New Year catch up post

Happy New Year!

I hope that everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year. We had a really nice family Christmas break, the children had three weeks off school and the end of term seems a long time ago now! Luckily it looks as though the children will be returning to school as normal, and as over half of Mia's school went down with covid before Christmas hopefully there won't be any more issues. 

We enjoyed our usual Christmas traditions. The Elf on the Shelf came back of course, the children might be getting older but the magic of Christmas is still alive and well!

Our school breaks up a week earlier than most of the country so we returned to the fantastic apartment in Torquay where we spent the same week last year. It's an amazing place with its own pool, which we used several times a day. I treated the children to an enormous inflatable unicorn, we went for walks, visited to the harbour, and went to the cinema to watch the new Spiderman film.

We ordered so much food that we ended up eating a roast dinner for three days in a row! We did our Christmas food shop with Tesco online and we bought a massive box of prepared vegetables, a sweet potato and red cabbage Christmas log for the main course and a chocolate yule log for dessert. Along with all the other snacks and party food of course. 

This was my Christmas dinner, going heavy on the roast potatoes along with my token Brussels sprout!

We didn't get out too much over Christmas as we were trying to avoid the covid, but we did spend some time with both sides of the family. At home we enjoyed lots of family Christmas television. I had my annual sob over The Snowman on Christmas Eve and we also enjoyed the film Encanto with some great songs. We've made a start on Around the World in 80 Days which is shaping up well. Mia and I spent an afternoon watching the latest Little Women film which I love, although I think it's quite confusing if you don't know the books so I had to explain quite a lot to her. She's now made a start on the books herself which I'm pleased with. 

I also did lots of reading. I worked through some of the books that I had stored up on my Kindle from the Amazon First Reads and Prime Reading selections, there were some nice easy books that I didn't need to concentrate on too much. I also received some books for Christmas - I've enjoyed several books by Haruki Murakami and the first few pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle suggest that I'll enjoy this one too. The Swish of the Curtain is an upgrade to the old paperback copy I have which is missing an entire chapter! And The Almanac is something new that I spotted while browsing for books. It has a chapter for each month of the year with things to look out for in nature - the night sky, birds and so on - with a folktale theme this year. 

I was also lucky enough to get an Amazon voucher and I've already bought three books. I bought The Betrayals and Ten Thousand Doors of January, both of which I borrowed from the library last year and loved enough to want my own copy. Then I bought Atomic Habits which I'm hoping will help me to work on a few things that I want to achieve this year. 

Now it's time to make sure that all the homework is completed, the books and bags are ready for school and the packed lunches are made. I'm looking forward to getting the house back in shape for the New Year, picking up on the neglected housework and hopefully having a bit of a sort out with everyone out of the way!