What we did between Christmas and New Year

The days between holidays and birthdays were also filled with fun. Auntie Kate gave Ellie a puzzle for Christmas, but even better, she did it with Ellie about 100 times.

The girls all got DS games from their grandparents so there was a lot of that going on - Emily was the expert though so they watched her for tips.
Katie got a hair kit - it had a wig along with some colors to paint on your hair, or face. She decided to try it out on her cousin Hamish.

The adults worked on a puzzle of their own - here are Margaret and Andrew having a go. We worked on it intermittently the entire time and it still wasn't done when we left, although I think the remnant may have finished it after we left!
Sam on his laptop - not too unusual. Sam's my hero though, he helped me recover my ipod music. THANK YOU!! It's great to have techno-savvy people in the family. 
There was a LOT of this going on (watching cricket on t.v. in case you Americans aren't sure what's happening).
Followed by a lot of this (playing cricket in the back yard).

Back at the t.v. Josie cuddles up while Daddy watches another match.
Some of our group went fishing and brought home these, making for a yummy dinner.
Emily caught the biggest one, I think. Oh the stories. . . fishermen always come home with stories!

With her catch. It's terrible taking a picture right into the sun, you can barely see the fish, but it's there. Way to go Em!!
Not to be outdone, Wills caught two fish.
Another day we took the girls to Dublin Bay for a swim and a ride in the boat. We'd been told it was warmer there because the water was shallower. Ahem. 

It wasn't all that warm, but it was fun! I pled illness and stayed on the beach with Hamish while Dugald handled the water sports. Daddy rocks.

Other spare time pursuits included reading with Grandma.
And kicking a ball around with all the "big kids".
Finally cabin fever set in a little bit, and I was feeling a teensy bit more energetic, so we piled in the car and headed down to Queenstown. We boarded the TSS Earnslaw (a steamship built in the 1910's, in the 1920's Dugald's father Hugh would take it to go on holiday across the lake) and sailed over to a sheep farm.
There were also deer at this sheep farm.
And of course sheepdogs, this one is Meg. We actually met this dog when we visited 4 years ago.


Our Meg and I went on a horse trek while the others were petting animals and watching sheep be shorn. It was really fun and we got to see a lot of the station and hear about how it is run, we also saw some amazing views. I didn't have a camera though, it was all I could do to hold on.

Here's our host with the most. Truly, Kate and Ant were so generous. I do feel a tad sorry for Ant though- while we were there his riding mower, boat and car broke but I had nothing to do with any of it!! Those of you who know me from my high school days might immediately think I was involved, but I was not. 

Delaney taught the girls about crossword puzzles.
And while the boys tried to relax on the lawn, the girls were having none of it.
Finally, Meggie channels her inner Hannah Montana.
Next post - our wild and raucous New Year's Eve. 

Our Christmas

We arrived in Wanaka on Christmas Eve so the next day was a busy one, though not as busy as what we are used to in Florida! The girls were so excited they woke up at 2:30 am ready to open gifts, but Dugald managed to get them to go back to sleep and the day began in earnest at the more palatable time of 7:30 am.  I'm not sure what the 20-somethings thought of being awake at that time, but we thought it reasonable enough and let the girls get up and open their stockings. 

After wrangling the girls into dresses and getting them fed we headed to church with Margaret and Hugh and Kate and Ant. I wish I had a picture of the tiny church, it was lovely. 

We arrived home to a house full of friends and relatives drinking champagne and preparing to open gifts. 

This is Dugald's brother Andrew and his wife, Debs. They live in Sydney and this visit was my first with them in many years - Dugald gets to see them when he travels.
The tree piled high with gifts and Ellie surveying all the loot. Kate and Ant's house is fantastic, they built it with a ski lodge feel to it. It is full of windows to take in the amazing view and has an enormous living/kitchen/eating area so that we never felt crowded despite having lots of people there at all times. They very generously allowed us our own "wing" of the house, so the girls had a room, we had a room and we had a shared bathroom. 
Josie's big gift was a Nintendo DS like her big sisters and she was VERY excited. 
Meggie opening a new journal with a note attached saying that her big gift from us would be a bike when we got to back to Wellington. In my exhaustion last year as we packed to move I realized JUST as the movers were locking up our container and preparing to drive off with all our worldly goods that I had forgotten to get them to pack up the shed in the backyard with all of our bikes, balls, scooters, etc. I didn't think it would be that big of a deal since we can get children's bikes at Walmart for $50. I was wrong. Bikes are a bit of an investment here. So, Meggie will be the first in our family to have one and she is very excited about it!
Ellie in the foyer, greeting people I suppose.
Hamish and Emily in the kitchen. Hamish and his partner Mike came over from Berlin, along with Mike's mother Helga. Poor Helga didn't speak much English so I imagine we were a little overwhelming, but she didn't let it show! Emily is Andrew and Deb's beautiful 16-year-old daughter whom the girls just adore, as they do all their cousins.
Some of the fellows having a game of  volleyball on the lawn.
Hugh watching it all - I'm sure he was cheering for Dugald's team. :)
Meanwhile back inside meal preparations are still underway and Josie decides to serve Hamish some of the "sushi" she got from Japan.

The table is set. Or I should say tableS.
Hamish and Emily again.
Kate and Ant serving up food and Hamish loading up his plate. 
Hugh makes a toast to our gracious hosts. 
Then our girls give a performance, a song they'd been practicing at home for just this occasion.

The audience.
Trying to get all four in one picture wasn't easy, there was a lot of dancing with the singing. They did a great job despite all the giggles though and it made for a special ending to a delicious meal. 
Finally a bit of dessert. We somehow managed to lose the Christmas cakes and puddings, at least temporarily, but we never suffered a lack of a delicious dessert thanks to Margaret who was in charge of it for the week. 

We're Back!

Happy New Year!!!

We arrived home last night after a wonderful vacation down in Wanaka. I have gobs of pictures, so many I filled up my camera's memory card! I took Dugald's old trusty laptop with me so that I could check my email once in awhile, but I couldn't upload photos so you are about to get them all in a few picture-laden posts. Actually I won't post them ALL. . . I'll try to self-edit a bit. 

Wanaka is down near the bottom of the South Island and we live on the bottom of the North Island. Our original plan was to fly down and rent a car, but we soon discovered that all the cars with the capacity to seat our family were spoken for. . . so we changed our plans and booked our car and ourselves on the ferry instead. I was still pretty darn sick when we left, I got the flu the Friday before Christmas and it hung on for quite some time. Thankfully our sail through the Cook Straight on the ferry was calm and uneventful. I've seen the ferry crossing in what I would consider VERY rough seas, so I was grateful indeed for the smooth ride. 

The ferry crossing is three hours and then we drove down to Christchurch, normally a four and a half hour drive, but it took us six. Oh well. It was beautiful. Here is a picture of the girls at our first stop - "The Pacific Store". It was a lovely cafe right on the shore so they went and got their feet wet.

We had two nights in Christchurch, so we managed to squeeze in a photo with Santa Claus, except for Ellie who was not going near him despite my desperate bribes.
Then, because I was ill, and Dugald was tired from the drive, we decided to go see a movie. We saw "Bolt" which was adorable, but in the theater the girls saw their friends from HSM3. Oh the joy!
Later that afternoon we went punting on the Avon - 




After punting we strolled around and saw Balentines famous Christmas window. We decided to go in and Josie tried on a few hats.

All of which was enough for sweet Ellie, who fell asleep on her Daddy's head. 
The next day we headed out for our long drive to Wanaka. I can't remember how long it took us, but again the scenery was incredible. Here are the girls at Lake Tekapo where we stopped for lunch. I should have taken more pictures of the lake but honestly I still was feeling pretty awful and didn't have the energy. The water is an amazing blue due to copper deposits, it's unlike anything I've ever seen.
Last stop before Wanaka was a salmon farm where the girls got to feed the fish and we bought some delicious fresh salmon for Christmas day.
Finally we arrived to Kate and Ant's incredible home in Wanaka. I didn't get a picture of the house from the front, but here is the view from the back. If you enlarge the photos or look closely you can see Meggie, Katie and Holly the black lab looking into the paddock.

I'll post more tomorrow with pictures of the family and more details about the fun we had!

Happy Birthday Mom

We're still in Wanaka enjoying the beauty all around us. Today we are going on a day trip to Queenstown to visit a sheep farm and do some horseback riding. I have so many beautiful photos to share, to entice as many of you as I can that this country is definitely worth a visit, but I can't post them until I get home.

I just wanted to drop in though and wish my mom a very happy birthday!! I wish I could be there to celebrate with you but know that you are being thought of and appreciated from afar. I hope your day is special and that you feel the love of friends and family. We miss and love you a lot!

Also a shout out to Ali and Stacy - Happy Anniversary you two!! Is it 15 years??? Congratulations and lots of love from all of us.

Merry Christmas

We are in Wanaka enjoying a wonderful Christmas with family and I just wanted to pop in and wish all of you a very Merry Christmas! I must apologize to those of you who didn't get cards from us - my computer died a violent death when we arrived and sadly I lost a lot of my contact information. Some of you may be receiving very late cards (as in I haven't even mailed them yet), and others I may miss entirely and I apologize. Aside from the lost list of contacts I've also been sick this week and my head is fuzzy so I've missed some details. All that to say, we send you our warmest Christmas greetings.

I will blog the details of our trip down here and the wonderful day we've enjoyed today, but in the meantime I read this on another blog and thought it was lovely. Enjoy!

This is paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13 by Sharon Jaynes:

If I decorate my house perfectly with lovely plaid bows, strands of twinkling lights, and shiny glass balls, but do not show love to my family - I’m just another decorator.
If I slave away in the kitchen, baking dozens of Christmas cookies, preparing gourmet meals, and arranging a beautifully adorned table at mealtime, but do not show love to my family - I’m just another cook.
If I work at the soup kitchen, carol in the nursing home, and give all that I have to charity, but do not show love to my family - It profits me nothing.
If I trim the spruce with shimmering angels and crocheted snowflakes, attend a myriad of holiday parties, and sing in the choir’s cantata but do not focus on Christ, I have missed the point.
Love stops the cooking to hug the child.
Love sets aside the decorating to kiss the husband.
Love is kind, though harried and tired.
Love doesn’t envy another home that has coordinated Christmas china and table linens.
Love doesn’t yell at the kids to get out of the way.
Love doesn’t give only to those who are able to give in return, but rejoices in giving to those who can’t.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
Love never fails. Video games will break; pearl necklaces will be lost; golf clubs will rust.
But giving the gift of love will endure

Christmas Countdown

Tonight Katie and I had a little fun with the makeup. Is makeup one word, makeup, or two words, make-up? Either way turning her into a glamour queen was fun . . .

I can hardly believe that we leave for the South Island on Monday! It really doesn't feel like Christmas to me - despite the Christmas parade the girls were in, the Christmas show for Musical Stars, the Christmas music occasionally on the radio. . .it's just hard to get my head around it being Christmas and summer. What it does feel like is when I went to summer camp in North Carolina and we would celebrate "Christmas in July".  Having grown up in Florida I'm quite used to warm weather in December, but I've missed all the familiar things leading up to Christmas, namely Thanksgiving, and even though it wasn't cold, per se, in Florida, it was cold-er. Not warmer. So it's still weird. 

The biggest benefit of this difference is that I'm not even very homesick. I've only spent one Christmas away from my family and it was horrible. We stayed in Texas and I got terribly depressed when on Christmas Eve our little family had dinner at Chili's after church. Then, on Christmas day I was so sad that we packed up everyone and went to Dallas to spend the night and shop the sales the next day. Memorable, but not in a good way. This year I'm really excited that even though we are far from my family, we will be with the Morrisons. I think the reason being in Texas that year was so difficult is simply that we were all alone. We had precious friends but Christmas is a time for family and we were away from ours and it was sad. I'm not anticipating any loneliness this year as there is quite a crew assembling at Kate and Ant's house in Wanaka, I'm very excited about it!

The girls are handling it all so well. I feel like I'm a bad mom for neglecting so many of our annual holiday traditions, but they are taking it all in stride and can hardly wait to go on the ferry and then see the family. Ours are the only small children going, which is quite a different affair than Christmases past. On my side of the family Meggie, at 9, is the oldest cousin of 14, but here in New Zealand she and her sisters are the youngest of 18. Six of their cousins will be in attendance at Wanaka, but Emily at 16 is the one closest in age to the girls. They adore Emily and all their boy-cousins, so much so that Dugald and I will have to protect the others from too much attention from our young brood.

We may be off-line while we are down there, I don't anticipate access to a computer for blog updates and Facebook checks. . . which might be a good thing for me anyway, a sort of fast. I'm not really good at fasting so I might see if I can get Dugald's laptop to take with me. We'll see. Anyway, if I don't blog until after the holidays Merry Christmas!! I'm sure I'll have gobs of pictures to upload when we return.