Since then: Back at work for the week Dec 20^th - Dec 23^rd. With Wednesday booked off to go shopping, and the Friday a public holiday. So actually, only three days at work after two weeks of paternity leave. I had lots to do.

On the 21^st the in-laws arrived. Well, Andie's mum and sister anyway. As I said, Wednesday I did the shopping, including the food shopping for Christmas dinner, and some gift shopping.

Saturday was Christmas Day. We started the day early (circa 6:15am) with Dylan by opening "stocking" presents - small 'gifts' to unwrap before breakfast - all bought and wrapped by me. Most successful gift: Ski Socks (for Andie), and Wind-up Fish Bath-toy pair (for Dylan).

After that, hot porridge (Oat-so-Simple), showers and baths. Dylan was really good about the pile of gifts under the tree. That is, he did not attack the pile, steal gifts, or throw temper tantrums, so when the in-laws arrived at about half ten for hot croissants he was given a present to open straight away, and was allowed to take gifts from the pile one by one, and (having checked who it is for), open it or give it to the person it was for. As I said, he was surprisingly well behaved.

During this time I was cooked (Andie and her mum helped with peeling the veg) a full roast dinner for five adults (and a toddler). We could have fed one or two more people with the amount I cooked. Yay for roast dinner:

Left to right: Andie (with Karl), Dylan, Yvonne, Lorraine, & Kirsten

After dinner, we opened the presents in a manner somewhere between orderly and chaotic. At one point the gift opening ground to a halt after Dylan opened his train set (from Andie and I), and he played with it, refusing any other gift. The train set was for certain the hit of the day.

Andie's favourite gift was a vase (from Kirsten), and my favourite gift was the two pairs of trousers (Fat Face) from Andie. I also got some books, some thermal underware, a paper shredder, some socks, and other little bits and bobs.

I ate so much, what with the main dinner, nibbles available - and eaten - all afternoon, then cheese in the evening.

If it's not a winter feast it's not Christmas.

That night Karl did not sleep well, and Dylan was up early (well, around 6:30 again). I took him into the living room and we played with his train set and watched some TV until his grandma came over, and Andie got up at about 11am. Soon after that I went for a lie-down and didn't wake up until just before 4pm. And that was boxing day pretty much taken care off.

Yesterday Andie went out with her mum and sister, and took Dylan and Karl out with them while I stayed home and worked on a DVD of photos and home-movies for the in-laws to take home.

iDVD is a pretty good application. I've never used it, or any DVD authoring software before, and was able to get results quickly. I created a heirachy of animated menus - a main menu with three sub menus, each with three items. The leafs of the menus lead to movie clips and slideshows. iDVD has a really neat feature for creatign slideshows that lets you fit the slide show to the music at the click of a button - but has a side effect when played back on cheap DVD players, that causes audio glitches at the start of every transition.

While the authoring process was quite quick, the rendering encoding and burning took something like four hours, which I was not expecting.

This morning the in-laws were gone, back to the UK.

And that, as they say, was that.

PS: Still no snow in Vienna. Damn you Austria, I wanted a White Christmas. Where's my White Christmas? Do need to go to the Arctic Pole?