2008 -- A catch up

Yes its been a busy year and I know this is meant to be blog and not just a sad excuse for one of those Christmas letters. I thought if I wrote it in October then you wouldn't realise it was actually one of those terrible letters in disguise minus the cheesy photos. More about the absence of photos later.

2008 was full of numerically significant milestones in the Boyd/Harris family. The first occurred in January when "Pa Len" turned 80. This was celebrated "en famille" at good old Craigieburn guest house in Bowral. Len invited the whole family to stay for the weekend with a special birthday dinner and entertainment ( a blind piano player no joke!) on the Saturday night. Fortunately, good old Craigieburn has had a facelift since we stayed there when we were young. Its now very comfortable with a serious restaurant. Over the weekend there was some serious and not so serious golf, some tennis and lots of relaxing for most people. We didn't quite get to do much of the relaxing except when I had a one hour massage. The kids were in heaven with all their big cousins giving them lots of attention. They also enjoyed the breakfast each morning in the restaurant. Obviously this wasn't so enjoyable for us. However, we were in much better shape than our last visit to Craigieburn with Len for Mum and Dad's big wedding anniversary when Ben was still waking at 5:00 and being bottle fed.

The next big birthday for the year was my 40th birthday in February. I had a great party at home catered for by my friend Gwen. We also had someone to serve and help out so it wasn't hard work for us.

Michael's birthday was the next in March but he hasn't made it to 40 yet so we'll leave that blog post for next year.

We did have a great holiday in March at Hyams beach down south with our friends Penny and Alan and their extended family. There was lots of nice weather, beach expeditions and best of all sleep ins. (well 6:30 nearly every day). We were joined for a few days by Grandma and Pa and Deb brought Tom and Sam for a night on the weekend. Once again the kids had a great time. Sarah even got to go surfing for 2 hours with keen surfer Alan.

The plan was to have lots of photos for this blog post and that's the excuse I gave myself for not writing it earlier. However, our computer hard disk crashed and experts that we are we didn't have a back up. We are still trying to recover all our photos but its not looking good so you'll just have to imagine the smiling faces and posed shots.

In the Harris family April was the next big birthday month with both Ben and Simon's birthday parties. We decided to break the trend and give them separate parties this year as Simon was getting old enough to have his own party. We were all booked in for a magician for Simon's party and then his wife rang 10 days before to say he was taken to hospital. At the last minute I managed to organise a sports birthday party for "the sporty one" Simon which turned out really well. Ella even participated in the sports games.

For Ben's party we had the old faithful jumping castle and some preschool friends (we think. It was hard to work out from Ben who from preschool we should invite.)

April also saw a 50th birthday for Anthony which was celebrated with afternoon tea at Lindfield.

We were a bit partied out after this effort so we had a bit of an entertaining break.

July saw the arrival of the Indian contingent with the favourite cousins visiting from India. We went away for another family holiday to Lake Macquarie with Vince, Maz and Darcy and Grandma and Pa. Angela, Liza and Francesca also joined us with guest appearances from some Darling Point Boyd women -- Pam, Alice, Jessica, Margot and Annabel. All enjoyed the heated pool and the parents of young children particularly enjoyed the kids club for 2 hours each morning.

August and September were very quiet months and Michael was particularly busy with work unfortunately. If you already do a five day a week job in four days its a bit hard when you get busy.

The next big milestone in the immediate family was a 70th birthday for Granny Gwenda who definitely did not want a fuss. So we decided to organise a surprise birthday afternoon tea. Much to everyone's surprise we managed to make it a surprise and it was a great success -- especially the chocolate cake.

And the final event of the year entertaining wise will be the 3rd birthday for a certain Ella Harris who already knows her birthday is next and she is having a jumping castle. She is busy instructing me who she wishes to come along with all the other instructions she issues each day.

We are currently in the throes of working on one of our goals for the year which is to be nappy free (during the day at least) by the end of the year. With the help of some lollies, chocolates and Dora underpants we are quietly confident that this will be achieved. Mind you there is nothing quiet about Ella herself who will not go gently into any good night unfortunately but as my friend Penny says "you get what you get and you don't get upset."