The Christmas roller coaster continues on it’s ever-hastening track with a visit to Southend to see A&A and Sebby G, the newest addition to my Mum’s side of the family.
Try as I might (even with the might of Google) I can’t figure out what relationship he is to me, though. What I’m almost sure of is that he’s either a second cousin or a first cousin once removed. An initial Google search turned up a definition making him my second cousin, being a child of my first cousin. The mighty (but often incorrect) WIkipedia, however, suggets the child of a first cousin as being my first cousin once removed, by dint of the fact that our shared relation is one-step removed between us (ie, my shared relation with my Cousin is my Grandfather, and Seb’s Great-Grandfather), which makes more sense to me, although frankly, it’s way too early in the morning to be calculating all this.
Anyway, he’s the newest edition to my extended clan and whichever way you look at it, he’s awesomely cute.
We were up at 8 for the drive, which didn’t take us as long as expected, even though it involved the M25 on the last “trucking” day before Christmas. Arriving around 12, we all immediately set about scrapping over first dibs on Seb, but were scuppered by his mother handing him straight over to my mum. Although, frankly, she’d have got him first anyway, she could beat any of us in a fight if she wanted cuddles.
Taking my lead from last night’s Ebn cuddle order, I swept in for seconds after mum, but managed simply to cause the little one to burst into tears, being rescued by K, who shut him up immediately with some random female witch-doctor power that she has.
Lunch was a separate whole bundle of fun, enjoying as we did a Raqlette (which K will no doubt sweep in and spell-check for me when she reads this) which is essentially a really easy way to cater for groups as it involves cooking your own food in a delightfully fun way. There is a grill element covered by a large slab of granite on which you cook strips of meat, veg or whatever else takes your fancy, while underneath you have a mini-frying pan to slip under the grill to melt cheese or fry quails eggs, as is your wont.
The only issues with this style of dining are that you never know when you’ve eaten too much until it’s too late and, from my perspective, it’s almost impossible to keep track of how much you’re eating and thusly how many Creon to take in order to make sure it’s all digested.
Once we’d laughed our way through a cracking meal, we all settled our stomachs by making arses out of our selves on the Wii-Fit, a ridiculously stupid device that uses your body-weight on a board to move the characters in a computer game.
I soon realised it wasn’t my day when I tried out the Yoga challenges and not only couldn’t even manage a single press-up, but end up almost flat on my face from trying to be a tree. Balance is not my forte.
By this time, after his post-lunch nap, Sebastian was being passed around the room again and this time turned the opposite cheek, crying at K and falling asleep again as soon as he came to me. Clearly an indecisive kid, although he certainly knows when he wants to sleep and when he doesn’t. He managed, through the course of the Raqlette, to sleep through two smoke alarms going off directly above his head.
By 7pm we were all pretty shattered and I still had a 2-hour plus drive ahead of me, since I’d been dedicated (or foolishly volunteered to be) sober-one for the day, seeing as we had to use my car anyway following a minor mishap on my mother’s part in Dad’s car.
On the road just after 7, we eventually got back to our humble little homestead about 9 and pretty much directly hit the sack. I love Christmas.