Christmas

Our first Christmas as a family of four alone without relatives, was quiet. Well, quiet if you don't count the excitement which started very very early in the morning, and went on and on until it ended with quite a lot of tears and sulking some time in the afternoon. Every year I am surprised at just how excited my children get - which is because I have a very short memory. Everything was a success - they have scooters which are in the process of being mastered and will hopefully speed up the walk to and from school. And they have a remote control helicopter as Lottie is currently obsessed with all flying things and Tom wanted one too.

Lunch was plentiful and delicious although as usual I completely forgot about gravy.



And I forgot about the brandy and matches after all that effort finding the Christmas pudding. But luckily not everyone takes Christmas so seriously and several shops were open so Tom found some which meant we had a proper Christmas after all.

Of course before the pudding we had to climb a hill. So we tackled Bernal Heights which we can see from our sitting room. The weather was perfect, a bit warm in fact and so very unChristmassy. We even saw some people in a hot tub on the way down the hill. A hot tub in December! The views from the top are incredible. The whole of the city is laid out before you and you can even see Golden Gate Bridge peeping over the top.

If I was clever and could be bothered I would stitch these four pictures together, but I'm useless with i-Photo or maybe i-Photo is useless for this kind of stuff so I won't. Just imagine this is a panoramic shot, looking from west through north to east and taking in Twin Peaks, the Golden Gate Bridge, Downtown and the East Bay.