Merry Christmas Everyone

Well, can you believe that Christmas has come and gone already? And after all the preparation and work? We had a lovely day, and I'm proud to say that I cooked a turkey for the first time (it wasn't such a big ordeal! thank goodness) with the onion and sage stuffing, made my own cranberry sauce (I'll never buy store made again) AND made Brussel sprouts edible! Which I think was my biggest achievement - I used a Delia recipe for Caramelised Brussel Sprouts with Shallots and Pancetta. They were lovely. Now that you've had a run down of the menu I can get onto the more important stuff - Ben LOVED Christmas... He had a ball opening his presents, and we had such a lovely morning playing around. It was one of my best Christmases... We got him a Smartville Train set which has lots of different animal characters that fit into different parts of the set and talk and teach - he's really spending quite a lot of time with it which is great. He got a plane that you can put things into from Riaan and Cathy and that was another favourite of the day - he spent ages putting things in and taking them out again. I also got him is own mobile phone, which I hope would take some of the attraction away from mine, but it is definitely only a stop gap until he gets the real thing.

The pregnancy is going well too now, after a bit of a rocky start... I'm starting to get my energy back now thank goodness, but for those of you in any doubt, pregnancy forgetfulness is a very real condition - I think this child will be a genius, as it is sapping all of my intelligence... I won't even launch into the litany of stupid things I've done over the past couple of weeks! ...

We hope that you have had a really good holiday, and that you've enjoyed spending time with friends and family, and for those of you we were far away from know that you were never that far as you are always in our thoughts...

Merry Christmas Everyone :)