Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We hope you are surviving the cold British winter. We had our first sunny Christmas which was weird, as was being away from our friends and family, but the Butlers/Shields families had an amazing BBQ and made us feel very welcome. Fi also worked her first Christmas Day with the whole department full of festive cheer. Fi made 3 children cry after stitching/gluing them back together after they had injured themselves on new toys or due to excessive Christmas Day excitement!

Boxing Day was a great day again with the Butlers and some of the Shields as we made our way to the mighty MCG to see England bowl out the Aussies before tea for 98 and saw Cook/Strauss reach half centuries each. The final score was 157 without loss for England. It was the best day of cricket we’d ever seen and made lots of records including the lowest score for Australia ever at the MCG and the lowest ever score for Australia on home soil for over 78 years! Even Gail stayed until almost then end, despite her facebook declaration 10 minutes into the test- ‘when is lunch’?!

Our pre-Christmas trips included a weekend trip to the Grampian mountains in North West Victoria. We stayed in goldmine town Ballarat on the Friday night and then on the Saturday and Sunday morning we did some walking to the Zumsteins and the Pinnacles. The views were incredible. The weekend before Christmas we did a day trip to the Mornington Peninsula to swim with Dolphins and sea lions. It was a great day and saw lots of dolphins and sea lions, preferring (surprisingly) the ungainly, playful sea lions. The same weekend we had Dave’s school friend, Rob, and his girlfriend, Kaisa, over for a BBQ in our back garden. It was our first sunny BBQ!

Dave had his last day at Fosters on Christmas Eve (including a compulsory visit to the staff bar!). Dave did well, coming home donning bottles of wine, a cookbook, a T-shirt, chocolates and good luck notes. Fi only has 4 more shifts in December, 4 in January and 4 in February as the rest is annual leave!

We are very excited about the rest of our trip as it is mainly travel and reunions with UK friends and family. We are heading to Sydney for NYE with Alex Hargreaves and are looking forward to staying with his Aunt and Uncle and yachting around Sydney with them. On the 5^th January Fi’s Mum is arriving as a last minute decision and we are very excited about seeing her! We are all journeying to Cairns for 5 days, after showing her around our Melbourne for 5 days, coinciding with Fi’s university friends, Liv and Izzy, arriving. We then travel to Darwin where we will greet Daniel Bennett to celebrate (hopefully!) the end of his PhD with trips to Kakadu National Park and Uluru.

We are coming home so soon but much excitement prior to that! We arrive home on the 25^th February via Japan and look forward to seeing you all again soon,

Happy New Year and look forward to seeing you in 2011,

Love from Dave and Fi