Friday, 26 December 2014

Zoe slept all night, which was nice. She woke up at like twenty to five, needing to go to the toilet, and afterwards claimed that she'd checked for Santa and he hadn't come yet. I thought the jig was going to be up for sure, given that the presents were all out.

I managed to get her back to bed and she slept until 6:30am, which was a much more civilised time to be opening presents.

After opening presents, and breakfast, Anshu prepped the dish she was taking for Christmas Day lunch at my parents, and we headed over there.

My sister called and asked me to get some ice along the way. 7 Eleven were obviously anticipating a run on ice, because they had multiple insulated pallets of party ice bags. It was slightly crazy.

We had a nice Christmas Day lunch with my entire immediate family, which was a bit of a first since I've been back in Australia. Zoe got along really well with one of my brother's step sons, and generally had a good time.

After lunch, we headed down to Palm Beach for a quick catch up with some more family. Zoe had a nap along the way, and then we headed back to drop Zoe off at Sarah's place.

Anshu and I went back to my place, and we went for a nice evening stroll to walk off the Christmas lunch.

I didn't have an awful lot planned for the day. Zoe finished watching the Nightmare Before Christmas, after she was dropped off, an then we made a bunch of dips for Christmas Day lunch.

Zoe really enjoys helping me in the kitchen, and today was no exception. She also has taken to helping with the washing up, and loves putting on my washing up gloves, so we made all of our dips together, and then she lost interest when it came time to make the plum pudding, so I did that myself.

Kelley had told me about a Christmas pantomime called Spaced Out Santa, on at the Studio Theatre and Cafe over at Morningside. I didn't’t even realise there was a theatre over there. They had tickets, so I thought that’d be something different to do.

We biked over there, via the post office, so I could deposit an offline donation I'd received for Decembeard.

We got to the theatre pretty early, and the "cafe" part of it was rather tiny, but we managed to snag a table. We had a drink and a snack while we were waiting for the theatre to open.

The theatre itself turned out to be not a lot bigger than the cafe. It was probably about 10 seats wide. We managed to get into the second row from the front. The play itself was nothing spectacular, but Zoe seemed to enjoy it. Most of the actors were children, and I thought they did quite a good job. It was hard to tell if the singing was lip synced or not.

Zoe was hungry by the time we got out, so after some photos with the actors, we grabbed some lunch nearby and then biked home.

I can't remember what we got up to in the afternoon, but Anshu came over, and we had some dinner, and then Zoe got all ready for bed, and we went for a drive around the neighbourhood to check out the Christmas lights. It was really nice driving around with some Christmas music playing on Pandora. I really like the Bing Crosby channel. It really helped set the mood.

Zoe has been super excited about Christmas this year. She's been counting down the sleeps until Christmas, and was very excited to leave out some egg nog, a mince pie and a cookie for Santa, as well as some water and carrots for the reindeer. I had just as much fun making them all look eaten. It really is a lot of fun looking at Christmas through the eyes of a child.