And then...

On Christmas Day, Son, Daughter-in-Law and The Unbloggable Toddler came down - Son was working on Christmas Eve and again on the 27th, so they could only stay one night. We all went to the playpark. Here's The Unbloggable Toddler swinging...

... and here's Son with his niece, Littlest.

The house was quite full with us all in it. Just for that one night, there were 11 of us sleeping in the house - and with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, that's quite a lot, especially as TUT needs a room to herself because she's only recently become a good(ish) sleeper. It was fine, though. At the fullest point, we had Niece in the sitting room on a sofa, Daughter 2 and SIL 2 in the dining room on a blow-up bed and Littlest in the study... well, at least for the part of the night when she slept... .

And there were 15 to dinner, which would be easy enough if there weren't six vegetarians among us, some of us rather fussy. (Or - looking at it another way - if the other nine weren't carnivores... .) Also, one son-in-law is diabetic and the other has a nut allergy. But we all got fed.

It would have been even easier if I hadn't had a rotten cold and sore throat (which I later passed on to my sister-in-law - so sorry!) and Littlest hadn't been keeping some of us from sleeping rather a lot.

Look at her - she has a completely clear conscience as she prepares to empty my recycling bin

and, for the umpteenth time, takes all the Elastoplast and micropore tape and antiseptic ointment out of the drawer.

Then, on various days, all the young ones went away, alas, and then my brother and his wife and the pair of us went to the BP Portrait Exhibition in the rather impressive Portrait Gallery. The portraits were amazing.

This one won first prize. I love it.You can't see it very well on this postcard, but some of the items on the table look as if they're magically spinning.  

We walked home afterwards. I would hate to live somewhere so big that you couldn't walk home if you really wanted to.

Then on Hogmanay (New Year's Eve) we brought in the New Year at Daughter 1's, which was lovely,

and later she and her family, including her lovely parents-in-law, came to dinner with us and Mr L's cousin.

And that's what happened in the last couple of weeks - except that today we heard that Son and Daughter-in-Law's new baby, due in May, is a boy. Grandson is very happy. "Yay!" he said. "It's not usually a boy." ("It" being a new baby in the family - though actually he does have a baby boy cousin on his dad's side.) He is the patriarch of the cousins.

And we're all excited and looking forward to meeting the New Unbloggable Baby. Or NUB.