Christmas & New Year with Family

For only the second time in Abigail's lifetime we got to celebrate Christmas with family in the UK. The first time she was only 3 months old!

After the craziness of packing up our lives in Ohio, we chose not to schedule anything but instead set aside a few weeks to both recover and spend time with family.

Abigail enjoyed opening Christmas presents right from the day after we arrived in the country ... and got stuck straight into the lego she got from Popeye, until the jetlag hit her and she was wiped out in the middle of the floor for an hour or two!

 

While we hadn't had a chance to do anything much festive in our house in the States, the girls got to decorate trees at both grandparents houses and had lots of fun making paper chains with Grandma to decorate their living room.

Naomi kept disappearing behind the tree at Grandma and Gramps' house and was often found picking up and putting down different presents in the days leading up to December 25th!

We stayed with Mark's parent's at the beginning and as you can see from the photo's below, getting to used to having grandchildren around can be both a snuggly and tiring business!

On Christmas morning, a week after we got back and with the girls still adjusting to the time zone we had the privilege of waking them up at about 9am ... and not the other way around with them bouncing around at some ungodly hour! We opened our stockings before breakfast and then waited for Nana and Uncle Stan to join us before enjoying a Christmas feast and opening the some more pressies all together.

For New Year we spent some time at Mark's parents cottage in Cornwall with them, Mark's sister and Jenny's mum. It was a chance to eat Cornish pasty's, cream tea's and walk along the beach, even if it was freezing cold!

Most of the week was grey and rainy ... yes, very British, a big welcome back to the country! It wasn't until the final night that we actually got to do one of the fun things that we had planned to do on New Year's Eve. Abigail's favourite movie is Tangled, the Disney Rapunzel story. We bought some floating lanterns, which they release in the movie, to light when we were there. It was a really fun way to finish the week ... watching them float away into the night sky!