Well… it’s a busy week this week for our little house with a couple of big events happening after the excitement of Sinterklaas and Pakjesavond last week! Actually, December through to mid January is always a long month of eventfulness!

Our tree!

The first thing is that we picked up our Christmas tree on Monday… which meant that we could start decorating it as soon as our oldest came home from school! Oddly enough, despite the fact that it is the biggest tree that we’ve ever had, our oldest daughter said that it was a touch small! Today, she’s come to realise it is huge! Perhaps not as big as the ones that she has at school though…. But this one is special, as it is our tree!

My wife comes from much bigger family than I did, and so the dressing of the tree was a much bigger and important event in her family I think. However, we are trying to make it a little thing of our own as well. So, we all pitched in and helped decorate the tree, mostly my wife and my oldest daughter... whilst the younger one and I tried not to cause too much chaos in the lower parts of the tree!

It also means that my wife gets to trot out her completely kitsch Santa plate for another year... it's terrible....

Grandmother arriving!

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Both my wife and I are Australian, and we are living in Netherlands... a long long way away from parental support for helping to bring up the kids! So, it means that we are often run off our feet with no prospect of the Grandparent effect to help out. Well, that is that way my parents did things as well, so I'm not complaining... however, it is something that we really notice when the grandparents are here (or when we are visiting Australia).

All of a sudden there is so much more time and space to get stuff done! So, my mother is here for a few weeks (nearly a month), and we are looking forward to a whole heap of more time and space for ourselves!

House is fixed for winter!

A few weeks back, some bastard decided to strip the lead protection from our wall. With winter coming up fast, we needed that protection for our walls to protect against the snow and rain. We finally had it repaired (after some misunderstanding in timing with the repair people) before the holiday season started. Luckily they were able to fit us in as an emergency repair at no extra cost due to the misunderstanding... otherwise, we would have had an unprotected wall for the worst weeks of the winter.

So, all fixed... still no idea why anyone would steal lead sheeting... I'd better not start seeing lead coins appearing at the @ssg-community!