Manchester

So, we had a good night's sleep, phew!  I woke up without a headache - double phew!!  First job of the morning was to have our annual SKYPE with Uncle Martin in Australia.  It's become a New Year tradition now.  Ben and Mia were at home, and my they have grown, Ben is 17 now and has a six pack!!!!!  Wow, how can a child from a friend of mine be that grown up?!  We had a good chat, and Tom and Matt showed off the Steam Engine that Martin bought them for Christmas.  He's thinking of maybe coming to the UK for Christmas next year - we hope he does.

We then quickly got ourselves ready and got in the car to Manchester as we were staying with the Komorovskis for a night.  Manchester greeted us with grey skies and rain (what's new?!) so we hurried in.  Leia and Rosa have both shot up (as always) - Leia is in Year 6 now, which is hard to believe (all these children are growing up way too fast!).  We arrived dead on 12 o'clock and ready for lunch (oh our stomaches have grown massively this Christmas as have our bellies).  It was a Boxing Day style lunch - yay!  My favourite meal of the year is Boxing Day lunch, but I haven't had one for ages for one reason or another, so I went a bit mad.  Loads of pate, cheese, French bread, chutney, pastries etc etc.   Decided that next year I am going to put my foot down and demand a proper Boxing Day lunch at ours.  Dread to think of the number of calories in it - but I don't care, it was wonderful.

Head massage time.

The boys then had some Ikea bits and pieces to put together, so Karen and I left them to it and headed into Manchester for a walk around / shop and chat.  Didn't buy anything but it was nice to have a girlie chat without interruption.

We returned to the house to find Matt 'tucked up in bed' on the sofa - Rosa had spent the afternoon 'looking after' him, including delivering beer and crisps to his 'bedside' - so not a bad afternoon for him.

The evening was spent chatting and drinking and eating, very pleasant and very chilling. In the morning, the girls were up early as they were going back to school.  We waited for the girls to head off and then got up, had breakfast and then headed to the cinema to watch Paddington 2.  Wow!  What a wonderful, wonderful film.  It was lovely, heart warming, gorgeous, so much so that I didn't want it to end.  Did Tom cry - yes!  Did I cry - yes! Did Matt cry - yes!  It got us all (only the second time I've ever seen Matt cry during a film!)

Once we had all recovered, we walked back to the Komorovskis house, pick up our car and headed over to Wing Yip for a dim sum lunch at The Glamorous which as always was super yummy - and stretched our stomachs even more before a big Asian shop and heading home.