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Happy New Year!

It's so nice to be back home! Finally I can kick back and relax. Our holiday wasn't really a holiday, it was more like a whirlwind of a frenzied storm running around like mad trying to get all of our visiting / shopping / visiting done! And we didn't even get to see everyone we were hoping to see. :(

On Friday Dec 17th, we both worked a full day, rushed around for our arranged ride to the airport, had a crappy time on Air New Zealand (the headsets and reading lights didn't work in our section) no movies, no reading, no leg room. . . went through ten different check points showing our passports / boarding passes / re checking our luggage / passports again / etc in LAX (the Los Angeles airport) managed to spend a couple of minutes in the Duty Free and were really truly on our way home! It was beautiful flying in over Vancouver - we could see that everyone has their Christmas lights on their houses and it was just heartbreakingly lovely. There aren't any Christmas lights here because it's summertime - lights would just be ridiculous really which is too bad. Lights make the holiday more cozy and festive.

This first picture is at Cis (sis) and John's new place (Patrick's sister's) where we had a super yummy ham dinner with Patrick's mom on Christmas Eve. I'm on the sofa with Liam, Cis and John's newest addition to the family. He's pretty sweet!

This picture is Daniel and Brennen on Christmas Day in the afternoon checking out their loot. They did a lot of comparisons to see who got more . . . and discovered that neither one of them got more than the other.

We got a Charlie Brown tree this year for five dollars at the lot on the John Oliver Secondary School grounds. Daniel spent a few days with his father so there are more photos of Brennen than there are of Dan.

Patrick, Brennen and I sort of bullied Gord into putting up his tree . . . on Christmas Eve during the day I think. It was very late. We had to take a picture because Brennen put all the balls on one corner of the tree. Gord was going to move them around, and Brennen looked crestfallen so Gord said he would just Appreciate his Art and left them just as they were. How sweet is that. Is the tree still up Gord?

Brennen got tired of dancing with me and ran away.

We got a small dusting of snow on New Year's Day. We've since found out that it's dumped tonnes of snow since we left Vancouver. We never did get to go tobogganing while we were there. That was a little disappointing.

All in all, it was nice to go home for a visit, but I'm glad to be back in Auckland. It's gorgeous here! The beyond laid back laziness of island living is very relaxing - even if it means crap service almost everywhere you go. My shift has changed at work, and we have a couple of new girls working with us - a couple left to move on to different things. I think everyone's happy to be back. I'll tell you all about Oz in the next email. I got burnt there and now I'm starting to peel. :(

Miss you all

April mom

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