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.

I can't think of a title to sum this up.

I think I've mentioned on this blog before how much Ellie wants to be just like her sisters. . . so much so that she even wants to do school like they do. Here are some cute pictures of her doing "Daddy Math" with Dugald the other night. She's learning double digit numbers so he would write them on the white board and then ask her what number he'd written.

Every time he put a number up she would strike this pose, the thinker:


We think she's adorable. She's actually been SO much better lately too. I think a lot of her behavior issues had to do with moving, both her inability to express  how disconcerting it was and me being too distracted with all that moving involves to give her the attention she needed. Now that we're finally settling I do hope our move in January doesn't  cause too much upheaval, again I'm grateful that we will have that house for three years. 

Our precious next-door neighbor Maddie is graduating this year and she came over so the girls could see her all dressed up for her "Leavers Ball" as they call it. She's in the middle, her younger sister Lucy is on the right and her mom is on the left. This family has been SUCH a blessing to us since we've been here and we will miss Maddie tremendously when she heads off to university next year. Thankfully our new house is close enough that Lucy will still be able to babysit.
This morning was a  sort of Christmas pageant at church and Dugald was Gabriel. 
Meggie and Katie were asked to help with the offering and they took their jobs quite seriously.

This picture is Ellie, Pippa, Monty and Josie taking their "gifts" to baby Jesus at the altar.
And finally, here are Meggie and Katie taking up the offering and bowing to the cross.

Performance Week

It's been a crazy busy week full of end-of-the-year performances and events. . . 

Katie and Josie both had their ballet recitals this week -two shows and two rehearsals made for a LOT of dancing! They were both so very good though, it was a joy to watch them perform and admire their abilities. Josie even won an award  for "showing enthusiasm and promise within her pre-primary ballet class". Of course we are very proud of both of them, here they show off their flowers from Daddy after the show. 

Between the two nights of ballet performances we had the Musical Stars Christmas show. Both Meggie and Katie had solo parts and had to memorize lines and again they did well. 

Here's Katie with her class doing a  Christmas rap (Katie is in the middle).
Meggie performing a funked-up version of "Away in a Manger". She's on the far left and they are all in their pajamas as the show begins during a slumber party.
Katie sings her solo in "When Christmas Comes to Town".

And Meggie does hers in "Silent Night".
Dugald and I also attended the prize-giving for Queen Margaret's College. Lloyd and Julie's eldest daughter Bella was the head girl there this past year and so she gave a speech. We were honored to be there and so proud of her, she is a wonderful speaker and very inspiring to her fellow students. We enjoyed dinner with Lloyd and Julie and their family as well as Margaret following the ceremony. Bella won several awards and she has also received a full scholarship to play water polo next year at the University of Arizona.

Finally, we are very pleased to have found a lovely house right around the corner from where we are currently living. It backs right onto a park, it gives us a bit more space and we are grateful to have found something before Christmas!! I went over today and had tea with the homeowner so she could show me where things are and how things work and I was pleased to discover a few added benefits that I hadn't even noticed when I had a look around the first time. 

Thorndon Street Fair

We had another weekend of absolutely perfect weather, I daresay I may even have been hot a few times. I know I can't complain though. . . not after bemoaning how freezing I was all winter. I think it is just going to take me a year to get used to the fact that the temperature is far more variable than the constant 78 degrees F I enjoyed year-round inside my house in Texas. It is lovely to enjoy the fresh air, with the windows open and the breeze blowing.

I've been looking at houses seeing as we have to move in January. I'm trying not to get too discouraged but I've only seen one that I thought we'd be happy in so far and I'm not sure that we will get it. . .a lot of people have looked at it. We are going to continue renting and we'd really like to stay here in Karori, so I will keep praying for the perfect house to become available. 

One of the reasons, no, the main reason, we are so desperate to stay in Karori is that we've made some amazing friends. On Saturday night Dugald and I went out with some of them. . . Richard and Fleur and Matt and Alison. Here we are after enjoying our delicious dinner of Chinese food.

Sunday we all headed to the Thorndon Street festival after church. We walked through the Botanic Gardens to get there and of course Katie tried to catch a duck - she can't walk by ducks anymore without trying to get one.
This was the walk DOWN the hill to the fair, the girls were full of energy to run and climb trees. The return trip UP the hill following the festival was not so energetic and might have involved a bit of whining.


The street was packed so we carefully navigated our stroller and girls from stall to stall. 
We had to buy them hats, the sun was quite strong. Now they look like real Kiwis!

Scottish Festival

On Sunday we went to Wellington's annual Scottish festival. . .  Morrison is a Scottish name, so we went to check out the festivities down by the waterfront. 

First stop - gelato! Here's Katie waiting patiently outside the store. . .

We wandered around the various booths checking out our family tartans (old and new), looking at maps and showing the girls where the Morrison clan came from, and getting freebies like these bookmarks:



We also saw a bit of Scottish dancing.

Meggie and Katie have both updated their blogs. . .kind of. . . you can click on the links to the right and go to their websites, they love comments!

"Everything's amazing but nobody's happy"

I saw this on another blog and thought it was funny enough to post here. . . it really has nothing to do with our adventures in New Zealand but it does prove that I'm learning how to do new stuff on the blog.

A day in Palmerston North

It's the time of year when the gardens around here are in full bloom. Here are some pictures of Grandma and Grandpa's garden in Palmerston North. . .

We all ate outside, the girls on a quilt under the tree. . .

More pictures of the flowers. . .

and Meggie in the plum tree.
After lunch Daddy took the girls to the esplanade to feed the ducks. Of course Katie wanted to catch one!


And she did!!! Then they played on the playground for awhile while mommy had a much appreciated break back at Grandma and Grandpa's.