New Year's Eve at Painthorpe House Golf & Country Club, where we went for a drink and to see in the new year. We don't brush up too bad do we

Tons of Mex food, tons of cheese, lots of port, and a game of Trivial Pursuit which Joel kept falling asleep through.

Snow at last! Ellie insisted on going outside and playing football in the snow; Ben was a little less keen but still had fun.

Nicky's family came round and dressed up as pirates (not a lot you can say to that, really).

Christmas at the Wrenthorpe house: up at 5am for Ben, 6am for Ellie, but Nicky managed to keep them upstairs until 7:30am before giving up and the carnage began. Features a remote-control Dalek terrorising Ellie, among other things.

There's a nice Italian restaurant called Valentino's around the corner from the office - when the final parcels had been sent, we went round to celebrate the fact with some good munchies. Oh, and Google sent us a nice Christmas prezzie with lots of Google-branded USB goodies.

A drunken half an hour in Holborn (London) with the 10D and a small tripod yielded some nice traffic motion-blur images. Most are taken at 100ISO with exposure times of 1s and 2s.

Kieran's sister Laura turned 21, and there was a bit of a family 'do' at the Masonic hall in Dewsbury. Ellie and Ben charged around, ate lots of things which weren't very good for them, and looked general 'cute'. But before all this, we tried to do some Christmas shopping in Leeds and Wakefield...

Our daughter's first Nativity play - she was an angel telling the shepherds about the baby in the manger. Although to be honest, it was less a nativity and more watching the playleaders try and herd cats

A horrendous hangover was mended by a huge joint of beef and some lamb, and we managed to fit 11 people around our table! Then in the evening we put up the Christmas decorations and trimmed the tree.

Lots of Mexican food, Nick drinking jugs of strange cocktails, a lot of hats, and sooB the bandido.

Hot water tank has been dripping. Felt a drip on my head while making the kids' sandwiches, looked up, touched the ceiling and it sorta crumbled. Not happy.

Honestly, it's quite easy to get Nicky to buy office supplies - simply use bribery.

Nicky was in the office, so the remaining family went out for lunch.

Waiting for the bus, trying out some long-lapse stuff on the Powershot, balancing the camera on a wall. Didn't come out *too* bad

Nicky was helping out on the toy stall, Ellie made a Christmas angel, and Ben had a bun. Yum!

Stress stress - Christmas is here, Nicky's working in the workshop until all hours, but it's a laugh innit (and hardly unexpected, it seems to have gone a bit mad round here this year).

Learning to cook steak the Gordon Ramsay way.

Trying out the brownies I'd made the night before, and cooking a decent lunch.

We'd wanted to try out the new Yo!Sushi in Leeds for a while - it's at the top of Harvey Nichols in the Victoria Quarter, and thus we ended up there for a Fotopic staff lunch.

Some more office pics, some odds and ends including a sunrise over Wrenthorpe taken from my home office window, and an alarm called Chuff.

I had a couple of hours before a train and ended up in a pub in Covent Garden.

Some long-lapse shots after maintenance on the Fotopic server arrays.

We made one of these years ago, but we had quite a few test prints kicking around from our new lab so put them to good use

Hard at work again - Christmas is here.

Time for our annual trip to watch the fireworks - this year accompanied by Mum Wade. Ellie did her usual trick of hiding in the pushchair, but Ben absolutely loved it yelling 'bang!' and 'pretty!' at almost all the fireworks (I guess he finally found something louder than him!).

We were going to stock magnetic jigsaws, and then we found out that we actually had the only one in existence thanks to a supplier issue. Pity really.

We went to visit Grandma and Grandad Meese, and saw Aunt Winnie into the bargain - and she had a bit of a play with Ben.

Family friend David is 50, trouble being that there was lots of wine so we felt we all had to lend a hand drinking it. The kids met Molly, one of our cousins, and played lots too.