girls.

At least as plausible as the tooth fairy I thought, but as Ruth then pointed out, Daisy would go around telling the other kids, “Farther Christmas only makes toys for poor kids, are you poor?”
probibily not a great idea.

Returning from Manchester yesterday (I’ve had my yearly fill now), we passed the Jaguar factory in halewood. It’s the first time we’ve passed since around Christmas, so the nice tree was missing from outside the factory.

It was a little shame, I thought because Jaguar have the nicest Christmas trees. So this got me thinking (like I needed a reason), maybe We (using the royal we here, Ruth thinks I’m bonkers) should give out an award for best publicly displayed Christmas tree in Liverpool. It seems that anybody can hand out awards now-er-days so why not us. I’ve even thought of the Award to, it would be one of those little lego trees, maybe on a block spray panted gold.

Then I thought why just stop at one award? Why not have a whole set of awards? I haven’t thought of any other categories yet (suggestions welcome, you can submit them anonymously if your ashamed to admit you’ve thought about it), but I’ve got all year, I’m thinking around Christmas this year, we’ll have awards. We might even tell the echo about them, you never know if it’s a very slow news day. We could make the paper!

The beeb, have an interesting little story about a website run by UCL (University Collage London) , that shows the migration of surnames. When the site isn’t falling over with load you type in the surname, and you get pictures showing you the spread of the surname, in 1881, and again in 1998. So of course when you’re like me and your distancing yourself from your given name, you type in your current surname. Below are the 1881 locations for the Jumps and the 1998 locations, darker colours mean there where/are more of them.

JUMP in 1881

JUMP in 1998

What struck me, is the incredibly small area the name covers, this should in theory make family history easier.

Right now we’ve got rid of all but the most determined of our regulars (yes even the email bit is broken at the moment), I thought I might start posting again.

The problem with not posting for a while is your standards raise, while I would usually see no problem in filling another corner of the internet with mindless ranting about say wheelie bins, when you’ve taken a brake, you feel that your next post has to be much loftier than that. Unfortunately, I don’t get much loftier, So I sort of stalled. Not to worry, I’ve started typing again now, and I can feel my need to share trivia starting to resurface.

We all know about Daisy’s favorite song old McDonald, but now she has a growing repertoire

The song she likes to sing with her toys is row-row, which doesn’t go much further into the song but it does include all the actions. It can be very useful in the morning when you’re trying to sort her out. If you give Daisy Samantha - the undisputed favorite bedtime toy, she will rock her back and forth, while you get everything ready.

another favorite, although I’m not sure she gets the song, is Happy Happy Joy Joy, which is from a ren and stimpy cartoon, I don’t think it was ever indented as a baby song. But the fact that the words are mainly just happy, happy, happy, means that Daisy can now just walk around going “abby, abby, abby”, it’s very cute.

We also sing to quite a lot of songs, even if we don’t know the words. If we are in the car and the song on the radio is particularly warbly, we’ll get accompanying la,la,la’s from the back, this happened more with Christmas songs, but put a warbly bit in most songs and we pick it up.

and then there’s our own made up songs, when daisy wakes up she’s quite chilled and often plays by herself for at least 30 minutes before we go in to get her and start the day, quite often you can be lying in bed listening to her and she will start to make up her own songs, they usually go, something along the lines of “ardy, la, la, la, la, e-i-e-i-o”

I think this year Daisy noticed Christmas a bit more, we now know what to do with wrapped up boxes. So even when Ruth is getting a present for her birthday, Daisy is right in there ripping the paper.

Toys abound our house, so much so, that we are gearing ourselves up for the first major cull of cuddly toys, when daisy was born she got around 20 cuddly toys, quite a few where small, and the rest just went to live on the high shelf to be brought out over time, but now, with her birthday, and Christmas, there is a real cuddly mountain in the house.

The hit presents of Christmas this year, have been Clive the bear who is just big and cuddly, both the pushing pram things, so much so that we’ve moved one upstairs so we can play in the morning. My mum got Daisy her own pink leather arm chair, which has to be seen to be believed, and Daisy loves it, unfortunately she also climbs on it and stands on the seat which is a bit dangerous so it’s been quarantined until she’s a bit older.

We got daisy bath toys, which are a big hit, although last night we worked out how to squirt water from one of them and daddy got very wet.