Christmas with The Gidneys

 

For Christmas Tom bought Caroline a family photo shoot. I found a local lady who is friends with quite a few of my friends and she was kind enough to fit them in. She sent through the above photo on Christmas Eve to whet our appetites. 

The kids, Tess's friend Beth and myself spent an enjoyable evening decorating the gingerbread house. The girls were much more focussed and diligent than Tom and I but we had a lovely evening listening to carols and drinking champagne. George then got to smash it after Christmas which he thought was fantastic fun. I was very impressed that he was more interested in the gingerbread than the lollies and so were the kids but only because that meant there were more for them!

Tom and Jules were on patrol on Christmas Eve and due to the beautiful weather they headed down on the scooter and motorbike. We followed down in the car and spent a lovely couple of hours at the beach. 

We had brunch at Jellyfish one morning whilst Tess was doing her shift and decided to try Matthew on his first bit of solids - a banana. It wasn't completely successful. 

We woke to a beautiful day on Christmas Day so headed down to the beach as usual before presents, champagne, lunch and hours of table tennis. 

Ted got in the Christmas spirit too. 

Another day we were at the beach and Tom was out surfing for a few hours. I saw him come into shore and as he was walking towards me he suddenly dropped his board, ran to the surf lifesaving board, grabbed it whilst shouting at a nearby clubbie and paddled for his life out to where I could see someone struggling in a rip. The council lifeguard had also seen what was happening so followed closely behind but wasn't needed because Tom got to the woman faster than he could. I was so proud - it's so incredible to think that my son has the surf skills to save someone's life. You can just see Tom with the lady on the board in front of him in the circle below. 

George had the shock of his life when he woke up one morning and found himself face to face with Ted! 

We had a lovely evening out at Garfish. We got Tia to babysit for us and Tom agreed to stay home and help her although he was very clear that if either of the children woke up he was good for nothing! We got a call at around 10.30: "Baby Jesus has arisen" so he came and picked us up which was all very convenient and did not end up disturbing our evening at all. 

New Year's Eve was a quiet affair with the 4 of us having dinner at home but we ate (and drank!) like kings - Caroline made an incredible kingfish ceviche and I did quite well with a fillet steak wrapped in prosciutto. We were very happy to discover that we could see the 9pm Manly fireworks from our balcony and everyone was asleep by midnight - a pretty excellent New Year's Eve in my books!

The Gidney's left on January 4th which was the same day we headed off to Thailand. It was such a pleasure to spend time with Robert and Caroline and to get to know George and Matthew. It was a little exhausting for R&C - I don't think they fully appreciated how hard it would be to spend that much time away with a 6 month and almost 3 year old - but we're so glad they came.