December, Christmas and New Year

[lnr]

Goodness it's a while since I posted here! Apologies to those who follow me on Facebook (or my photos of Matthew on blipfoto) and have probably heard most of this already :)

Matthew had a selection of early Christmas parties, the first of which was with our lovely NCT group at a soft play centre where we also met this time last year. We also had a Sing and Sign Christmas party and one at the mobile soft play group in the village. He was quite happy to see Santa across the room but not very impressed to actually go meet him. He did discover that he loves "pie" - both apple and mince pies were a hit. He also had a couple of goes at baking: rolling out and cutting out biscuits and mince pies, and helping decorate them both - very much something he enjoyed so we'll have to do some more of that.

We had a quiet Christmas itself with just me, Mike and Matthew. We went for duck rather than turkey, but had all the trimmings, and we have a real tree which Matthew has loved poking and prodding - which is rather less popular with the rest of us now all the needles are falling off. Lots of presents which were gradually opened over the course of the day, and played with lots - his fire engine from granny Gina and grandad Evan was a particular hit, and he had a lovely Duplo train from his childminder. Lovely Skype chats with both sides of the family too.

The week after Christmas was very quiet. We had a day out to Ely to do some present swapping in a shop that isn't in Cambridge, and admired the Cathedral in the frost and bought a football and played at the park and enjoyed riding on trains. I spent a day shopping in Cambridge and got Matthew a new car seat (which he loves). Matthew and I met up with Rod and Tom (who's almost exactly Matthew's age) at a playground and they had great fun chasing each other around and playing on the slide and round-and-round-stick (I consider it a variant of a roundabout, Mike and Rod both say it's not :) and playing with Matthew's new football. A quiet night in for New Year's Eve, and chat with grandad to sing happy birthday and play peekaboo by Skype on New Years Day.

And this weekend has been Christmas part 2 - granny and grandad came to visit and we had more presents and some lovely meals (the Red Lion in Hinxton had fabulous food and were really well set up for kids too). We all had a really good time - including poor mum though not so much with her broken arm hurting too much. Matthew is really taken with his balance bike, and loved the 'boat' from Steph, Dave, Ollie and Izzy too.

I broke my phone just before Christmas, and had a bit of an entertaining saga trying to fix it, which I won't go into here, but suffice to say eventually I gave in and bought a new one, which is doing great so far. Back to work today, and it's freezing as usual. But Mike's taken a couple of extra days off and will have a quiet day to himself tomorrow, and I'm taking Wednesday and we'll go out and perhaps see the last part of the Hobbit :)

NB: My two recent LJ posts were partly as a result of seeing this - so I'm reposting in case it inspires anyone else:

'When you see this, make a post in your journal or in a community. It can be anything: a crosspost something you've posted on Tumblr, a few words about the last thing you read/watched, or just a "Hi, how is everyone?" Then go read your f-list and leave at least one comment.'