We hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and a great New Year celebration! We’ve been out and about (as usual), enjoying the weather and taking Mum to new places.
The Motley Crue on the Foreshore on Christmas Eve.
The kid’s had a lovely Christmas day and Santa was particularly generous this year – thank you Santa! Sam received: an electric guitar, a Buzz PS2 game and controllers and a Jungle Buzz game (which provided possibly THE most fun we’ve ever had on Christmas evening!), a LocoRoco PSP game from Nanny D, Lovely lolly to spend in the sales from Uncle Michael (and Nanny D), Ferrari lego…. Honestly, the list just went on and on…. Darcie got: two Furbys (one ‘Funky’, one ‘normal’), an ipod, an iDog, some Polly Pocket stuff and a Pixel chix mall, a fantastic dancing Barbie from Nanny D (o: ) and Mr Cheese received more Bob the ilder and Thomas than you could fit into a Bob and Thomas catalogue, a lovely new ball and a bicycle! Nanny D got him an interactive game for the TV, which he loves (when he gets a turn on the TV!). Thanks Uncle Michael for the money (o: we’ll let you know what they spend it all on. I’ve got a feeling Sam might be spending it all on connector pens:
Sam and his ever increasing pen collection.
So, Christmas dinner involved seafood, seafood and a bit more seafood. We had prawns (in their dinner jackets, as well as naked!), scallops, oysters, smoked salmon… all very civilised and yummy. It was particularly hot, so the kids hopped in and out of the pool all day. We hung around the house and the kids enjoyed their presents – flitting from one to the other like butterflies with ADD.
Christmas lunch!
Between Xmas and New Year, we all went to watch The Wild at the outdoor cinema in Perth. It’s a lovely experience to sit under the stars, huddled up like an old woman with a blanket covering your knees watching a movie. Quite an experience for Mum, seeing as the last film she’d seen at the ‘cinema’ was 50,000 leagues under the sea, which I think she took me to see when I was in primary school at the Campus West!! But it was good fun and Mum managed to sit through the entire film without asking when the usherette would come round with the ice creams and what time the Pearl and Dean advertising would start. Well done, Mum! Adam enjoyed the film (he always loves going to the pictures!), although he was a bit scared by the buffalo thingies. Eddie Izzard was very funny as the koala – it just suited him down to the ground. The fun thing about watching an open air film in Oz is that they have an affilation with a pizza company and just before the film starts, you get a yummy Dominos pizza delivered to the park!
Getting ready for the film.....
Before we got to the cinema, we did a little tour of the Northern Suburbs of Perth. We do like it up there; it’s a lot more developed and has more to offer on your doorstep, but it’s all coming ‘down south’ and the house prices will just rocket after the train line goes live. Mum actually like a place call Hillarys (in the old cliché of Dad ‘having a good day’ on holiday – Mum actually liked somewhere!!!). There’s a harbour where you can sit and people watch with a coffee – it’s like an up-market Southend, but with less effluent being bilged into the sea. We also let the kids have a play at Mullaloo beach. It’s a favourite of ours – always busy and the view is just GORG-OUS!
Mr Cheese in the pool on Christmas day.
New Year’s Eve started with Yum Cha in Northbridge. It’s a Chinese restaurant where you take a seat and mad little Chinese women wander up and down with trays, trying to tempt you to take their food. If they’ve got something on their trolley that you like the look of, you take one and they stamp your card. At the end of the meal, you pay for what you’ve eaten (kind of like the coloured plate thing in sushi bars). It’s very chaotic and busy, but it’s a real experience. Mum’s face was a picture as Adam and Darcie tucked into a plate of octopus tentacles! Adam really likes them. He spends ages with them on his fingers like an extra from a Doctor Who episode!
Tentacle anyone???
After we filled our faces, we popped into Fremantle for a beer in a brewery/pub called Little Creatures. It’s got lots of atmosphere, but was getting a bit rowdy for the kids, so we whizzed back to Mandurah to watch the New Year’s fireworks at 9pm. Like last year, the teenagers were getting loud (and very drunk) after the fireworks; so after witnessing one completely pi**ed teenage boy wee into the river just in front of us (and a hundred other families sitting on the foreshore!), we bid our goodbyes and headed home to see in the New Year in front of the TV with a party popper (who says we don’t know how to enjoy ourselves?) The fireworks in Sydney looked just amazing. It was weird though that we went off to bed and woke up in time to see London celebrating the New Year with the fireworks round the Eye. You were singing Auld Land Syne, we were having cornflakes and a coffee……
So, Mum is now in her little holiday rental. She’s got it for the month, just in case we were driving her mad and she could have a little respite from us. Unfortunately (for her – ha ha!), Sam and Darcie have moved in with her! We pop over to visit during the day and Adam goes over to visit his siblings, but they are adamant that they want to stay with Nanny! I feel bereft and have had to console my wayward emotions in a bottle of wine each night! OK, that’s rubbish – I usually drink to forget about the kids, now I’m drinking in celebration of their absence! Ha ha. What time is it? Pims o’clock? Marvellous! The house is sweet and I’ve spoilt her with an inside toilet this time. I don’t think she realised this was a working holiday and she’d be an au pair for a month. She’ll know to read the small print a bit better next time.
Last night we took a boat trip down the Mandurah canals to see the Xmas lights. Every year, these multi-million dollar houses decorate themselves (i.e. chav themselves up) with tacky multi-coloured lights and the boat operators spend the evenings cruising up and down the canals with a full compliment of people staring straight into their living rooms! Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos as they were just too chavvy! It really put me off the thought of one day ‘moving up’ to a home on the canals. The thought of two months of the year with every pleasure craft on the water pootling up and down the river at the end of my garden passing comments about my choice of soft furnishings, or the colour of my kitchen units??? No thanks! I’ll take my bad taste elsewhere where it can languish un-discussed and un-ridiculed. Plus, there were all these huge houses with only two sad people sat round a kitchen table! It’d cost me a fortune in ‘rent-a-crowd’ fees to hire people to come and sit in my house to make it look like I was popular and had loads of mates!
It also amazed me how competitive the neighbours were. All that money and no taste!!! They were still determined to out-do their neighbour with an extra 20,000 lights in the shape of a Wise man on a donkey! I think if we ever did it again though, we would go before Christmas. It was slightly sad yesterday on the 3rd of January looking at all the Christmas lights with piped Nat King Cole over the PA system. Adam got very excited when he saw his first inflatable Santa though and was convinced that he was coming to visit him again that night. I reassured him that Santa would only be back to remove presents when he had been naughty – kind of like a repossession for when lego goes bad.
Oh and I’ve already broken my New Years Resolution by eating 5 of Adam’s Lindor choccys that were taunting me from the fridge. Note to self: must got to the Doctors about these voices in my head telling me to do stuff (o:
