Tom's Birthday Celebrations

Well Tom turned the ripe old age of 24 on Friday and so his parents put on a bit of a party for some of his old mates, so I thought I'd give you an idea in pictures of how the night went.

This is some of the boys playing a strange version of cricket in the pool.

This is a nice photo of myself with Katie (L) and Krystal.

This is me trying to take a snazzy shot with the night vision on the camera, as you can see, I need a tripod.

This is Heather's magnificent trifle, she has to put it in a lasagne dish and three times the recipe! YUM!

And because trifle with ice-cream wasn't enough, there was a gingerbread house (made by Christy) for afters.

Yet through all this I didn't seem to get a picture of Tom, so here's one I took tonight! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Holidays

We are currently enjoying holidays in Newcastle which have been very relaxing so far including trips to the beach and long talks with our cousins and aunt and uncle. Josh and his girlfriend Jayne picked us up from the airport and we went out for a beautiful breakfast in Stockton, it was the first time we had met Jayne and she was every bit as gorgeous as Josh had described. We have also been watching lots of DVD's including "You, Me and Dupree", "Bridget Jones's Diary", "Robin Hood, Men in Tights". Tom has also promised Uncle Dave that he'll watch "The Sting" with him before we leave on Thursday. Went to the 20/twenty match at Newcastle yesterday and it was packed. A fairly close game coming down to the last two overs. NSW kind of stuffed it by letting one of the Rugby players into their team as he wasn't very good. I enjoyed it because it was a faster game of cricket!

Only two trips to the beach so far, the weather here hasn't been perfect beach weather and the water on Saturday was 15 degrees, I mean, if we wanted to swim in water that cold we could have stayed in Melbourne!

Anyway, the food has been great (as one always gets with Aunty Sue) so much so that we will be doing some serious trips to the gym this month! Anna leaves to go back to London tomorrow, but we have enjoyed spending more time with her this year as she was already there when we came last year. It has been freaking us out how similar Anna is to Jocelyn and Uncle Dave is to my Dad, like, REALLY FREAKING US OUT. It's also nice to get a taste of familiarity though with Mum and Dad overseas. It's amazing how similar familes can be even when they don't see each other very often!

A Teppenyaki Treat!

Tom and I have never dined out to Teppenyaki before but with Entertainment books in hand and a cousin over from Perth with her husband, Connor, Tim and Amy, Heidi and Adrian and Tom and I thought it might be fun to take them out somewhere fun. So we ended up at Southbank at a Teppenyaki restaurant.

From L-R: Eloise, Heidi, Amy, Me, Tom, Tim, Connor, Adrian.

And now for the food:

Yum!

For Phili (who loves irises)

It's so lovely to have a garden, but I have been quite concerned about the beautiful white irises on the path to our door. This is why...

They just didn't seem to be flowering. Anyway, we got a bit of rain on Sunday morning and when we arrived home they looked like this...

I have no idea why they decided to start flowering or how they did it in a few short hours, but I will enjoy them all the same. Isn't creation great?