Christmas 2016
Was woken up by Beth Christmas morning at 6am. Very excited because the Reindeers had eaten all the Reindeer food, plus Santa had eaten the pie that was left out for him. There was some concern because silly Santa hadn't had a drink of the water that had been left out for him. Theo woke up about 6:30am, probably due to all of the screaming (excitement) that was going on.
Man the kids got so many presents this year, I don't even think I'll be able to list half of them.
Beth got:
Some nice books
Some lovely clothes
A hamster house thing
A wooden cooking set
A swing
Binoculars.
A hoola-hoop
Some space icecream
Theo got:
A car set, which he nearly died of excitement when he saw
Some togs
Some jandels
Two new trucks (a noisy one and a wooden one)
A seal that swims in the bath
Plus there's a slip-n-slide, clothes, a teddy.
So much stuff I really can't remember it all, plus not all it hasn't all been opened yet! (This isn't true now at the time of posting!)
We had breakfast here at home firstly, Peter and Mary came over and we unwrapped a bunch of presents. I say we, mostly the children unwrapped a bunch of presents while we helped clean up the paper and other mess that they produced in the process. We then tried to put Theo down for a sleep but he wasn't having a bar of it, I guess the whole thing was very exciting for him as well. His little face when he realised he'd been given a car seat for Christmas, I'm glad I managed to catch it on film because it was the cutest most excited little face ever.
Lunch was at Holly and Adrian's and it was awesome. Sarah had made some lovely starter/nibbles, though sadly I accidentally left one of them in the car and we didn't realise until it was time to leave and we couldn't find the plate. Oops. At least 3 out of 4 of the plats had been eaten and cleaned up, a shame I left the final one in the car because it would have been cleaned up as well I'm sure. We had Beef, Pork and a lovely Salmon for lunch. Theo even had a sleep, took him quite a while to finally give up and pass out for his sleep, but he did. In fact he woke up just as lunch was being served. That's also the time it all started to become way to much for Beth, the excitement, the sugar and everything. So people had to take it in turns to go inside and read a book to her, trying to calm her down etc. Didn't really work, though we did try. After lunch the kids took turns on the slip'n'slide though no one really seemed to enjoy it fully apart from Isla. Theo wanted to enjoy it but as soon as he was on it would tense up and not enjoy it. But then he'd get crabby when he wasn't on it.
We went out Friday night and had dinner at Bistronomy. They always have nice food and Friday night was no exception. I had Goose, which I've never had before and Sarah had Eel. Both very tasty. Mary was kind enough babysit, for once both children were super well behaved and didn't wake up at all while we were out. Beth won't even know that she missed Grandma! Glad that work's over and I've got two weeks off, I don't have to be back at work until the 9th of Jan. Perfect! Some time to get stuff done around the house, clean up the garden and that sort of thing.
Saturday that's exactly what I did, cleaned up all the sheds, went to war against the rat which I think I might finally have won. I put down some baits for it (sorry, rat) and it's totally taken one of them. Which is quite impressive seeing as they're screwed against the wall with a screw.
Got both lights up in the lounge. Quite a bit of work mixing together two different light sockets, one is a nice cord with a hideous enclosure (rose, it turns out they're called) and other has a boring arse cord with a nice rose. So we've taken the two best bits of both and combined them together, the lights look really good now. Plus Sarah bought some special bulbs that are either bright white or a soft warm white, depending on how many times you flick the switch on and off. Quite clever really. Though for some reason it defaults to bright white to start with, instead of warm white. So you have to flick the lights on twice to get a decent colour in the lounge, unless you're planning on doing an operation on a patient.
We're up in Auckland at our house swap now. It's really nice. The drive was slow - we stopped in Tirau for an hour or so which helped to break up the trip a little bit. To be fair to Beth and Theo though, they were both really good. Theo was fine as long as he had his blanket (typical) and Beth was pretty good. A few times she said that she had a sore tummy but mostly that was just her very thinly veiled way of asking for a lolly. We gave her a few on the trip and it seemed to work, we didn't have to deal with any upchucks this time.
Lovely house we're staying it, they've got a lot of stuff similar to us, so that's good. They're at ours now and sound like they're happy too, so the old house swap has worked out well, at least so far. Think tomorrow we'll go on a Bus ride, or maybe a train ride or maybe both.
Hopefully might get to relax a little bit in Auckland.
Tim