Merry Christmas!!!
Merry Christmas to all of you, whether you’re somebody looking for allergy support, a Google searcher interested in suitable foods and restaurants, a friend (new or old) who reads this purely for the cutting edge humour and incredible modesty, or even one of the automated bots that seems to routinely hit the ‘vegan magnum’ page looking for Amazon links; I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Who knows I might even slip the word ‘Amazon’ into the magnum page to make you happy…
2019 has been quite the year. We’ve had injury rehabilitation, camping explorations, failed soya ladder tests (although a small win in passing an Oat Milk ladder test), multiple experiences of treading the boards, diet changes, weight-loss and PCOS diet challenges and successes. We’re ending it in a good place. My son is VERY excited for Christmas and me and my wife seem in a good place.
We haven’t hugely pushed the Christmas thing with Piglet. We’ve tried not to over play the ‘Santa’ thing without wanting to ruin the magic for him. Both my wife and I are a little uneasy with just completely making up the idea of a large unknown man breaking into our house and leaving ‘presents’ on the floor under our nicely decorated tree (the phrase ‘gifts from strangers’ comes to mind?!). And even though he doesn’t really watch any TV (we significantly limit screen time for him), he’s clearly picked up on the ideas of the tradition. Most of his knowledge seems to come from the poem: ‘Twas the night before Christmas’, so I suppose he’s expected a fairly antiquated version of Christmas Day (and the sudden installation of sash windows and roof tiles actually strong enough to support 8 (8!!) reindeer). That said, I think he’s genuinely excited to be seeing family and so it’s more about the atmosphere of Christmas than just the presents (I may urgently re-write this on Christmas morning when it becomes clear how utterly wrong I’ve been). We’re travelling quite a bit of the holidays to see family in Wiltshire, Oxford and Norfolk, so he really will get to see quite a lot of family!
Exercise is turning out to be ‘the solution’ so far this holiday. He gets pretty giddy, and eventually hysterical, climbing the walls at home. But he gets to burn off energy pretty quickly when we get out so we’ve tried to do that at least once each day. Yesterday we went to Stourhead near Warminster and Frome. It’s a very picturesque National Trust gardens on the back of a stately home. They actually have a night exhibition in the evenings in December but we couldn’t make the timings work with other things while we’re here so we just walked round it late into the afternoon. It still looked very beautiful and it’s made me want to come back one day to see the light tour properly. Piglet did very well walking around the entire lake, partially motivated by a very enthusiastic all-singing-and-dancing performance of ‘The 12 days of Christmas’. He got a bit scared in the 250-year-old grotto on the far side of the lake, although it was getting pretty dark by then!
I’ve tried to keep myself sane through exercise although I’ve found it hard with the continuous amount of rain recently. I don’t usually find a bit of rain puts me off running but the ground is so saturated that it makes it fairly difficult to find routes that don’t involve a short section of swimming at the moment! I went for a run this morning after Piglet had demanded that we woke up bright and early just after 6 and only just missed the sunrise. That said, I did try and run on a designated path through a field. It was the point when both my feet were ankle deep in muddy water and the skies opened to some of the heaviest rain I’ve even been in that I decided to turn around and find a more tarmac-lined route. I had to laugh to myself when I was running with my arms stretched out in front of my face to stop the wind catapulting the raindrops into my eyes like hailstorms. I took short respite under a bridge until I realised that being stood, cold in the wind wasn’t much better than running head-first into a horizontal flood. Still I managed just shy of 4-miles and was still back and dressed in time to not really miss out on the day.
I suppose I’ll have to think of New-Year’s Resolutions soon. We did them fairly seriously for 2019 and they’re still pinned up on our blackboard at home. Off the top of my head we did fairly well with them although there are still fairly major ones that seem to lose out every year to whimsical minor ones (I’m sure getting Piglet on stage was more important than fixing the roof of our house). We know that we want to go camping again and especially in weather like this I look forward hugely to cooking on an open fire under the stars in summer.
My wife will go under the knife again in early Jan to have a second surgery for her endometriosis. We’re both nervous about the surgery itself but cautiously optimistic about the consequences; both from a pain-level and a fertility side of things. There are no promises on either front but I think there’s a reasonable chance it will help with both. Fingers crossed. It’s tough on Piglet because it’s hard for him to understand why mummy needs so much time to recover and why she can’t pick him up or drive him anywhere for weeks afterwards. He coped pretty well the first time so at least this time we can give him a point of reference to refer back to. Another thing that makes it easier is that he is no longer breastfeeding. Ahead of the surgery, my wife has been given an injection that will induce the menopause (temporarily) in her. This should help give the body a chance to heal itself a bit but it’s also accompanied with the normal symptoms of women usually a bit older than my wife. It’s meant to take a few weeks to really take effect and we’ve not really experienced anything yet but I’ll be honest I’m a little nervous about having a bed-ridden post-surgery wife going through the menopause in the new year! I’m sure I’ll update on how it’s going as we go along.
I loved being involved in Seussical the Musical in December and it had a profound impact on Piglet as I wrote about here. The adoration of theatre has continued too: we went to see two plays recently, a pantomime and a children’s live interpretation of Raymond Brigg’s ‘The Bear’. He loved both and was in absolute rapture at the two man puppet of the Polar bear that they used in the latter. He also got to star as Joseph in his nursery’s nativity production which was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever scene. The nursery did a great job over all but I was bowled over by Piglet’s swagger at being the main character. No hint of nerves, lines delivered with gusto and signing and dancing the songs like he’d been doing it all his life (actually, I guess he has…). However, with our group seemingly unlikely to put on a Spring production and no realistic proposition of the three of us being in a play at the same time, it will be my wife’s turn in the summer. Therefore next Christmas is probably the soonest I can expect to be back on stage, and that’s only if I’m successful in auditioning for a part! As a result, I probably need to find something else to get my teeth into and the current thinking is to get back into audio recording. I play a range of musical instruments (although none of them to any particular standard) and having now become a bit more confident with singing (if I can do it in front of 120 people as a solo or duet with harmonies, I can probably do it in private in my own home, right?), it feels like I should really be able to build on this to start recording some songs.
As such, we decided to do something a little bit different this year than sending out Christmas Cards (we’ve never been very good at that anyway) and so we’ve made an audio card in the form of my son singing Little Donkey. It’s all a bit hurried and so it’s a bit rough-and-ready but I’m sure you will appreciate the gusto with which my son decides to sing on the bits when he actually joins in and it seems like a good excuse to accompany him with keyboards, drums, jingle bells and, of course, his mum and day on supporting vocals. I hope you like it. Most people say the ending is the best bit….
Merry Christmas and Toodlepips X
P.S. See if you can spot the bit in the mix where I went wrong on the piano and dropped another version in over the top towards the end without realising that it was on a much higher volume setting. You can almost literally hear my panic as I desperately try and turn it down in the final mix!
P.P.S. We only went and forgot the panettone, didn’t we!