The Christmas Holidays

Our holidays got off to a good start when we broke down on the M2 on our way to Dover. It was about 8.45 pm, Luca had fallen asleep but Max was still awake. We called the RAC and as we were on a motorway they promise to be with you in half an hour. They then put us through to a recorded message giving you safety advice which includes getting everyone out of the car and as far up the verge as possible. This was not what I wanted to hear, but it was good advice and we took it. It was a freezing cold night and we bundled the children up and took Max’s suction and huddled on Justin’s coat awaiting rescue. At 9.15 pm exactly the RAC man arrived and he fixed the problem really very quickly but wanted us to get off the motorway to a nearby industrial estate where he could look at the problem more closely and safely. After a few discussions between Justin and the RAC man, we set off again, thanking our lucky stars that we had left so early that we still had time to make it to our train! We got there on time and with both children awake we got on the train. To keep the children entertained on the train we put Pingu on the laptop and as a ruse it worked a treat! After a very long journey we eventually arrived at Amanda and Thierry’s at 11 am local time. We got unloaded and had lunch and then Justin and I went for a well-deserved nap.

As you can see from the various pictures, in was very cold and frosty in France when we got there, in fact we had to drive through a lot of icy fog on our way down, and it remained like this for the first few days we were there. Christmas eve was actually a beautiful, sunny, crisp, cold day and it melted all the frost taking with it the idea of a white Christmas.

In good French tradition Christmas was celebrated on Christmas eve with a few guests. There were two other children there the same age as Dan and Emilie and the four of them tried desperately hard to stay awake but finally all fell asleep sometime around 1 am. All the guests left at around 2.15 am but then the work started for Amanda, Thierry and I (Justin had also fallen asleep). In France, all Christmas gifts are from Father Christmas so all the gifts have to be kept hidden until Christmas night when we had to get them all out from their hiding places and place them all around the Christmas tree, then fill and deliver all four stockings. We finally collapsed into bed at around 3.15 am which is when Luca decided to wake up and absolutely refused to go back to sleep until about 6 am. He woke Dan and Emilie up too, and they started opening their stockings thinking it was morning until they were told to go to sleep by the father with dire warnings of Father Christmas not having delivered in the living room yet.

We were all up again at 9 am to get on with the serious business of Christmas and then to get ourselves sorted and ready for another invasion of guests for a late lunch. Amazingly enough we were ready and waiting by the time the guests arrived! More eating and drinking ensued and more gifts arrived. We were all exhausted and went to bed at 9 pm!

Between Christmas and New Year we didn’t really get up to that much. Boxing day was spent recovering, building toys that needed building and the children enjoyed exploring their new toys. Dan and Emilie got some foam soap in their stockings which appeared to be just like shaving foam but slightly more solid, which is what they have covered themselves with in the photo. They were rather pleased with themselves and also pleased with their water colouring tablets for the bath. They suddenly were very eager to have a bath every evening. I got a jigsaw puzzle and Amanda and I got straight down to doing it.

The children got on very well together as these pictures show and one of Max’s favourite pastime whilst in France was to gently push Dan or Emilie and they would pretend to fall over. He laughed so much at this we were worried his gastrostomy would not cope! Of course Dan and Emilie also thought that Luca was more a living doll than a real child but he coped well with the attention, only beginning to find it a little too overwhelming a few days before we left to come home. Another favourite pastime of Max’s was to play with the stacking cups that Luca was given for Christmas. He got very, very good at stacking them in the correct order starting with whichever one he happened to find first, then pushing them over and starting again! Unfortunately the boys also found that Amanda’s kitchen and living room had lots of cupboards with doors which were fun to open and close incessantly. A very noisy pastime, however more amusingly, and near the end of our holiday, Max discovered a little variation on the theme. He thought it a lot of fun to open a cupboard door (he had a favourite), put his milk bottle in, close the door, open it again to find his bottle, take the bottle out and close the door, only to start the process all over again. Luca did not progress to this, which was a blessing because the amount of banging was enough to give everyone quite a headache! A much quieter game, and one preferred by the adults, was putting either child on the trike and having Dan or Emilie push them around the house. As the house is all on one floor there was plenty of room for them to run around. Another advantage of being on one floor that Luca discovered was that he could bum-shuffle into Emilie’s room, where he was sleeping, and bang his head on the netting around his cot. The children soon understood that this was a request for his magic bunny and a sure sign of tiredness. In fact, one day he fell asleep on the next-door neighbour’s daughter he was so tired! She was thrilled and said she would have happily stayed there the full 2 and a half hours of his nap if needed, but I thought it best to put him in his cot.

For the new year, we had planned a quiet evening with just us, but at the last minute we also invited the two children from next door. Luca had been suffering from teething pains and that particular evening he decided to wake up about an hour after he had fallen asleep and then was in no mood to go back to bed. We had all gone out the day before and we had been to an American style diner where the children were all given helium filled balloons. As the balloon started deflating it wasn’t floating quite so high and Luca spent a happy half hour chasing the balloon around the room before having a taste of champange which he appeared to like, if the clapping was anything to go by, and going back to bed!

We left Amanda and Thierry’s at about 9.30 pm on 2nd January and we got home at 9.30 am (local time – so actually a 13 hour journey). We had a very good run on the way back, somehow less tiring than it had been on the way out, probably because the weather was better and we didn’t have to battle with the fog quite so much, although there was some between Paris and Calais.

We are now back into the regular routine of life although one exciting thing is that Max will be starting Nursery on Thusday afternoon.