Wellington Adventures: Christmas 2013

Christmas began VERY early for us this year, with a wake-up call from Alfie at 5.30am, just TOO excited to stay in bed any longer. And 10 minutes later Molly was up too. Grrrr....!

So we hauled them into our bed, made a cup of coffee and enjoyed watching them empty their stockings for a while.

We have a bit of a Christmas-morning-at-the-beach tradition in our family. Ever since we first moved to NZ we've made a point of bringing a pile of Vegemite toast, a flask of hot chocolate and a couple of presents to the beach first thing in the morning after we wake up. This year, we were there by 7.30am! (I should point out that this isn't the earliest we've ever been to the beach on Christmas morning - there was one year when we were there by 6.05am!).

There was still a bit of a chill in the air at this early hour, so we busied ourselves hunting for starfish on the rocks and making a sandcastle..

But the temptation proved too great, and it wasn't long before we were all having a paddle!

Then it was back home for brunch...

And some present opening...

Oh the excitement of so many presents! It was bedlam for a while! So we engineered some quiet-ish time - it didn't last very long but it was enough for us to finally all finish our Santa jigsaw puzzle....We've been slowly doing it for the last few weeks.

After that we all had a Christmas nap! Ah...bliss....! Then it was Christmas cake time...

Things quickly deteriorated after that! First there was a huge family Nerf Gun fight....Alfie's owned a couple of Nerf Guns for a long while, but Santa brought some mini ones this year and Molly got a girl version of her own too, so the pace has been picked up and there've been some fairly full on Nerf battles this Christmas, including several fat lips!

And the Nerf Gun battle then morphed into a family water sprinkler session. Sorry to everyone in Wellington if you were wishing for a peaceful Christmas - we screamed a lot!