Tag Archives: christmas

Christmas time

Leave a Reply

Christmas here at Tea Towers has been a little different this year – we have still managed to do a lot of our home Christmas traditions but because we’ve been unable to see friends and family this year we really wanted to share our photos with you all and let you know that we are missing you x.

To kick off the Christmas break a trip to the Krispy Kreme doughnut factory was a must to get hold of their seasonal doughnuts… these didn’t stay around for long!

Sam has been quite active in the kitchen this holiday making himself and Emily their Saturday evening meal each week.

Emily has enjoyed doing some of her Christmas Brownies activities, including making smores before having a camp out in Sam’s room and also taking part in an online Brownies Christingle service.

Sam & Emily very much enjoyed trying to work out who was attempting to ruin Christmas in the online Theatre production from Wrongsemble (www.wrongsemble.com/humbug).

Much baking of gingerbread took place this year, not only did we make our own gingerbread house, but Sam & Emily also decorated a gingerbread caravan from their grandparents this year.

Our street was very lucky to have a visit from a brass trio who very kindly came out on a cold wet evening to play carols as they weren’t able to do their usual concert this year.

This is Christmas morning before the present unwrapping began… it took a lot of restraining to get this photograph taken before they were allowed to start 🙂

Rich is clearly delighted with his present of corn on the cob skewers and I am also very excited in this photo with my ‘Wooloo’ Pokemon toy.

We all really enjoyed eating our traditional turkey dinner, mmmm pigs in blankets 🙂

The weather has just turned quite Christmasy over the last few days in Sale, we’ve had two days of morning snow and the kids have had a great time having snowball fights and building a large number of snow people.

We really hope you’ve all had a wonderful Christmas, that you are all safe and well and that one day soon we’ll get to see you x

Christmas time

Leave a Reply

We decided that we’d start Christmas today at Tea Towers. The Christmas tree is up and decorated and we’re hoping that our ingenious move of putting the tree on a table will prevent little hands from interfering.

Jessica is going to redistribute the decorations this evening as Samuel favoured the approach of putting all his decorations on one branch. It’s not immediately evident in the picture but Sam decorated the lower right.

The last month & Happy New Year

Leave a Reply

There has been a definite lull in my activity on the blog over the last month so I thought I’d give a quick digest of what I’ve been up to.

Samuel with one of his new toys

First of all there was Christmas… we were lucky enough to have my parents to visit this year so Samuel got to spend Christmas day with Grandad and Grandma. Jessica prepared a lovely Christmas dinner and Samuel had a great time with so many people there to entertain him. I have a mountain of chocolate to get through post Christmas and have so far only dented the surface.

This was before I had a drink

For New Years Eve, Cara and Nick took time out of their busy social calendar to spend the last evening of the decade with me and Jessica. As Samuel slept soundly we made some predictions for 2020 and enjoyed a game of Taboo whilst eating Pizza and a hastily assembled cheese board. We pulled the last of the festive crackers and I invented Elton-vision (above).

He enjoyed himself, honestly

On New Years Day we went to Kelsey park where Sam had a go on the swings and I fed the squirrels. The squirrels in the park are really tame and a lot of people bring nuts along to feed them by hand.

Squillie enjoys a cashew

We’re hoping that 2010 will be a quiet year for our family so we can enjoy all Sam’s milestones and have a bit of a rest after our marriage-house-baby stress marathon. Things at work are all change with a move from Kingswood to W12 and a challenging project taking a lot of my time. I hope that you had a great holiday and are looking forward to an exciting year too.

Happy New Year!

Happy Christmas!

Leave a Reply

Sam's first ChristmasHappy Christmas to all our readers – we hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas day and are now enjoying what is left of the seasonal celebrations.

Rich, Sam and myself all had a lovely time spending Christmas at my parent’s home with my two other sisters, brother, little niece Katie, Kathy & Marcus. Somehow all ten of us managed to squeeze round the table for a fantastic Christmas meal (with Sam dosing in his sling on my lap). Thanks for all the lovely food Mum & Dad – especially the tasty desserts!

In the photo on the left you can see little Sam in his cute little jumper that a friend made up for him and the photo on the right shows Sam recovering after a tiring but very enjoyable Christmas.

Sam managed to charm everyone who saw him and he spent the day cooing and playing and having the Tired Samueloccasional nap time too. He is now babbling and cooing like a good-un and he is also smiling and playing really well. Sam would like me to take this opportunity to thank everyone for all his presents, he had a very impressive haul for his first Christmas – he had more presents than his dad and me put together!

Rich and I are now gearing ourselves up for some visitors from the north – Sam’s other grandparents! Little Sam is practising being as cute as possible for their visit while Rich and I rush around getting the house tidied up.

Merry Christmas

Leave a Reply

To the left is a picture of Jessica crafting on Christmas morning. What you probably can’t spot is the tiny radio controlled helicopter that is hovering nearby – I have highlighted it in the picture on the right. Jessica has been very understanding whilst I learn to fly my new toy.

Below is a short video of it in action – I apologise if Microsoft insist on making you watch an ad first.

This year was our first Christmas as hosts and I am pleased to say that everything went well on the big day. Jessica’s roast dinner was delicious and she obeyed the Christmas traditions of supplying far too much food for us to eat. Thank you to everyone who sent a present or card I hope you enjoyed your presents too.

We are currently enjoying a few quiet days before it all kicks off again when we host a New Years eve bash. Thankfully we still have some Champagne left over from the wedding so we’ll be able to see the New Year in with style.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Video: Tiny RC copter

Kingswood Christmas Casino

Leave a Reply

Jessica kindly organised a Christmas party for the club at work – a good time was had by everyone who came which was fantastic as the majority of the people at work were miserable and declared humbug. I donned a (borrowed) dinner jacket and bow-tie and staffed one of the two black jack tables with other games including Roulette and Wii bowling.

The aim of the night was to accumulate more (chocolate) coins than anyone else by gambling on the casino games. Everyone then cashed in their winnings and the top gamblers won a box of chocolates each. The banked casino currency could then be eaten but due to the sheer amount available a lot was taken home too 🙂

Thank you again to Jessica for organising such a great evening.

Leave a Reply

A neat trick for anyone using Flickr this Christmas (which I found via boingboing). Add an image note with the text “ho ho ho hat” or “ho ho ho beard” to get either a hat or beard for your image.

Here is one I made earlier to make Clive look a little more festive.

Leave a Reply

Happy Christmas! I am getting in early this year as I had to re-design the site banner and want to get a decent amount of use out of it! After the success of the LED Pumpkin kit I made for Jessica (see her October blog archive) I decided to get a Christmas kit whilst they were selling them cheap at Maplin’s. You can see the finished product in the video below.

  • Around 120 LEDs
  • About 5 hours of soldering

Jessica has a 3D Christmas tree soldering kit that she has almost finished – I’l l introduce her to youTube uploading and see if she can feature it in her blog soon.