Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year everybody….. better late then never huh??
We had a great Christmas this year. It was Ollies first & the first one where Amie really grasped the concept of Santa. The kids had a great time helping Becky put up the Christmas Tree, which ended up having to live on the dining table as Ollie kept pulling it over. On Christmas Eve we continued the Guptill family tradition of going to Nanna & Poppas for the reading of “The Night Before Christmas”. Later on Amie put out some water in a bowl on the deck for Santas Reindeer & some milk & a cookie for Santa on the mantlepiece.
On Christmas morning we were woken up to Amie yelling & getting all excited as she had discovered a sack of presents at the end of her bed. She was buzzing when she found an empty bowl on the deck & a pile of crumbs in the lounge. Anyway we all then cruised over to Nana & Poppas for the Christmas festivities for half the day before going to the Haworth Christmas up in Kumeu in the early afternoon.
On New Years Eve we all went up to Omaha Beach with Unlce Tim, Uncle Wai & Aunty Katie to some family friends batch for New Years. We had a great time & Amie had an absolute blast. I unfortunately didn’t think some things through & Ollie who has a normal bed time of 7 was kept up by all the music, yelling & fireworks. The poor little guy didn’t manage to get to sleep untill after midnight when we did.
The next day I managed to sneek in a dive at Goat Island before we all made the trek down to Mt Maunganui for a week in the sun with Nanna, Poppa, Tim, Kaite & Wai.
It was a nice week & the weather was superb but to tell you the truth I found it a little stressful because Amie was very unsettled which caused a few major tanties. I was very conscious of peoples right to have a quiet relaxing time without a vocal two year old trying her luck. We managed to get it out of her that she was missing home & her own bed, I suppose at two we can’t blame her for being home sick. We tried to keep her busy most of the time & I took her on a few Daddy Daughter dates which she loved. She adored the beach & even loved getting in the water with me. Ollie even enjoyed the beach & seemed to love the taste of sand.
We are all back to normal now & already only 3 days into it all it feels like we never had a break. Amie is dying to start kindy again for the year & regularly packs her bag & tells us she of off to kindy. Ollie now has 8 teeth & isn’t too far away from walking. He walks around the furniture all the time & can stand on the spot quite happily for a while but at the moment he seems to think crawling is much faster. His sleeping is still ho hum. At least once a night he wakes crying. His feeding is also getting better. He’s never really liked the baby mush & is really getting into eating the big people food. It’s his birthday in a few weeks so we will have to arrange something small for the family.

Well that’s it from me for the meantime. I’ll leave you with some photos to look through.