Month: December 2011

Posted on

Christmas Morning

It began at 5:29 – their earliest rising yet on a Christmas morning. It didn’t however start with the sound of presents being ripped open but with the noise of two little boys chitter chattering. I was half asleep at this point but I could make out the odd reference to Bellevue, going to Disney last year, mince pies and talk of going on a train to see if they were good.

The talk then moved on to Barcelona, Liverpool kits and Fernando Torres. All the while, their Seattle Sounders Christmas stockings hung on the door handles. They were completely oblivious to them.

The next few minutes were spent discussing how hard it is too get to sleep on Christmas night and then moved onto the relative merits of Joe Hart, Pepe Reina and Petr Cech. At 5:59 there was still no mention of the stockings on the door handles.

At 6:02 Harry went to the toilet and Toby followed. Toby did give the stocking on the office door a sly glance but they both went back to bed and started wondering what the time was. By the sounds of it, they looked out the window, saw it was dark and Harry’s best guess was that it was about 4 or 5 in the morning.

They wanted to get up and Harry said, “why don’t we just get up?”. Before coming up with a reason as to why they shouldn’t, Harry mentioned that he loved whisky (they both had a little sample yesterday). I’m not sure of Toby’s response but I got the impression he wasn’t so keen.

Talk then moved back to what time it was and wondering where a clock was. Harry mentioned there was one in Mum and Dad’s room. At 6:08 I lay very still in bed as Harry crept into the room. He walked around to Tracy’s side and then went back into their bedroom where he informed Toby that it was 4 or 5 in the morning – he’d checked the clock.

At 6:09 Harry came back to our bedroom door and pulled the door close – I think he was covering his tracks! Having established it was 5 in the morning they then decided they needed to wait another 3 hours before present opening. This wasn’t good news and George the cat started miaowing – he clearly wasn’t happy either!

Five minutes later, at 6:14 they wished each other Merry Christmas. Two minutes later they moved onto the world of world of football management. Harry told Toby he would be signing him as a squad rotation player, and then announced he had to fly to Barcelona to watch then play tomorrow. At 6:17 they arrived in Barcelona and went boot shopping.

This could only hold their attention for a short while though because at 6:20 Harry announced he was bored, “what shall we do?”. Toby replied with “I just want to open my presents”. “You could go into Mum and Dad’s room and ask them if we can then”.

At 6:21 Toby came into the room …

httpv://youtu.be/SaoxfzC0td0

By 6:28 all stocking presents – 22 each – were open! It was the best Christmas ever!! As a bonus to all their presents Harry announced that Rudolph hadn’t woken them up farting like Uncle Jack said he would. Apparently Rudolph also does a poo on top of your house every Christmas Eve.

As the boys played with their presents we lay in bed watching Santa’s progress, and at 7 in the morning he reached Seattle, I wonder if he has left anything there?

7am he delivers to Seattle?

Posted on

Water Slide

Along with the food, drink, dogs, large garden, Chinese, staying up late, pulling about 38 crackers, opening presents, eating as much chocolate as you like and seeing Nanny and Grandad there was also the fun of the new, giant bath. The giant bath was big enough to 1) get my Christmas belly in, and 2) act as a slide for two little boys…

httpv://youtu.be/aEowaxs4FcM

Posted on

Social Butterfly

Never mind a relaxing December back in the UK. It’s been chaos for everyone who has had us to stay and real hard work for Tracy. It took a few weeks to organize and another few to execute but the social butterfly has flitted her way through appointment after appointment. I think we’ll probably need a nice vacation in January!

Posted on

On The Train Again!

Wow! The alarm went off at 6:10am and it wasn’t a good feeling! I’m not sure when it last went off that early but it was a long time ago. After a quick shower and getting dressed, Jack gave me a lift to the station. As I opened the door to get out the car I nearly managed to knock a bloke off his scooter as he went past! I’m not sure if this was because I wasn’t really awake or just because I’m not prepared for scooters – I don’t think they have them in America!!

To ease the pain of going on the train I decided Expedia could treat me to a 1st class ticket so at least I would be able to sit down rather than be squashed like cattle. As I stood on the platform 2 (at a time that I am still normally in bed) I recognized all sorts of faces from when I was doing this journey 7 months earlier (maybe over 8 months ago as I did work from home rather a lot at the end!). I don’t know why I found this strange/surprising but I did.

Once the train arrived I started reaping the rewards of an extra pricey train ticket with a cup of tea, a bottle of water and a copy of the Independent:

More importantly than all those benefits I got wireless which is good as the data on my phone wasn’t working which I need to sort otherwise they’ll be no tweets for the month of December! And that, I’m sure you will agree, will never do!

 

Posted on

Homeward Bound

With the flight back to the UK almost upon us there were only two things to do – shop and go out to eat. Twice! Having started the packing process it became abundantly clear that I clearly didn’t have the right pj’s, shoes or work bag to go to the UK with. Fortunately Macy’s had some kind of crazy sale on which meant that I could stock up on all these items at truly bargain prices. So on Friday evening we went over to Bellevue for a trip to the mall and some pizza at Zeeks – our first visit to the one at Bellevue. I think that as much as we love Zeeks it will also be our last visit to the Bellevue version – it’s not quite up to the standard of Kirkland and Issaquah. On a positive side, I did manage to order the pizza that I actually wanted this time which is progress.

On Saturday it was time to watch soccer, tidy the house, watch more soccer, go to Red Robbin and then after being asked about 247 times “what time are we going to the airport?”, we went to the airport. We had booked the car into offsite airport parking and it was really rather nice! Firstly it meant we had to go south on the I-5 further than we had been before which in turn meant we had some views of Mount Rainier which we hadn’t had before. We got more of a side-on view and saw some of the foot hills. It looked mightily impressive and I’m sure it just came out to say goodbye to us.

When we arrived at the offsite parking we were pointed in the direction of where to park and unlike most airport parking facilities, as we drove to find a space a small bus followed us so we didn’t have to walk back to a bus stop with our luggage. They loaded us and our bags on and drove us to the terminal. It was all very civilized!

After getting through security with no hassle, we waited a couple of hours and then boarded the plane. BA seriously need to review their hand luggage policy – it’s clearly being abused with people bringing stupid amounts of bags and buggys and stuff onto the plane. This simply served to make the passengers grumpy as they had to wait for people to stuff it all into the overhead lockers (or whatever it’s called) and the BA staff became grumpy as they tried to force luggage in. Anyway, eventually we were all set and we were off.

After watching some TV and eating what I thought was rubbish food but Tracy and the boys liked we attempted to get some sleep. Toby did the best curling up on his seat, Tracy did pretty well despite having Harry leaning on her and I was rubbish. I was hot, sweaty and cramped and only slept for a couple of hours which is not good because I normally sleep for most of the this flight. I’ve obviously grown taller since being in America because there really wasn’t much room at all. On the plus side, the flight was only just over 8 hours so the suffering didn’t last too long!

With our bags collected from the carousel very quickly (probably because everyone else took their luggage on as hand luggage) we met Uncle Jack and drove back up to Clapham. My initial impressions of returning to England was how flat it all was! I guess I have got used to seeing mountains in every direction, so heaven alone knows what it will be like in Norfolk!

After an afternoon of catching up with everyone Tracy and I were getting tired but the boys were like duracell bunnies – they just kept on going and showed no signs of tiring. In the end (around 8pm) they were dosed up with some herbal sweets and packed off to bed. Although they weren’t overly happy about this they were very quickly zonked. Tracy and I made it until 10pm which I thought was quite impressive and then we took some sleeping pills and knocked ourselves out. The pills clearly worked because we all slept through until just after 7am when Harry appeared in our room and woke us up saying he’d heard something making a “whooshy” noise and was scared. Doesn’t matter where we are in the world, some things never change! Naughty monkey!