Donaldson Crew Adventures

While we have been having a great time over the holidays, the weather here has been dismall!  It has rained almost every day the kids have been off.  Today - the first day of 2013 is the first nice sunny day we have had, and you could tell because it felt like everyone was out.  We decided to head to Southerndown beach and it turned out we were not the only ones:).  Co-incidentally we also found out that there is a yearly tradition of running into the ocean on new years day at Southerndown.  It was very windy and cold even though the sun was out.  It made us cold just watching them from the cliffs above.

Trip over this morning to see Caerphilly Castle with Erin.  As you may be able to tell from the first photo, their was a cool wind blowing :)

A few photos from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at Churchfarm.  Kelly's family has a tradition of opening 'family gifts' on Christmas Eve so we follow that tradition and Christmas morning is for Santa (or Father Christmas as he is known here:).  Another tradition is 'Christmas Jammies' which you can see being worn in the photos.

There is an outdoor ice skating area set up in Cardiff over the holidays but due to rain we decided to go skating at the indoor rink - planet ice instead. This was Abbie's first time on skates! She did awesome!

Every year at our house in December one of Santa's Elves comes to watch over the kids to make sure they are being good up until Christmas.  He comes each morning and watches from a different place in the house, and each evening he goes back to the North Pole to tell Santa about any good or bad deeds from the day.  Some mornings he will supprise the kids with a treat.  Kirby is the elf that usually comes to visit, however this year, Kirby had some 'troubles' (possibly due to the move), so a british elf friend of his, "Kipper"took over duties while we are overseas.  Tonight is Christmas eve and it will be Kipper's last time visiting until next December!  He always finds some ingenious places to sit and every morning the kids have fun trying to find him.

It has been raining a lot this winter so the ground is quite saturated. However last night it poured all night long hard! Below are a series of pictures and videos of the lanes by our house starting at the end of our lawn and progressing down the road.

It stopped raining today so we took Erin around for a drive along the coast by Ogmore by the Sea. Lots of sheep out grazing.

We picked up our tree yesterday (Sunday), but after decorating it once we had a bit of an incident involving Noah, his intense interest to take things apart, and a quick-release lever on the tree base which resulted in the tree on the floor with lights not working, broken ornaments, and pine needles everywhere.
We replaced the lights and re-decorated this evening-take 2!

Still 20 days until the winter solstice but the days are already short, but not surprising given that we are about 51.5 degrees latitude. I stopped on my way to work this morning and snapped this shot with my phone at about 7:50 am.