marc.vic.max.elliot

Merry Christmas everyone!

It’s mid-afternoon, rainy, miserable and the kids are in bed – ahhhh 🙂 This year we are not going any where and people are all coming to us so things have been a bit hectic so far. It doesn’t help when you don’t get to bed until 00:30 and are up at 05:45…………

We hope that you all have a great time over the festive period and we look forward to seeing you over the coming year.

PS: Max’s t-shirt says “Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is EVERYTHING, please” 🙂

This seems to be a big day for Max!

The first thing is he’s having his first night sans pullups. He’s been dry at night for a couple of weeks now and I think it’s time for that next step.  I know he’ll have accidents (and be distraught) but it’s a move he needs to make.

The second thing (and a bit stranger) is that he has his first adult tooth!  The boys stayed at my Mum’s last night while Vic and I watched the Phoenix play and we went to pick them up at lunchtime.  When we got there Mum warned me that Max had hurt his tooth while eating a plum.  I asked Max if I could have a look and whilst checking it out saw a whole new tooth popping through!  This isn’t suppposed to start until he’s at least six and he’s not even five yet!  He now has two wiggly teeth (bottom middle ones) so we’ll see how that goes 🙂

It’s true – look 😉

Max drew his first self portrait yesterday.  As you can see he has freckles, short hair and sticky-out ears 🙂 He also seems to have acquired the neck of a giraffe!

No news really. Christmas is getting closer and the boys are starting to get excited about it 🙂 Here’s a couple of shots from this morning…..

Hello from the lounge at LAX 🙂

Sorry there hasn’t been an update while I’ve been here (I got here 14 hours late) but my week has been mucho filled with training sessions, meetings and copious amounts of drinking….

I was looking through the photos on my camera and came across this one. Max had a party a couple of weeks ago that had a pirate theme. Naturally Elliot wanted to join in 🙂

Update to follow (probably)

It’s 05:20 in the morning and I’m sitting in the lounge at Auckland airport.

Not only is this a horrible, horrible time to be awake but it’s also the same time that I should have been landing in Los Angeles on the first day of my latest trip.

“Engineering requirements” has kept the 747 on the ground for the last 12 hours and me away from a day in the US.  To be fair though I’d rather have twelve hours on the ground than have an engine drop off over the Pacific ocean 🙂

In typical airline fashion the airline had booked us all into a hotel near the airport the “Grand” Chancellor.  I put grand in quote marks due to the fact that it is so not.  I’ve stayed there before when a flight to Hong Kong was delayed and had a shitty smoking room but this time it was even better as they ran out of rooms before I could check in!  They said they could probably find us a room down the road but by this time I had decided that I would catch a cab into the city and stay where I normally do when I come to Auckland.  A couple of phone calls later and I had booked a room and was on my way to somewhere I knew and trusted.

$255 and 8 hours later and I was checking out and back on my way to the airport to try again.  It’s 90 minutes until we (hopefully) leave and there is still no gate number assigned……

After a lot of travelling you just have to sit back and accept that stuff like this happens.  There were so many pissed off and stressed out people last night and there really is nothing you can do about it – shouting at some harassed person behind the counter will really not get you anywhere.

Mind you, if the flight goes ahead, it will be my first time upstairs in a jumbo jet!  I didn’t get an upgrade last night but because a number of business class passengers moved to another US bound flight I think it freed up a number of seats on our flight – happy days 🙂