Christmas comes early

It's a common complaint that Christmas seems to come around earlier every year. Ours arrived today, 19th December.

Amy goes into Calvary Hospital on the 21st for a mastectomy and because she's not going to be in the best of health when she comes out we decided to bring Christmas forward a week so we could spend the day as a family as happily as possible.

Our day began at 6.30am with the kids excitedly opening their stockings from Santa. It's great watching Eli as a 19 month old absolutely delighted at receiving a tub of Play Dough (at $1.74 a tub) and a colouring book. Life seems to get more complicated as you get older.

Audrey got a towel for swimming (with Tinkerbell on it) which works like an overhead cape. She chose to wear it for much of the day, alternating with her fairy wings which she'd received from my work Christmas party a couple of days earlier.

Lunch was the traditional Christmas fayre. I roasted a chicken (in our decidedly dodgy oven) and then dripped fat onto the element as I was taking it out resulting in a worryingly large fire at the bottom of the oven. Fortunately it went out pretty quickly, but not before Audrey had raced out of the kitchen shouting "Run away!" - she wasn't stopping for anyone!

Brussel Sprouts were met with a typical lack of enthusiasm, Audrey refusing point blank, Amy chasing a couple round her plate for 5 minutes and Eli literally throwing his off his plate. Despite trying to pass them off as 'fun size cabbages' I was left to eat 8 or 9 on my own - it was only a couple of hours later that the others suffered for their abstention and my over indulgence.

We went for a walk late in the day, luckily managing to dodge the rain clouds. We had another day of intermittent rain. People had forecast that the weather would be rainy up until Christmas, and in our case the prediction came true. At least it's not snow!

So that's Christmas over with for another year, or 6 days depending on your point of view...

Here's a few pics;

future England/Australia captain?so much joy from a toy matchbox car

Our walk up to the postbox.