Boxing Day - just like Christmas again but with less surprises

My tummy has been full for most of the last 48 hours. Why do we do this to ourselves? I can't walk past a bowl of nuts without having a few, even when I am groaningly full. But enough about my eating disorder. How are you?
Christmas Day started at about six, as usual. The boys emptied their stockings and were both pretty happy with what they found. Michael has been asking over and over for "an empty book with lines to write on" and he finally got one in the stocking. He has been writing a diary in it since, and as you can imagine, it's pretty great.

Elf went off to pick up Imp, Ed and the girls (she later took them to the airport to fly to Canberra). They joined us for breakfast, along with Sally, Matt and Arthur, and my Mum and Dad who are staying for the rest of December. Elf was up early chopping fruit, and we had croissants, fruit salad, and pancakes that Imp brought with her. Everyone was so stuffed by 10 that all of us could have easily fasted the rest of the day - perhaps the rest of the week. Then we tore into the presents.

We gave the boys a 3 meter inflatable pool, and a microscope set. The weather has been too brisk to use the pool, but it is pumped up and filled and ready for aquatic fun. The microscope has been a hit - we just have to convince them not to run around with glass slides in their hands. Marcus particularly cannot walk anywhere at the moment. This might have something to do with his high-sugar diet.

One way we are trying to burn off his energy is with the table tennis set from Imp and Ed. It contains the bats, some balls and a net, and we just set it up on the dining table. It's been fantastic. The holes in the table give the play a slightly anarchic edge, although the ball doesn't seem to find them that often. I have realised since we set it up this morning that table tennis is the quintessential summer holiday activity. The crisp bip, bap, bip, bap of a rally seems to echo with my memories of those incredibly long holidays when I was a kid. On alternate years we'd stay for a month at Mum's parents' in Sydney, but the years when we stayed home we really stayed home. No shack, or relatives down south, or caravan. Lots of table tennis. Tonight we had the quintessential Boxing Day supper - ham on toast, on the bare table with the net still set up. Delightful.

To finish Christmas Day, we planned to have no lunch as such, but have an evening Christmas dinner with ham, turkey, pudding and so forth. What we ended up doing was leftover pancakes and croissants with ham and salad. I stuffed and cooked the turkey just to get it done. I think its the first time I have made stuffing - I used the recipe from the good old Central cookbook, and it came out very tasty indeed.