Oh wow, it's 2011

Happy New Year everyone! We had possibly the least organised Hogmanay in Scotland yesterday. It was really rather enjoyable. We had, at one point, hoped to be down at The Corbies for Hogmanay but late and therefore still drying plaster repairs, no floorcoverings and all the furniture being trapped in the summerhouse behind a six foot high frozen solid snowdrift sort of put a stop to that idea.

So instead, we vegetated at home. Second Born spent his enormous wodge of Christmas cash on an Xbox, an extra controller and a game, all in the sales, for he is smart that way. He had lost hope of it arriving in 2010 but lo! the delivery man from Amazon arrived at lunchtime on 31st bearing computer generated Nirvana. We have barely seen either of our children since. We know they are still living here, though, as I can hear them whooping from here.

I braved the supermarket to buy some odds and ends to keep us fed and happy and then Husband and I spent the day reading, watching some non-boy suitable stuff on TV and drinking tea. We drank a LOT of tea.

The boys emerged to eat and watch some classy TV (Harry Hill, You've Been Framed and an old Christmas episode of The Good Life - which we were pleased to discover the boys really enjoyed!) and then went back to annihilating aliens. (I am assuming that if we let them gorge themselves on computer-generated mayhem for a day or two, they will then be happy enough to cut back on their screen time. That will work, right?)

We headed out at about 11.45pm to a point on the hill upon which we live from where you can see most of the other hills on which Edinburgh is built, and that means you can see the fireworks at midnight without being trampled underfoot by 80,000 slightly tipsy tourists. The boys enjoyed the fireworks (First Born even managed to watch most of them without his ear defenders on - his sensitivity to noise is slowly improving) and we then came home and let Second Born first foot the house. We told him he was being nominated as traditionally it is supposed to be a tall, dark, handsome man who does the honours, but as we didn't have one of those, we would make do with small, dark and stinky instead. He took it surprisingly well.

I told the boys and Husband about Sara's family tradition of having a big book in which to record the memories and high points of the year just gone together with predictions for the new year ahead and they loved the idea. With your permission, Sara, we will be stealing this one (I only wish we had known about it years ago!)

Today we are again doing nothing, and doing it rather well, even if I do say so myself. I got up early-ish and set a beef hotpot going in the slow cooker before going back to bed with tea, shortbread and my Kindle. And Husband. And his Kindle. We then had "Happy New Year!" calls with various relatives from beneath the duvet. Very decadent. The hotpot will be ready in another couple of hours or so. I wonder what I could do to fill in a couple of hours?........