I have turned twelve! I woke up early in the morning and wrote my story for about an hour (which is what I like to do most). Then I woke up Andy and Mummy and opened some presents. Over the whole day I opened:
- A nature journal
- – my favourite present, it had pages marked with nature-related facts, pretty drawings, and extracts from books on nature. Some pages were lined and some blank. On the 1st January 2019 (it gives me a little thrill to think about that!) I’m going to start it. Mummy and I have agreed to go on a nature walk just once a week and see the forest develop and change over the course of the year. I’m hoping that for my 13th birthday I will get another, and on my 14th, and my 15th and so on – so I can see my handwriting and ideas develop and change too.
- A jigsaw puzzle
- – it is in the shape of a 3D triangle or pyramid and it’s a horses puzzle. I can’t wait to complete it!
- Foam hair curlers
- – they were actually from Primark… shh!
- A Body Shop body kit
- – it’s all mango scented. It has body butter, an exfoliant, shower gel, a bar of soap, and a bath pouf.
- Two huge tins of chocolate truffles
- – really posh chocolate truffles – Truffe Fantasie truffles, actually 😉
- A lovely little trinket box from Nanny Trish and Grandad Mal
- – it’s so pretty – thank you Nanny Trish and Grandad Mal! – with little flower decorations! It’s my earrings box now.
- A scrapbook
- – it’s blank and I can’t wait to fill it!
- A book about authors
- – we’ve got the Artists one – it’s our spine book for art history. My authors one is called Writers: Their Lives and Works. I love it!
- A Chinese game called Chopsticks
- – you have a short wooden post, some tokens and a pair of chopsticks. You have to use the chopsticks to pick up the tokens off the table and stack them on top of the post. Sounds easy, but I can promise you it’s most certainly not!
- A maze in a cube
- – There are four layers inside the cube, each with a maze. There’s a little silver ball which you have to get through the top maze down the cube to the last and finish the last to win. Catch is, all the mazes are inside the cube, like I said before. So you can’t actually see where the ball is. You have to guide it through by turning the cube but you never know where it is unless you take it apart. And that’s cheating.
- A Mi Band 3 from Nanny
- – I previously had a Mi Band 2, which I always thought was amazing – but not after I got the updated version! It’s basically the Chinese version (the better version!) of a FitBit. From the outside it just looks like a watch. The Mi Band 3 has a display on which you can see the time, the date and the day, how many steps you’ve taken, the distance you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned, the battery, your heart rate, a little exercise routine, notifications (you have to pair it to a device like your phone, so it will vibrate and show you if you have a text message, email etc.), the weather on the current day, the next day, and the day after that, a stopwatch, a “silent” mode, you can make the device it’s paired to ring if you’ve lost that device, you can change the display layout, AND it’s waterproof. Of course all those features don’t fit on one screen or you’d have a watch display the size of a laptop screen, so you can swipe around on it and hold things down and click special buttons. At first I thought it was fiddly and confusing but the next day I was completely used to it. It’s amazing!
- A really pretty Cath Kidston-design floral strap to go with it.
That took a long time and I’m not even sure I didn’t miss something.
Nanny came in the afternoon, after my ‘lunch buffet’. Then we watched telly, played with my presents, played Chopsticks, wrote my story, watched some more telly, and generally played a lot. It was really fun! Then we had spaghetti bolognaise for dinner which Mummy had made the day before. Tilly had trampolining with the Guides, so while she went to that Mummy drove Nanny back home and Andy and I played play-fighting. I didn’t get to bed until nine pm! I slept like a log, I can tell you!