Family photos

 

Final hours at Haciendas

On our last full day, we did some sailing finally, which we had been trying to make happen all week.
We had pretty strong winds and it was very exciting to be out there! We rented 2 Hobie cats for 90 minutes and took turns going out there with all the kids and each other.

 Heidi and John spent part of the time up in the sky on a parasail - that is them in the distance in the photo below! Meanwhile those of us who were not out sailing were busy on the beach playing in the sand.

 In the late afternoon we had a photo session and then went for final dinner together. It has been so wonderful to spend quality time with each other, although having young kids like my siblings do definitely makes this challenging! We also were able to have a dinner out just the 8 of us with Grandma, Rhiannon and Tryfan all babysitting.

Soon enough we will be back to reality, but we are so grateful for the chance to see each other in person for this week.

Xel-ha

We all (except Grandma) spent the day at the quite incredible Xel-ha water wonderland. What a place!

The way it works is that you pay a [quite large] entrance fee, but then all food, drink, lockers, and snorkeling equipment is free. So you are free to explore the park and swim, snorkel, zip line, float, and play in this natural lagoon. There are lots of fish and manta rays to see, and it is just really cool! The big tower in the photo is a waterslide that is pretty fun, too, with a great view from the top. We locked up our phones and cameras and enjoyed this place for the entire day. Highly recommended.

More Christmas photos

The good times continue!

 

Cousins then and now

Here are the 8 cousins today

And the same setting 2 years ago

Christmas Morning

We all gathered in our suite with Grandma for a Christmas morning discovery of stockings, a few presents, and the now traditional White Elephant gift exchange.  Once the excitement had mellowed a bit, we had room service delivery of breakfast.

 

 By about 10:30 am, we were ready to get outside and go swimming in the pool and at the beach. 

Christmas in the sunshine

It has been so wonderful to be here at the Royal Haciendas in Playa del Carmen. Our first day here was spent re-familiarizing ourselves with the swimming pools, the beach, the poolside and beachside food and bar menus, all that amazing stuff. And of course trying very hard to not get sunburnt!

 

Mexico here we coooommmme!

Finallllllllyyy! The day is here where we are flying to Cancun for a week of Christmas and family and sunshine. We have been counting down the months, weeks, days, and finally hours until this morning.

We saw a lot of festively dressed families heading out into the wide world.


There were families with matching sweatshirts that said 'Family Trip to Lapland 2019', families with everyone wearing matching antlers, and plenty of Christmas jumpers and funny hats.

 We checked in, found a place for breakfast, and got on the flight for 11 hours to Cancun! Rhodri hasn't been feeling 100% the past couple of days, so he sat with the kids and I sat a few rows away by myself. It was a long flight but a good one.

Upon landing, we found our luggage and driver, then realized we were going to need to wait another 45 minutes for Grandma, Eric, Kristin and the boys. It was warm and we were all a bit sweaty, and it was fabulous to discover a little bar area next to the arrival area outside where we could sit and have some refreshing drinks and nachos! Bienvenidos a Mexico!

Morning mayhem

Rhiannon and her friends sure made a mess of the downstairs.

 Iris had to leave early, and Zoey left slightly later so it was only Soph, Aggie and Rio who remained to do a rather good tidy up of the house. Fair play to them for pitching in!

CG Tree Lighting party + Rhi's birthday

(aka my favorite night of the year!)

As mentioned previously, we had a practice on Wed night and then tonight was our big performance. We were the finale to the evening.  Here is the video of our performance... sorry that you might need to rotate your head to the side in order to view properly.

After the performance, everyone stood around socialising for a bit, then headed to the Red Lion pub for an after party. Rhiannon and her Danehill posse headed back to our house for a girls birthday sleepover. It was a little fractious with the 5 of them - splitting into two pairs with Rhiannon trying to keep the peace. Once they had a bit more food in their tummies, everyone was quite a bit happier and there was no issue.

Meanwhile, back at the pub, there was quite a big crowd of us and we were lucky to have the live music performed by a great guitarist and singer named Dave McLennan..

At some point only Rhodri, Pete and I were left and by then we were friends with the musician and he was taking our requests. We danced and sang with him until the very end, and a bunch of ladies from a dinner party round the corner came to join us too. It was a super fun night! 

When we got home, we found that all the girls had totally taken over the main rug area in the lounge. The house was a huge mess but we weren't to discover the full extent until the next morning.

Mary's Boy Child

This week is crazy.
After Rhiannon's birthday yesterday, tonight we had a spontaneous practice session for our last minute entry to the annual village Christmas Tree Lighting party. After getting verbal agreement from a few key people on Saturday at the school Christmas Fair, we set this night to practice and then Friday is the performance. I honestly didn't know if anyone other than Leigh was going to show up, but we actually had a pretty good turn out. Rhodri made a few phone calls to rope in some unsuspecting neighbors as well, and we lubricated the vocal chords with some bubbly beverages.

This is the backing track that we used.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRMLRgA6AY8
And this is the original song that brings inspiration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGqXy_iD4kc
This is honestly my favorite Christmas song ever, and I'm so happy to have discovered the magic of Boney M.
It was really fun singing together to practice tonight, and now we are really excited about the performance on Friday!

Rhiannon turns 14!

Our gorgeous girl is 14 years old today. Crazy!
Since today is a Tuesday in the last full week of the term, it is actually a really busy and demanding day for her. Poor thing has 4 exams today and a totally normal school day with no respite.

Tonight for dinner of her choosing, she opted to have her bestie pal Sophie over and get take-out pizza from La Casa.

And so, at a blossoming 14 years of age, our dear Rhiannon is:
- Kind hearted and caring
- Hard working
- Independent
- Disciplined
- Sensitive
- Extremely observant (especially tuned into small details)
- Loves horses and is spending part of each day with 'Tee'
- Is a good friend to others including her brother

We treasure Rhiannon and are so grateful for her in our lives.

Christmas tree festival with Annie

We were so lucky to get to have cousin Annie come and visit us for about 24 hours this weekend! She arrived on Sunday morning and reunited at Waitrose in Haywards Heath in the bakery aisle. So exciting! Then she came home with me and we hung around the house until mid afternoon when she joined Rhodri and I at the first annual Christmas Tree Festival in Danehill. This was a weekend long festival that we managed to catch the final hour of, and it was a display of Christmas trees inside the church, with each tree having been assembled and decorated by a particular club/ group in the community. Such a cool idea!

The badminton club had spray-painted shuttlecocks to be silver or gold and turned those into tree ornaments, the karate club had made little reindeer doing flying kicks as ornaments, the Parish Council had decorated a ladder with tinsel and put photos of the council members on it, including our own Chairmen Lewis who adorned the top.

The grand masterpiece was a tree that was 100% made of hand knitted green squares by various members of the community.  All of the 'tinsel' and ornaments were also hand-knitted - amazing.  As we walked around admiring the festival entries, we were offered glasses of mulled wine and then invited to partake in the snack table which had mince pies and other baked goods. We gladly made a donation to the money pot and helped ourselves!

All of the proceeds and donations for the event would go to the charity 'Off the Fence', which is the local Brighton-based Christian charity for resisting poverty.  The green squares of the Christmas tree would be knitted into blankets.  I hope it goes again next year. Its a lovely idea.

Company Christmas party

For the first time in 5 years, my employer decided to host a Christmas party. Prior to that, there had been an annual party but I never attended and neither did Rhodri (this was due to a bit of bad feeling about him being laid off and also the fact that I was rather unsocial at work and so had not many friends!). But this year, it was game on! I have been making a bigger effort at being social, and now I actually do have friends at work since I play soccer/ football at lunchtime every couple of weeks or so. Anyway, this year we went and the theme was 'Rio Carnival'.  Last weekend when I was taking Tryfan and his mates to the cinema, I went shopping and found The Dress that I would wear to this event. I've been a bit excited about wearing this dress because it is soooo green and fancy!

Anyway, the event was fine, and even fun. 

Rhodri was fairly well behaved and we both had a good time.

The Rio Carnival part of the evening was quite well done because there were random displays of acrobatics and dancing by some proper performers from time to time throughout the evening, and they were great!

Forest walks and other highlights

This has been a low key weekend, but in a nice way. Rhiannon has been working for some of the neighbors as a follow up to last weekend's flyer distribution (!!), and Tryfs has been helping this weekend to finish the distribution.

Since we've had Winnie for the past week or so, we've been able to go on some nice daily walks or runs with her. In fact, Rhodri and I went by ourselves today and it was quite nice to just walk and talk! Winnie made friends with other dogs and ran around in her cute way.  Too bad Sioned is coming back today to pick her up. Wish they lived closer, but actually we do get to see them relatively often, so we are grateful for that.


Then today at rugby, Tryfan won Player of the Month. Look how cute he is next to the big poster of the raisins!