ever seen a lion in the nativity?

 There are two lions and a buffalo in the nativity at Durban Botanical Gardens. Josh was thrilled, he is lion mad at the moment. Really the nativity was a sight - a mixture of beaded animals, a white plastic doll, an angel with a blond curly wig, and a wooden lion...

One of the biggest beaded animals we have come across - the zulu women make smaller beaded animals and sell them in the craft areas.

19 weddings in one day

We visited Durban Botanical Gardens last Saturday, it was what you would expect really, beautiful gardens, plants everywhere, trails to walk around...and 19 wedding parties having their photos taken. We started counting while we sat and ate our picnic after we could see five different wedding parties all at once. Incredibly the weddings had all chosen different colour themes, apart from a couple that were pink that it was easy to count and differentiate them. The photo above has three of them in, the one on the left had green bridesmaids, there is one on the right behind the bush with the yellow bridesmaids and one of the pink parties coming down the hill. And there was one with gold and green bridemaids next to where I stood taking the picture! Josh was even asked to be in a picture, which fortunately he declined as he was covered in chocolate spread, dirt and a chavvy white England hat!

This year's school play...

...was the Christmas story from the Angels perspective. The bigger kids told the story through acting, singing, dancing and sign language (in the pitch black for one song with luminous gloves -quite incredible!). The smaller kids did some group singing, dancing and joined in for a bit of the sign language. And the tiny ones dressed up as part of the nativity. Josh was quite vocal about not wanting to be a sheep so got to be a cow this year, and actually did make it up on the stage (after refusing last year and falling asleep on my lap dressed in his sheep costume). In the photo above (borrowed from the Schwebels blog as we didn't get any good pics- hope they don't mind) Tom is bottom left and Josh is the cow with the farmers tan next to him. We'll have the video soon (although our video camera seems to have died like our camera so didn't film it properly :-( There should be some film from the other video cameras though so we can show our visitors coming soon).

eating cookies

One of the Christmas traditions on the Ship is a mass cookie bake. This year we haven't the kitchen facilities for everyone to help make them so a few of us got them ready and on Thursday everyone got to decorate and eat them!!

friends

Aren't they sweet? Our little thorn between two gorgeous roses, he plans on marrying the little girl sitting behind him even though he has his arms around her sister!