It’s Chriiiiiiiiiiiisssstmaaaaaaas.

Yes, it is, as yelled by Noddy Holder in that old faithful seasonal refrain, ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’

I hope you had a brilliant Christmas – I certainly have!

But first, a small apology

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  It’s been 2 months since my last blog post.

In my defence, I have been mad busy, mostly with work, which has robbed me of all motivation to do anything else and when I have had the time, it’s been taken up with gardening or other chores.  I’ve started a few posts, some rants about this that or the other, but so far, nothing good enough to actually post.

Until now.

I’ve got my kids here in Perth for Christmas.

As they live in England, this involves a fair amount of travelling.  And when I say ‘fair’ I mean ‘ridiculous’.  Get this for 3 days of fun.

1.  Red line – Fly myself – Perth to Singapore – 5 hours 30 mins
2.  Singapore to London – 13 hours
3.  Arrive London 5:30am – drive 200 miles to collect kids.  Drive 100 miles to parents house with kids.
4.  Green line – Next day 2:15pm – fly with kids – London to Doha (Qatar) – 6 hours 30mins
5.  Doha to Perth – 10 hours 30 mins
6.  Arrive Perth on Christmas Eve 6pm.  Drive home and take kids out to see the local Christmas lights, play santa and get to bed late.

I couldn’t wait to get off!!

I had a few dramas, I miss-read the tickets and managed to miss the Perth-Singapore flight by about 10 minutes.  Luckily for me, someone else missed the next one and I managed to nab their seat and make the original connection to London in Singapore. *phew*

In England, the weather was terrible and we got stuck in a massive tailback on the M25 trying to get back to Heathrow – we managed to scrape in with 45 mins to spare! *eep*  In both cases, we’d checked in online, so it takes some of the pressure off, but even so!

But all this is how come I have something interesting to write about.  And some pictures at last!

Travelling…

Christmas Day here was great – typically warm, full of family and presents, trips to the beach and tons of yummy food!

But the beach was the bit that kids most enjoyed.  Given that I’d just collected them from a dark and rainy England where the temp was no more than 7C, they really loved this!  To Anja and Piper, this is just normal, the beach is just down the end of the road, but with Ella and Henry being so excited, they got into it and let their hair down pretty quickly!

We went back to the beach later in the day with swimming cossies – the sea breeze brought in the waves, so the kids spent a few hours leaping and jumping and getting bowled over.

All in all – a very successful day.

This week we have a ton of stuff planned  – including a trip to Caversham Wildlife Park to see koalas and kangaroos.  I cant wait to see their faces!