Christmas

Well I hope you’ve all had/are having a peaceful and stress free Christmas. I’m updating the blog now because Sean has gone to do a job and has taken Junior with him. She was quite happy to go because the people at the factory are friends of ours and they’ll play with her and spoil her for a couple of hours!
We had the usual Christmas although we didn’t have the normal Christmas Day walk because Junior didn’t want to change out of her pyjamas all day, she just wanted to stay in and play with her presents which is fair enough, she is only 8 after all.
We went quite minimal on the decorations this year, mainly because of Monty and his tendency towards madness! We knew that any tree we put up would be brought down on a daily basis and would probably result in lost and broken ornaments. Junior has all the tinsel and fairy lights in her room whilst we’ve gone Swedish in the living room with an Ikea tree.

The cats can’t reach it but Sean and I do keep banging our heads on it – oh, the joy of low ceilings!

The other main decorations consist of our wooden advent calendar from John Lewis which we got when Junior was 2 years old and which unfortunately just doesn’t cut it any more in the excitement stakes, hence the chocolate advent calendar. The tree shaped decoration is made from an Ikea catalogue and took ages to make but I really rather like it, and the small tree is made of lego and was a free gift given out at a lego activity session in Public in Volos.
It’s been quite cold lately, annoyingly colder than Britain which seems unfair. We had to bite the bullet and buy some heating oil because our electric heaters just weren’t taking the chill off the air. Concrete houses really retain their cold, especially ones with flat roofs, they just don’t build homes over here to keep you warm. The dogs have been less inclined to run around outside and have spent most of their time like this -

in fact they’re all sprawled out on the sofa at the moment. They know they’re supposed to sit on the rug but the minute my back’s turned, they’re on the furniture. Not as bad as the cats I suppose who are all curled up in bed!
We did manage a Christmas walk yesterday and it turned out to be surprisingly mild on the beach – in fact it was warmer than our house,

although there was snow not far away.

This last picture was Sean’s idea, as he is a rather overgrown child, but the toys are actually Junior’s.

She does love her Playmobil