30th December 2007.

My brother and his fiancee were working nights on New Year's Eve, so we brought our festivities forward by 24 hours in order to see in the eve of New Year's Eve.

Bearing in mind that the last time (but one) that my brother saw us, Lara screamed for two hours until he left (she must have sensed the torment caused by her daddy's records being nailed to a tree and shot by his errant brother some 30 years ago), she behaved admirably. I'm not sure whether this was down to the presents (thanks Uncle Bobby / Auntie Jan), the presence of a dog and a cat to detract Lara's attention and provide tails to pull, or the continued (astounding) development of my little girl, but we did the whole dinner and grown-up conversation thing and remembered how it is to be adults again while Lali dreamed the night away, apart from being left to cry twice as we forgot the monitor (we only apply the traditional English method of torturing the child by ignoring her demands, all in the name of social-engineering, when the technology is not available).

So, a great time was had by all, and another year goes by. We were back home for New Year's Eve where we watched Little Britain, commented on the superiority of the London fireworks to the Sydney display (that we saw 'live' in our childless days), and gladly went to bed a little past midnight (oh, how things change). My daughter celebrated by being sweet, funny, beautiful, adorable etc during the day, and then going to bed at 9pm and staying there for 12 hours; what better present could parents receive?

2006. Christmas morning..... at my daughter's age I would have been sitting in front of the (unopened) presents for several hours by the time my parents awoke and joined in the splendour of tearing and comparing.

Lara, however, rolled out of bed at 9am, this being due largely to her recent spell of avoiding bed-time by all means necessary, even including asking Daddy for a cuddle (now that doesn't normally happen, I think she picked that up from my wife).

Although I am a firm believer in 'the best advice is no advice' when it comes to child-rearing, a word to the wise... try and arrange the order of present-giving in reverse order of preference (as an aside, I'm sure that I only ever got an orange and half an action man for Christmas).

Lara, having recently spent 4 hours at Disney (Florida)'s Animal Kingdom asking to 'see the squirrels' (it really was 4 hours, and it was incessant), and finally having that wish granted due to a Mission Impossible quest involving chasing the bloody things around the park while being misled by the various Disney people with every assertation up to 'they don't exist', had a special bond with the tree-climbing rats. Thus, it mattered not how much had been spent on the Disney Princess bike, or how much trouble family had gone to to wrap and send various (fantastic) toys in time for Xmas, once Chip and Dale were on the DVD, all other gifts and her parents were suddenly invisible.

It was the best Christmas day in living memory.