The trick is to not make hard work of things. Since the twins came along, I have basically become the champion of the Australian custom of everybody bringing a plate when it comes to entertaining. The days of me saying things like, "don't worry, you don't need to bring a thing" are well and truly gone. In fact I've gone the complete other way. Just on Friday, Ed's godmother announced that she wanted to visit at 11.30am on Saturday. I considered saying no but then we'd have to find another time in the next few weeks and I couldn't really see that happening, so instead I said, "sure that's fine as long as you bring lunch." She was happy to. It was nice. I was grateful and she got to feel like she was helping out (which she was). Win win.
Saturday night was our annual ugly Christmas sweater party. This involves my uni friends and their partners all dressing in ridiculous Christmas jumpers and generally having a good time. It grows each year and this time we had 14 adults and nine adorable children in our little backyard! It might sounds a little bit stressful but when you're good enough friends to dress up in stupid jumpers in the middle of summer, you're also good enough friends to help each other out. Ed and I pretty much only did the meat. Nibblies, salads and desserts were all brought by other people. Even the friends who had an 11 day old baby pitched in. Best of all I don't think I heard my children whinge the whole time people were here! With adults outnumbering the children, there's always someone around to provide the necessary attention. It was great. I can't wait until next year. My only concern is that as all my friends keep having children, the adult child ratio is going to tip the wrong way!
Sunday lunch we had more friends over and again they all brought something plus we unashamedly served up some leftovers from the night before. Very low key, very stress free.
We hadn't committed to carols because we weren't sure how we'd be going after all the entertaining but in the end we decided to go and I'm so glad we did. It was fantastic. Miss 3 was up the front with her friend dancing almost the whole time and despite being well past everyone's bed time all three children were super happy. Another unexpected benefit of the late night was the walk home. It's usually light when the children go to bed so they hadn't seen many of the Christmas lights but we found out last night that our street has really turned it on this year. There was lots of ooing and ahhing all the way home and we were even inspired to jazz ours up a bit next year.
So a busy but great weekend and much to my delight everyone slept in until 7.30 this morning!
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