Christmas 2010 Roundup

Christmas 2010 was a good one.

The timing of course was difficult. Christmas Eve was a Friday, so there wasn't an easy half-day Saturday to do emergency shopping. Nope, I went home from work and it was already Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve

Joanne's parents and Brother (Grandma, Grandad and Uncle Paul) stayed over at our house on Christmas Eve. We had a nice Barbeque dinner - the usual Bollard BBQ; Steak, Sausages, BBQ Mushrooms, BBQ Toad in the Hole (can you see the Scouting influence?) plus Salads. Then it was time to read the kids their Christmas stories and put them to bed.

They got read; The Night before Christmas and Always Room for a Little One.

The kids went to sleep surprisingly well, with few arguements and "nil returns" (ie: no coming back out of bed).

The adults stayed up and had a few drinks and talked - it was nice.

At about 10pm, we started sorting out the trampoline, in the dark. It was really, really heavy and it was very complicated to put up. I'm glad that Joanne's brother and father were on hand to help (thanks Guys!). It took most of the night just to get the base set up and we decided to leave the nets for when the kids woke up.

Of course we needed a guinea pig to test it but decided that ours probably wouldn't be heavy enough - so it had to be me. I was asked to do acrobatics on the trampoline (without the net) but although I could do the knee bounce, every time I tried a bum bounce, I couldn't get up again. (btw: I've since mastered the art)

The Christmas tree before the carnage

Christmas Morning

I woke up at about 6am and there was no noise in the house. It's hardly surprising because I'm deaf. After being cautioned by Joanne not to make any noise, I slipped downstairs to watch the fun - only to discover that Joanne's parents had been up since 4am and the kids had been up since 4:30. Even worse, in their milling about "itching to open their presents" behaviour, they'd discovered the "secret" presents under their beds (they're not supposed to find them until well after Christmas morning).

So, we went in to where the tree was and started unwrapping. The kids were very excited but still managed to restrain themselves so that they took about the same time to unwrap their presents and savour the moment. Kaelan dropped a whole pile of his wrappings onto his other presents (and lost them for a while), then they went outside to jump on the trampoline - coming inside only to grab another handful of candy.

Tristan shows us exactly how big his lollypop is.

After cleaning up the wrapping paper (the boys didn't move their toys to their rooms until the next day (and even then only with a lot of protesting), Paul Jr and I put up the net around the trampoline. While we were doing that and remarking on the size of the thing, Tristan came over, smiled and then pointed accusingly at me. "You did this", he said. "I did what?" I asked.

Then he told me how the trampoline couldn't fit into Santa's sleigh. I tried explaining that it was probably dimensionally transcendental like the Doctor's TARDIS but he was having none of it. Eventually I just got on and started jumping and he forgot the conversation immediately. The jumping made me so hot and puffed that I had to get in the pool to cool down - and therein passed the morning.

Christmas Lunch

For Christmas lunch we had Turkey and Prawns. There was other stuff too various salads etc; but the T&P was the best. Dessert was pavlova shells with double-cream and various fruits in them.

The boys playing with their balls on the trampoline.

Then the kids went off the play with their new toys - Kaelan "helped" Tristan by opening most of his packets while he was jumping on the trampoline. We explained to him about how that's not actually a nice thing to do (maybe he won't do it next year). Luckily, Tristan didn't seem to mind too much. While the kids played, the adults took turns to fall asleep in the middle of conversations.

We had leftover turkey and prawns for dinner on Christmas day.

Boxing Day

Actually we didn't do anything on Boxing day except clean up and relax. We were pretty tired. Very tired... I was installing a new game on Tristan's PC and the bar graph was taking a long time. I accidentally crashed out on his bedroom floor and woke up three hours later. That's how tired we were.

We had leftover turkey and prawns for lunch on Boxing day.

My parents and Maree and Michael and their family turned up at about 4-ish. We all had a good time catching up and the boys went for a swim. Then we had a Christmas dinner of .... wait for it... Turkey and Prawns!!! This time it wasn't leftover because we'd bought three turkeys (one for Christmas and two for boxing day - more people to feed) and we'd bought several bags of prawns too.

Dessert was a scary-looking but nice tasting ice cream pudding that Maree made. She went to suspiciously great lengths to assure me that there were no sultanas in it. We also had a pavlova which was really nice.

The Christmas family shot - doesn't everyone look like they want to be there?

The day after boxing day... we had leftover prawns and turkey for lunch.... It was really nice but I think I might be over it for now...

Thanks everyone for helping to make 2010 such as Great Christmas!