The Last Post

of this year, anyway. I've hardly been prolific of late, but I thought I'd do a spot of virtual housekeeping before the old year slips away and bring my avid readers (?) up to date with goings on chez winter.

First of all, Christmas. People might remember that I was exceedingly unimpressed with last christmas - it felt claustrophobic, with too many people here, too much hard work getting the house ready for them, too much hard work feeding and entertaining them; mostly, however, it was the inability to relax that comes with having other people in your house. Then there were the presents - everyone had bought the boys individual presents and we were absolutely swamped with toys, most of which were opened while I was out of the room, thus making it impossible to properly thank people afterwards for their gifts - I had no idea who had bought what! And then there were the pointless presents, the gifts that people had wasted their money on, presents with either zero usefulness or zero amusement value. I found a couple of them in the garage the other day where they've been all year.

This year has been much, much, much better. We asked that people buy Sam & Jacob joint presents, thus cutting down on the number of toys they got, and taking less time to open - I didn't have to rush off to put the turkey on before they'd finished opening everything, so I managed to keep tabs on who had bought what. Doug had been relatively quiet at work, so unlike last year where he was so busy that he only had the time to buy me the couple of things I'd suggested, this year he went into town and bought me a selection of surprises, all of which were lovely and welcome. With regard to presents from others, we'd been quite assiduous in letting people know the sort of things we were looking for and pretty much everybody seemed glad for our suggestions - we certainly got most of the things that we wanted and needed; only one person struck out on their own and bought "off the list" and lo! it was the only pointless/total waste of money present we received this year. Quite an improvement on last year...



Guest-wise, we just had the one guest to dinner; a friend of ours who was on-call for the festive season and unable to get home to his family who live much further afield than York. He arrived at about midday and left about 6ish - it was lovely to have company for the afternoon, but it was also lovely to be able to just relax in the evening, to crash out on the sofa and watch tv and not have to worry about making entertaining conversation. Doug and I have decided that this is definitely the way to do Christmas - by all means have guests around during the day, but only ones that can go home in the evening!!



We bought Jacob and Sam bikes for Christmas, and we've had much fun pushing them round Rowntree park and down to the shops on them. Jacob has got the hang of pedalling right away whereas Sam likes to be pushed around as if he was in his pram :-) This has been the sum total of our activity since Christmas Day, and thankfully its stayed fairly dry to allow us to get out and about. We did get to Creepy Crawlies on Friday, and instead of it being the bunfight I was expecting, it was relatively quiet and the kids had a great time charging round both inside and outside play areas.

My parents are now staying with us over the New Year period - without all the hassle and work that comes with Christmas, this is proving very relaxing; we went and had lunch at the farm shop yesterday, as well as buying the food for our New Year's Day roast dinner, and in the evening Doug and I went into York for a bite to eat and a trip to the cinema (The Golden Compass, very good). Today, I may or may not take my mum into York as she wants to go to the wool shop and I've got one duplicate present that needs to be swapped. The kids also need shoes, so I may or may not take them too. We're not going out for New Year's Eve, even though Mum & Dad have offered to babysit - having experienced York on race weekends, I'm not keen to go out when its like that x 10! So we've decided to have a games evening, playing triominoes and Carcassone etc very convivial :-)

Its Mum's birthday on Thursday, so my brother is secretly planning to bring his kids up from Nottingham for the day (don't worry, she doesn't use the computer, she won't see this); I'll prolly just get a stack of pizzas from Tesco and heat them up - a minimum fuss dinner for a horde of hungry kids.

And in the New Year, it is all change. We have a three week hiatus before Jacob starts at nursery school on 22nd, and Sam starts going to mother and toddler group on 24th. We have a home visit from the school on 8th Jan (have to remember to tidy up for that!) so they can see Jacob's home environment and get a chance to meet him one-to-one before he starts with them. We also have to decide on his eventual school by February when we need to put in the application form to the LEA; it seems rather scary that we're at this point already.

We're also going to find a nursery for Sam to attend a couple of mornings a week; we feel he needs to interact with kids his own age, especially as he still isn't talking at all. The playgroup/mother-toddler group that Jacob attended is being incorporated into a Childrens Centre run by Sure Start, and as well as a drop-in centre, they will also be offering all-day childcare from 0-5; as this will be in the same complex as Jacob's nursery school, it makes sense that Sam goes there too, but it doesn't open until February so it might be a while before he can go there. We'll know a bit more in the New Year.

Anyway, that's a rather mammoth post. Its what happens when you don't blog for nearly a month :-) I'll try and stick some photos in to make it a little more interesting (I know, it'll take a bloody interesting photo to do that!!), and I've also got a load of photos on the camera that need loading up into the gallery, so I'll stick a link in when I've done that. A New Year's resolution perhaps? ......