Christmas

I can't believe how quickly Christmas has come and gone this year! We've had a lovely time, the preps started weeks ago with cake baking, pudding steaming, gift wrapping, visiting the Christmas markets, seeing the boys perform in their various concerts and shows and everything else that pops up at this time of year.

Here are my baking efforts for this year...

I got cookie-cutter happy with my Christmas cake this year and some lovely blue icing and was really happy with how it looked, cake decorating is not a strength of mine so by my standards this was fabulous :-) Another 6 hours of my life were spent steaming the pudding, personally I hate Christmas pudding but it means a lot to my hubby to have a homemade one so I persevered!

Last year we went with very traditional colours for our Christmas tree, red, gold and silver so this year I decided to go with a lot more colour...

The boys helped me decorate as always and everyone was very happy with how it looked.

Can you spot the cute little Disney ornament from our trip to Paris?

Elsewhere around the house were a varied assortment of baubles, ornaments, fairy lights and candles...

We spent Christmas day with my husband's side of the family at his brother's house, 9 adults and 7 kids in total! They have just had an extension put on their house so it was a fabulous space for so many people, eating, drinking and dancing the night away. Everyone took on a cooking job for the day so it was pretty easy going and everything was delicious. We all slept over and the boys were so excited with it all and got to stay up will 11pm! In fairness the adults were all a bit tipsy or we may have remembered to put them to bed earlier ;-)

Feeling a bit delicate on Boxing Day morning we managed to recover in time for another big meal at our house with my parents and little sis. It was another great day, the boys love having family over and were spoilt all over again with presents and treats and we had a lovely evening relaxing and playing board games.

I was pretty spoilt myself this Christmas with really lovely presents from my hubby and boys, tickets to see Adele (I LOVE her!!!!!!!!!), a fab new smartphone, goodies from L'Occitane, a manicure station and some new books! I'm like a big kid opening my presents at Christmas and I was thrilled with these :-)

I have loved every Christmas our little family has had but I have to say these last 2 Christmases we have had back in Ireland have been my favourite, it's just so special for the boys to be surrounded by all their family and we all love being back :-)

Three in a row

My "baby boy" turned 8 a couple of weeks ago!!! The perfect excuse to bake some cupcakes...

My boys are now aged 8, 9 and 10. A lot of people think we were insane to have our kids so close together but I am so glad we did. Yes there are crazy days where I think "what were we thinking???" but then I look at them playing together, enjoying the same toys, movies and games and just know how blessed we are :-) Other days when they're all wrestling and being totally feral I think maybe we should have spaced them out by about 10 years each :-D!!!