As for Christmas it was crazy!  The boys came in about 06:00 and we headed downstairs to see if Santa had visited.  Supposedly he had so I’m not sure which list he was reading and checking twice….

One of the most used presents on the day was a very inexpensive guitar-microphone-amp set that Santa bought for Elliot.  The boys even put on a show for us

Vic’s Mum had stayed for for the night and about 08:00 my Dad and his partner turned up for breakfast and more presents.  Showers, nibbles and playing with toys and all of a sudden it was lunchtime and a visit from my Mum.  We had decided again this year to stay at home and make everyone visit us.  This was due to a couple of things.  The first was falling asleep at the wheel a couple of years ago after rushing around all day (luckily I woke up when we hit the rough asphalt at the side of the road!) and the second was so that the boys could actually have time to enjoy their gifts in the presence of the people that gave them.

Dinner time rolled around and it was the full on dinner with Turkey and all the trimmings.  Vic’s sister and her partner both hate raisins so Vic had made them an ice-cream pudding instead.  They seemed to enjoy it although they were lucky it lasted until desert….

Boxing day was spent visiting people and then it was a full house again for BBQ on the 27th for friends that we hadn’t seen over the Christmas period yet.  Here are some photo’s from the day.

Jay and Thomas on their first visit back to NZ from London

Thomas, Jack, Elliot, Abbey and Max

Max and Abbey (after we’d caught them kissing upstairs – at 6 she’s an older woman! )

Max and his Auntie Ali

Larry, Vic and Ali.  These three have known each other since they were five!

We are so lucky to have generous people that live nice and close and are willing to look after the boys. Without them we wouldn’t be able to do half the things we do……..

The first post was made on the 20th March 2002 and was, funnily enough, about beer   We had a website before then but all the pages were static (except for some php includes) and so moving to a blogging application backend made a huge difference.  Even more amazing is the fact that the posts have made it through four different products – MoveableType, pMachine, ExpressionEngine and WordPress.  Plenty of broken links in the older posts but the text is there.

Max – vomiting only.  Threw up in three sessions between 6 and 10pm. We’d given him a bowl and he used it every time the wee star.

Vic – vomiting and diarrhoea. Sometimes at the same time! Nice…..

Marc – Diarrhoea only and even that didn’t kick in until about 3am.  I had, however, been awake from 10pm until 2am keeping an ear out for the boys.

Elliot – Nothing.  Right as rain the lucky bugger

So all up a great night!  Everyone is much better this morning though so I guess that it was just something that needed to get out of our systems one way or the other…….. Thanks for all the emails wishing us well

Another fad? Maybe, but I found a way to do updates via email rather than SMS so I can email from my blackberry rather than have to SMS a number in the UK (at 20 cents a pop). We’ll see how it gets on but keep an eye on the right of the screen

If you twitter as well you can track me at cosmo_nz

iTheme update from 1.2 to 1.3.1 (plus a bit of hacking to increase the size of the sidebar bg image and the template to show author)

So far so good Any problems let me know!