Hello again! Sorry about the laziness in posting. I've been too busy eating Freddo Frogs and drinking cheap, pink, boxed wine, much to the horror of Uncle Ken.

It's been a really fun couple of days, and now it's Christmas Eve, so the next couple of days promise to be awesome too.

Going back to Wednesday, it was my Auntie Judy's last day at work at a job that she's had for more than 33 years. It's been a pretty stressful month for her, so we decided to do what any helpful relatives would do - we arranged to have a party at her house that evening. To our defense, we DID say that we'd take care of the food and drinks, and that all she'd need to do was come home.

Stephen and I started at the grocery store, where we argued over whether or not brown onions in Australia are the same thing as yellow onions in America. This was the point that he held it up and said, "look, it's a *bleeping* onion, isn't it?". It's also the point that I enlisted help from the produce employee, who told us that no, that was not the kind of onion we wanted.




Back to Judy & Ken's to get ready, and then the cousins started arriving. This is my cousin, Dean, with his gorgeous wife (Mio) and new baby (Jemma).




Myra gets her mitts on Jemma.




And then the rest of the cousins arrived. Declan is Sophie's age, and Patrick is Felix's age, so there was a lot of excitement surrounding meeting them. I wanted to get a nice photo of all four of them together. Hahaha.





I finally just settled on "they're all looking in the general direction of the camera".




The grown ups get down to the business of dinner.




Stephen gets down to the business of a gin and tonic AND champagne.




Nine year old nerds.




My cousin's mean and awful husband, Tim, has a fair bit of an advantage on me height-wise, and has spent years telling me all about it.




Sweetest baby ever.




Awww!




Judy came home from work (um, we sort of started without her) to find her house full of people.




This is Gwenda the Quenda. They're marsupials that are indigenous to Australia, and this one likes to be fed mince by my Uncle Ken.






I know that I called him a bit of a Grinch the other day, but when pouring alcohol of any kind, Ken is more than generous.




Here is my cousin, Dana, being talked at by TWO nine year olds, plus a Felix. God bless her. She is smiling on the outside, but on the inside she's trying to figure out the quickest escape route.




Here is mean, tall Tim picking Felix up by his ears.




As a grand finale for an already wonderful evening, the kids decided to dress up and sing Jingle Bells. It may have been the alcohol, but at the time, this seemed like one of the greatest things to ever have happened.






It was a fantastic evening, and huge thanks go to Ken and Judy for being willing and able to just roll with us taking over their house.

Can't wait for round two with the cousins tomorrow.