Tis the Season

We are getting into the Christmas spirit at our house! Last weekend we got our tree up, sadly it is an artificial tree because we are not supposed to have plants in this house (a clause in our rental agreement prohibits such things). I miss the smell of a real tree but in actuality this was a lot easier, cheaper and quicker. For the first time ever the girls totally decorated it themselves - Dugald put on the lights and I unpacked the decorations and they placed them all on the tree. Now our playroom looks very festive indeed!!

We also started our Advent celebrations - thanks to this fantastic house from the Knights. We open a door every day and there is a reading inside and there may or may not be some candy.
Ellie got to open the first door so I helped her read the activity paper and then Daddy read the Scripture reading to us.

I still find the mixed-up seasons a bit strange - it's not bad having Christmas in the summer. I grew up with fairly warm Christmases in Florida. The harder part is having a long winter without Christmas!! However, summer has yet to officially arrive here anyway.

Hope you are all enjoying this busy and festive time of year. xx

Wellington Christmas Parade

This year Meggie and Katie both represented Tarrant Dance Studio in the Christmas parade- Katie as a reindeer on Santa's float and Meggie marched as a Christmas tree right in front of the float. I did my duty as a parade marshall and I have the lovely blue t-shirt to prove it.

It was a rather chilly day - which kind of reminded me of Christmases at home, but the little girls were rather cold poor things. There was a great crowd despite the chill in the air - and the whole town was celebrating because the night before the New Zealand soccer team, the All Whites, had won their game against Bahrain to qualify for the World's Cup and they were leading the whole shebang.

Katie and her reindeer friends Pippa and Vita were adorable pulling the sleigh and Meggie was a crowd- pleaser as well smiling and waving as she walked along Lambton Quay.

We began our day at the dance studio getting into our costumes and t-shirts, then we rode on a bus to the parade start. I loved watching all the little reindeer on their way to board the bus. Riding the bus is still a thrill for my girls since it is a rather unusual happening, I tried to take pictures of them once we were on but they didn't turn out particularly well as we were all rather crowded. They enjoyed waving at pedestrians though and generally feeling a bit famous for a few minutes :-).
As you probably know Santa's float is the last part of the parade, so we had a bit of a wait in the cold before it was our turn. I was so proud of all the children - they kept smiling and did their very best to keep warm.



I mean really, who doesn't love a parade? We had a ball and are so happy to be a part of this great city and it's celebrations. xx

By the way - Katie's updated her blog a bit - check her out with the link to the right.

Giving Thanks

If we still lived in America we'd be celebrating Thanksgiving today - a holiday I absolutely adore for the food, the friendships and the taking of time to count our blessings from the previous year. Last year there was no way I was going to be able to pull off any sort of Thanksgiving feast due to several things, most notably an oven the size of my childhood Easy Bake. Seriously, I had to buy new cookie pans when we moved in because mine wouldn't fit in the oven! Another detriment to our celebrating last year was my lack of planning ahead and a bit of depression still lingering. Nevertheless we did take the time to count the things we were grateful for and there were many - a reconnection with our New Zealand family, new friends who had reached out and made us feel so welcome here, an amazingly beautiful city in which to live, Dugald having a job despite a rough economy, and so on and so forth.

This year I had high hopes of inviting friends, who have been so very dear to us, over to celebrate American style. I had every intention of trying to track down an extremely over-priced turkey (though I have never seen one for sale here I have heard that one can be purchased if you try hard enough and fork over a week's worth of rent), cook it and all the fixings and count our blessings with friends. But. . . somehow it all snuck up on me again and before I knew it Thanksgiving was in a few days and I've done nothing to organize myself, find said turkey, invite friends, nada.

So this year we will once again just celebrate as a family with a roast chicken and some summer veggies - asparagus, tomatoes, etc. - and give thanks. This year I am particularly grateful for a larger, warmer home. I am grateful for friendships that have grown over the past year. I am thankful for our church home and "family" there, I am of course so thankful for the Morrison family and especially that Lloyd and Hugh are both doing better. In the end though I think it was fortuitous that I hadn't invited the masses because just yesterday our refrigerator was replaced. The joy of renting is that I didn't have to sort it out or pay for it - all I had to do was get our stuff out of the old one - but the bad news is that I also didn't get to choose the replacement. When it arrived I was SHOCKED. You have no idea how small this baby is - I've taken some pictures of the girls in front of it to try and give you an idea, but they hardly have the impact I felt when they took this baby out of the box:

(Keep in mind that these very average-sized children are 8 and 10 when comparing their size to that of the fridge)
The fridge is basically shorter and thinner than I am. Mercy. I would never have fit a turkey in there if my life depended on it! So, we're looking at options as to where we can put a second fridge/freezer that I hope to purchase this weekend - Merry Christmas to me :-). To be fair the space that the fridge has to go in is not particularly big and I don't think they make the one that was there before anymore. . . and this will just help me stick to my plan of minimizing food waste by trying to only shop for the things we need for that day's meal. Theoretically that is a good plan, but practically speaking I don't get to the store every day despite it being two blocks away from my house. Thankfully I have two daughters who can do the shopping for me in an emergency as long as I have cash since I am not ready to give them the pin number on my debit (EFTPOS as they call it here) card.

On a happier note the sun has been shining for two days in a row and the thermometer in my house reads 62 F with all the windows open - it is fabulous. Yesterday morning Wills came and stayed with the girls and I did my first ocean swim of the season - it was freezing in the water and rather choppy but such fun!! The replacing of the refrigerator, and subsequent search for where we could put a second one, forced me to organize and clean out our storage area under the house. As I did that the girls spotted the Christmas decorations - which I was planning to put up anyway - so we decorated, except for the tree which we still need to purchase but we've made a space for it. Our house is looking festive (on the inside anyway) and the girls and I have been listening to Christmas music to get in the spirit. I have some great pictures of the girls in the Wellington Christmas Parade that I plan to post tomorrow so come back soon.

We love you all and give thanks for YOU!! xx

Meggie the Master Chef

The girls and I have been watching "Master Chef Australia" lately - when we can remember- and it has inspired them to some creativity in the kitchen which has been quite fun! Meggie made up her own dessert the other night and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but I love that she was inspired to try to create her very own dish. Another night Meg wanted to make dinner for all of us so I suggested she consult one of her cookbooks and then make me a list for the grocery store - and I told her I wanted the dinner to be healthy, cover the major food groups and not too expensive. If we didn't have a grocery budget the girls would choose to have lamb every night, they really are Kiwi children!

Anyway, here she is making us a lovely dinner of "Pasta with Pesto, Bacon and Peas" with some strawberries on the side:

By the way Meggie just updated her blog so click on the link to the right if you'd like to read it.

xx

Josie's Ballet Presentation

For Josie's Primary Grade class Mrs. Tarrant organized an official "presentation". It worked the same way as Katie's Grade 2 exam - Josie got her hair fixed and there was an "examiner", but it was slightly less formal and the moms were allowed to watch. Josie is a beautiful dancer and did a wonderful job - her weakness was getting the timing right but that will come with time. She exuberantly performed all of her moves, smiling the whole time, and had a great time (and that's the most important thing anyway at her age I reckon).

Staglands

Staglands Wildlife Park is just outside of Wellington and I've been wanting to take the girls there for awhile now. Finally last weekend was the perfect opportunity - the weather was beautiful and we had a free Saturday. It was lovely to be there in the Spring because we got to feed lots of baby animals. I took a million pictures so this post is quite full of them - but none of them quite capture the beauty of the day. We all left refreshed and happy after our day with the wildlife!

Fun Improv Video!

This video from Improv Everywhere is so much fun! My new favorite show is Glee - I'm a musical fan - so that said, this is exactly the kind of entertainment I love! Enjoy and I'll be back with pictures from our trip to Staglands soon. xx