It has been a tradition in our group of home ed friends that we holiday together once or twice a year. We used to do a youth hostel camp in February ish, and an actual with tents camp in the early summer. Over the years these holidays have moved and changed as families’ needs have changed and the last few years have included an early December Christmas camp in a youth hostel.
It’s likely for a variety of reasons that this will be our last pre christmas camp, at least in this format. Several of the central families now have children in school, so their numbers are dwindling, and without the numbers, we can’t afford the hostel. So there is a peculiar bittersweetness to our camp preparations this time, as we bake cakes to take and share, as we prepare our secret santa presents, as I run around doing the prosaic preparations of making sure everyone has enough underwear 😉
This year I’ll be taking our advent calendar with us. It does mean that Tim gets to miss out on the fun (he doesn’t do Youth Hostels, so stays home when we do this type of holiday) but I suppose I can instagram a picture each day for him. (If I can access wifi. I found out that if you have youth hostel membership you get free wifi in social areas, but I didn’t realise it took 7 business days to process membership, so when I went to set it up I discovered that I was already too late 🙁 ) As we’re playmobil bloggers, we’ve been sent a wonderful Playmobil Advent calendar and I can’t wait to see what’s in it.
I could of course, have made an advent calendar. Or dug out one of the several material ones we’ve accumulated over the years and prepared them with presents carefully gathered over the preceding days and weeks, each suitable for the targeted child. But I haven’t. Because I’m not that organised. And what’s more, I like playmobil.
I like that it’s all organised for me. I like that it will make a toy that will add to toys they’ve got, but also be something special that recalls this Christmas and this camp, rather than just be a piece of chocolate or a little something that disappears into the vast piles of little somethings that is this house. (Yes, I know it’s going to go into the playmobil box, but that’s a discrete pile of little somethings if you know what I mean 😉 .)
So, it’s in the packing pile. At the moment it’s the only thing in the packing pile. Tomorrow is looking like a whole load of fun, while I do last minute washing, and shopping, and baking and planning and hopefully scheduling posts and all the stuff that I have to do to go away with 4 children.
Mustn’t forget the potty this year.
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