Winter Holidays

We've had one week of winter holidays and I'm amazed at how much I've enjoyed having everyone home together, and also at how frustrated it's made me, listening to their constant bickering.

It would have been perfect had it not been for the bickering.

It's been pretty packed, but I haven't taken many photos (as per usual.)  In fact, the first thing I did was ...

let the battery in my Canon run flat and fail to charge it.  So our holiday pictures have so far been taken on the little point and shoot.  Yurk.  Anyway ...

there has been some baby-cuddling.  It was great to see our friends from our old town - they came for a visit and let Jessie have a lovely long cuddle with their new little man.  She was smitten.  Kept giving him little kisses on the head and when they left she asked if we could travel to their place the next day so she could cuddle the baby again!  Next week, I think there will be some more baby-cuddling - this time it will be a little pink bundle closer to home.  I think she's looking forward to that.

Some other great friends (wow we have a lot of great friends) gave us tickets to see Dora Live.  It was a pretty good show, and now I feel fluent in Spanish.  Admittedly, I can only say "Hola!" and name items like backpacks and teddy bears, but it's a lot more than I could say a week ago.  We've never seen Dora on TV, so it was a bit weird having kids all around us jumping up and screaming the names of creatures we'd never seen, but it was fun!

And then there was the craft.  Usually I run in the opposite direction from kids with PVA glue, but Jessie needed a bedroom clock, so I bought some cheap clocks and some sparkles and we got to work.  Glue went everywhere, including over the tops of the sparkles.  I was sure they clocks would turn out ghastly, but they were ...

gorgeous!  These pictures don't do this (Jessie's) clock justice, but it's beautiful, as is Buzz's next door.  When the glue dried, it didn't seem to make the sparkles any less sparkly, and the completely haphazard placement of random sparkles actually looks planned and organised.  Yay for Buzz and Jessie, and yay for me, who let them do it.  I think we need to head to Spotlight for some more things to decorate next week!

To show you how absolutely SAD I am, I was most excited this week by the coming of The Garage Shelves.  I still don't have a half-decent picture of them so I'll leave you with this "before" picture, and then I'll fill you in on what we've done in the space since then.

Oh dear.  That was in April 2009.  If I'd taken a picture on Monday morning, there would have been shoes overflowing from the shelves, bags falling from on top and a lot more dirt and dust in there.  I didn't take a picture on Monday morning because I was far too excited about The Coming Of The New Shelves.  I will attempt to take a better picture of them tomorrow and show you how it looks now!