Harry's Birthday and first Nativity

Harry celebrated his 4th Birthday on 16th December.  He has two other friends, Zoe and Miles who all have birthdays at a similar time, so we booked the local sports centre for the the following weekend.  This saved lots of hassle, as they al have the same group of friends, plus Jo, Miles' mum has just had a baby, so tyring to organise a birthday party with a newborn was not her idea of fun!

Anyway, the Nativity play was the day before his birthday, Harry was a Cow.  All the preschoolers were sat at the front doing actions and singing along with the songs.  They all seemed to enjoy it, although Harry got a little stressed when he couldn't see us in the audience!!

 

 He was shattered, and fell asleep during the mile or so journey home, so he went to bed as he was.  Up he got the following morning full of excitement for his birthday.

What's under here???

Present from Mummy and Daddy

Present from Gangan

Knitwear from Nanny

 

 

 

Present from Grandma and Grandad

The party was the 19th, the kids enjoyed themselves tremendously......

Miles having Fun

Hien looking after Harriet for Jo

 erm.......

 Yay.....Bouncy castles!!!!!

We got too rowdy!!!!  Just joking, Mark is Miles' dad!!

Miles' Cake

 There is a rather funny story to why the corner is missing on Miles' cake, click the link above to find out more!!!

At first, Miles wasn't too impressed with the sparklers on his cake......

 but he came round in the end.......

 Harry and Zoe loved their Peppa Pig cake!!!

 Time for one last bounce, where Kailand amazed everyone by climbing the rope ladder on a bouncy castle on his own.  I think I have mentioned previously that he has cerebral palsy, but a set of splints for his legs and feet has given him new lease of life, and amazed even the doctors who thought it would be 12-18 months before he started walking.  After 4 months he can now totter around without the splints, but does get on better wearing them!

Christmas Day and a BBQ

Naturally, with this being our first Southern Hemisphere Christmas, we were hoping for good weather, and it did not disappoint.  We were able to have a BBQ after present opening and Skyping the family back in the UK.  They were not impressed whe we told them about our hot weather whilst they froze in the snow!!!

The fun started on Xmas Eve, with a party on Victory Green and every child got a free present from Santa when he arrived behind the Fire and Rescue Land Rover.  There was a free bouncy castle too!  Can you imagine that in the UK???

After that, there was a carol service under the Whalebone Arch outside the Cathedral.

Harry and Zoe running around the Cathedral Garden

 

Sneaky beaky Olly in the tree!!

The RAF did a few flypasts on Xmas Day, I guess with it being as "operational" down here, they are able to get off the ground on Xmas Day, first we had some Typhoons who had been escorting the Airbridge flight in through the airspace, and then the SAR Seaking did a flypast along the harbour, which made Harry chuckle.....

Then it was upto Paul and Karen's place for Xmas Dinner.  They had insisted we come as were going to have a quiet BBQ, just the three of us, but they were most insistent.  It was great fun!

It was also a chance to try out their new shed, which is still not finished, but meant we had some shelter from the sun.

Karen and Paul's kids, Kia and Kailand had got some new toy spades, so were digging in the garden.  This upset Harry, so I found my folding shovel from the back of the Landrover, and he was happy again!!

They have a cracking view from their place, so I took a few snaps of some of the wrecks in the harbour.

The Lady Liz

The Sampson??

Dawn enjoyed her BBQ!!

Paul and Kailand busy BBQing

In between courses, we amused ourselves with some games, which included William Tell, but using a spud in place of an apple.....apples are too expensive to waste at 70p each!!!

Paul then found an old steer skull in the back of his Land Rover, so that was fixed to the shed wall.

The kids tired themsleves out playing on bikes, and Harry finished the night in his push chair munching on a drumstick, 9.30pm in broad daylight!!!

A Southern Christmas.....

 We had the traditional build the Xmas Tree.  Harry was old enough to understand and help this year, so we were relegated to passing him the tree decorations, whilst he gave Dawn a heart attack by leaning from the arm of the sofa......

We even had Falkland Island baubles!!!
 

Topping the tree out

Ships, ships and more ships

We get visited regularly by lots of ships.  Cruise ship season is here, and we get visited by some very small ships, with just 100 passenger, to big monsters like the one below, which holds nearly 4000 people!  On the "cruise ship days" the population of Stanley literally doubles, or even trebles for the day!!

The large ships though have to moor outside the harbour, and the passengers are ferried in on smaller tenders.

 Not quite sure that I would want to be on the tender in the picture above.  The day was fairly windy, and the tenders were bombarded with spray for the mile or so they are the boat!!  It is quite funny to watch loads of green faced tourists getting off the boats at the jetty.

If you arrive on one of the smaller boats, like below, the transfer is often by Gemini inflatable, which can be just as bad in rough weather, but only for about 300 yards!

 We then had the chance to visit HMS Clyde, which is the Royal Navy offshore patrol ship down here.  She is scheduled to be here until 2012, when she is expected to return to the UK for a refit.

We had a tour around the boat by a lady who looked extremely familiar.....she was one of the officers featured in the TV Show Ice Patrol which was about HMS Endurance!

As we were down at FIPASS, we had the chance to snap a few other ships, which included the James Clarke Ross of the British Antarctic Survey.

The Polarcus Nadia is a revolutionary ship which I ended up googling to find out why the bow was so weird...It is called an "X Bow" and gives lower drag.  The boat is used for seismic surveys of the ocean floor and strata below.  It is down for the next round of oil exploration.