It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Hello and welcome back our blog, if you're new, please take a look around and let me know your thoughts!

So we finally got to start the Festive season with a bang, and visited V's first ever Christmas Grotto! To be fair it was my first christmas grotto as a mom; as well as my first one in many years so I was pretty excited...and clearly this was more for me than him, but I digress.

Now whilst all this excitement to go to the grotto was happening, of course Lockdown is still a thing, and with Boris toying with our emotions, it came to light that there would still be restrictions in place; and this honestly broke my heart. So much, that I didn't even want to attend the event when the night came about and thought we'd just take V to the Alice in Wonderland Christmas event instead. With the tickets being limited due to V's age, we begrudgingly went thinking the worst...and we were pleasantly suprised!

Despite all the restrictions, they worked really hard to make it as festivy as possible. You were assigned an elf to guide you through the grotto and then finally take you to meet Santa and select a toy from his workshop. Our elf was such a cutie! She had a face shield on, but made a concerted effort to engage with Mr Fitzy and Baby V, the overall design was of a lot higher quality than I expected as you can see in the below video. There was a real story feel to the whole thing.

V was obsessed with all the lights and the tunnel was particularly interesting for him. As we got to Santa's workshop we were pleasantly shocked, Santa had been practicing his accent and reminded me so much of original Dumbledore, poor guy tried to talk to V, but honestly all V wanted to do was look at all the lights and colours in the room; everything but Santa! We got a picture with Santa stood just behind the boys, before being escorted to the workshop.

In the workshop, the toys were laid out according to age range, and it wasn't necessarily all cheap toys either, we tossed up the idea of finding a toy for Leo, but found a gorgeous wooden puzzle toy that we could use for our Montessori practice as he got older. I really was impressed with the overall day and so glad we went in the end.

I'd thoroughly recommend going to Tong Garden if you're ever in the Yorkshire Area, and definately book yourself in for the experience. Hopefully 2021 will see less restrictions and we can finally get the screaming child on Santa's lap shot; because I am that kind of jerk!

As always,

Ciao for now!

x