EMP in the US

So, I can’t help taking pictures of the snow – it’ s great! It’s just like you imagine it to be in all those nature films with the seals and stuff. Today, it especially felt like a polar bear or a penguin might pop out at any moment – there was such a gale blowing that the screen door was snapped off by a gust of wind!

The wind blew all the snow around like a blizzard, so that snow drifts built up even when it wasn’t snowing! I had carefully scraped the snow off the driveway yesterday (only to reveal the ice beneath) but this wind blew it all back again today!

Anyway, a blizzard was no excuse not to make the extremely reluctant kids go out for a walk, especially with a willing Yaya to help.

We bullied and cajoled the kids out to the golf course. Ollie whined a lot, Thomas just complained. However, we did get a couple of exhilarating rides on our new sled. Unfortunately I didn’t capture the excitement, partly due to Ollie crying every time his mitten came off (every 5 seconds) but I did capture the walk home…

I found the tracks we made fascinating!

And we even saw a woodpecker on the way home, though this was the black-and-white version – I haven’t seen the bright red ones since the winter hit.

Thankfully we all cosied up, and played the Wii in the evening, which was great fun:

However, this was Yaya and Yayo’s last evening for this time, and for me this marks the end of a whole month’s holiday from the banal tasks of motherhood. I’ve not had to clean or cook since I got on the plane to the UK on the 1st December, and on returning home, I barely entered my own kitchen. Prepare for much more morose posting as I once again embark on the cleaning and washing-up’edness of housewifery…

This post is temporally challenged, but when we went out for drinks on Christmas Eve, I left the rucksack, with my camera, at our friends’ house, so i’ve only just looked at the photos on it. Anyway, there was cookie-decorating for the kids, and I got a couple of nice photos from it, before I got to have a go!

So yesterday it rained a lot. Today it snowed again. Even the rain didn’t manage to melt the snow, so when it snowed some more, the new snow just sat as a layer on top of the old snow. The old snow was the type of snow that didn’t stick together, but the new snow was perfect.

The kids worked hard!

It was a good team effort.

The nearly finished product:

Our front garden:

I just had to blog about a fantastic Christmas present Thomas was given, and it’s made me very happy, as well as Thomas. It’s a really cool drawing book:

What has made me happy, is that it has encouraged Thomas to draw recognisable pictures, which was something he never seemed to do, and it was a worry enough that I talked to the head of his childcare about it. We thought that because likes to hang around mostly with girls, and girls tend to be better at drawing at this age, his confidence in his ability had been knocked, so he didn’t want to try. So when I saw him copying in this book I was very relieved.

This post may be slightly incoherent, as I am probably a little on the wrong side of a few gin and tonics. However, I have a lot of photos to show you , so let’s see how we get on…

So firstly, the day after we got back to the US, we rushed out to play in all the snow, and it was great!

I’ve already written about Christmas eve, so I’ll skip right on to Christmas Day. We opened presents!

…and Thomas loved his remote-controlled car which is noisy and destructive, so how could he not!?

Then we went out to try out a christmas present:

I tried a steering technique:

We found some deer poo by the tree outside our house, and hoofprints:

And then it was back inside for an amazing Christmas dinner of pot roast (beef) which David had slaved over in his new apron:

On Boxing day, which isn’t a holiday here, we decided to go up a mountain. It’s called Cannon mountain and is about one-and-a-half hour’s drive away. It was pretty amazing – this is the bottom of the cable car, which was mostly used by skiers and snowboarders:

Here we are on the mountain – it was pretty cold!

My father-in-law and I were both impressed by the cable car machinery:

And we also both liked the snow on the trees – neither of us had really seen snow like this before!

So all-in-all, not only did I have two Christmases, two white Christmases, but two fantastic Christmases. I have been very lucky this year. I’m trying to save some of the reflecting-while-drunk for my New Year’s Eve post, but I just can’t wait to mention one more thing… my youngest cousin is pregnant! This means we will have 3 babies born into the family next year! It’s really very exciting, but I don’t want to say too much so that I can blubber on about it all in my New Year post! YIPEE!!!!!!!

So, already I feel like we’ve had a great Christmas Eve. We were invited out for drinks and cookie-decorating, which I’d never tried before, and got stuck into as it’s very relaxing! (well, i’ve obviously tried drinks before…)

The boys have already had some great presents, including a sled, which I can’t wait to get them on tomorrow, and a hat-and-mittens-set for Ollie:

We have also been having lots of serious family fun too:

I am personally having lots of fun with quite a lot of red wine, but need to stay at least a little together until I’ve wrapped the presents and performed other parental duties…

So the boys and I are safely back home, to beautiful sunny weather, with a good layer of snow on the ground. It was a long journey, but the boys were pretty good on the plane, and I managed to get it right so that they napped in the middle of the flight, rather than at the beginning. Thomas got a bit fed up, but at the end of the flight, one of the stewardesses said they had been the best behaved little kids that she’d ever met! However, when we got off the plane, we had to go through security without the buggy, which meant both boys were able to run free, which, having been sat down for 8 hours, they did with enthusiasm. A serious-looking policeman told them that it “wasn’t a playground” but I was so stressed by then I was just glad he didn’t shoot them! Anyway, thankfully there were no incidents, and David and Yayo and Yaya were waiting for us when we came out.

Ollie was asleep when we got home, and we were all soon ready for beds, but the boys were up at 3 in the morning. It became a very long morning, until, at about 9ish I felt it was reasonable for them to go out and play in the snow.

I tried to make a snow angel, but actually the surface was too frozen!

Then at nap time, Thomas and Yaya got stuck in with making dinner:

David was pleased that his stick, aka tap guitar finally arrived. It looks beautiful, and sounds good too!

And I got the boys to pose in their dressing-gowns, as they did look very cute.

This morning, the boys looked out of the window and said “SNOW!” There was a sprinkling, typical of a UK winter. Needless to say, they wanted to try it out!

While we’ve been here, I’ve been making the boys do quite a lot of walking. Mostly, we do “something” in the morning, then there’s lunch and nap-time for Ollie, then there’s a bit of a deadzone around 4pm, so I jump up and find jumpers, coats, hats, mittens, extra socks, wellies, scarves etc etc, and spend a good 20 minutes getting the boys ready to go out. They wear high-visibility vests, and I carry a torch as of course it is dark by this time! We have walked along the canal, up to the railway bridge to watch trains (Ollie always wants to do this) and even today we tried out a playpark in the dark! I’ve really enjoyed these walks without a buggy: I think it’s given me a sense of freedom.

Actually, the first picture in that set is of a daytime stroll into town, and is with the buggy, but it was a walk anyway!

Now, tomorrow, we are holding our own little Christmas Day. This means the boys will get two Christmasses, and maybe even two white Christmasses! My mum presented them with a couple of stockings this evening, which they could hang to see if Santa might put in an early visit just for them…

So, there’s a lot of us staying at my mum and dads this week, which makes for a great Christmas. Luckily, as we still outnumber the other half of the family by one (even without David with us!) we get the bigger spare room. There is ample space, a big double bed, and room for a “readybed” for Ollie.

I share the double bed with Thomas. Though, when I say share… it can take me quite a while to clear myself a little space to sleep in!

Now this room is slightly less child-proofed than we are used to at home, which means that Ollie can find lots of mischief to get up to in the time it takes for him to fall asleep, when I’m not there. His ready bed is next to a cupboard. Unfortunately he likes to take all his and Thomas’ clothes out of the cupboard. I found him wearing a pair of Thomas’ underpants over his pyjamas when I came up to bed the other night! This was bad enough, but he did it again the next night too! I expect he has a Superman complex.

The other day, mum and I took the boys up to London to a Christmas market in Hyde Park. It’s taken me this long to recover and post about it, but actually we had a lot of fun, and when I can bear to face my gallery problem, I’ll post lots of great pictures of it.

This was the entrance:

Also, we had a sort of pre-Christmas dinner with a Danish dish of Hamburgerryg that we traditionally have around this time. It was followed by another Danish tradition of Ris alla Mande, which is normally eaten on Christmas eve. This is a type of rice pudding with coarsely-chopped almonds in. A whole almond is place in the bowl, and whoever gets it in their portion wins the Mandelgave (almond-gift) which is usually a marzipan pig, and quite often homemade. It is almost always won by my brother or father, with their ability to consume vast amounts of the pudding, but this year, it was mum’s turn to win the prize, which had been made by the boys and me.