Home & Family

I’m mustering up the courage to attempt blogging about our trip to New Zealand.  It’s taken forever to sort through thousands of photos and create some sort of order!  There’s just too much to write about for one post, so I’ll break it up a bit to give us all a breather!!!

We were  blessed with 4 weeks of utter blissful, relaxing and fun-filled days.  Now that we are home, we are all pining to go back.  It’s always nice to be back amongst your own things, but we could easily have stayed for another couple of weeks!  The best part – Jaron and I had a bedroom downstairs away from the main living areas of the house and the kids were upstairs with my in-laws and sister-in-law…most mornings we would roll out of bed after 9am to find the kids fed, dressed, beds made and happily playing and we didn’t even have to do a thing 🙂  Simple things like that make for a perfect holiday for parents, right?!

So, the holiday started with leaving sunny, blue skies in Tasmania. 

The kids were sooooo excited to get going and were amazing little travellers.  There was a lot of waiting at the airport in Melbourne and then a 4 hour flight to NZ, but they did a great job and were still chirpy when we arrived at midnight!!  We flew a combination of Jetstar and Air New Zealand and if we did it again, would definitley fly Air New Zealand (or Qantas) for the longer flights.  We arrived to rain, rain and more rain – in fact, it rained pretty much our whole trip!  But that didn’t stop us from having lots of fun!!
 
There was no messing around when we first arrived, the next day we headed out to our very first Polkadots concert!  These guys are great – if you haven’t heard of them, I guess they could be likened to a Kiwi version of The Wiggles.  

Our little sister, Ashleigh is a Polkadots girl – she is a pro dancer and started out back-up dancing for the Polkadots and now is there fill-in when one of the main girls have babies or other business to take care of.  Three cool things about the Polkadots…  1. They are all young Mums so know exactly what kids want, 2. Their messages are all about keeping healthy, and 3. They are all members of our Church and have great values, in fact, you can watch a cool video about pink Polkadot Dionne here.

We were especially lucky that Aunty Ash is filling in for one of the Polkadots at the moment and could see her in full action – she was great and the kids are massive fans now!

 

 

Jaron’s parents live about a 10 minute drive from the city centre of Auckland, so this was the view from the highway each day – the city is sooo beautiful. 

 

 

 

 

 

Right, that’s all for tonight!  I’ll be back soon with PART 2 of our trip (promise this won’t go on forever…the quantity of photos we took decreased as the trip went on!) 
xxx

One of my favourite things about the Christmas season is all of the “get-togethers” – especially when it involves family.  I come from a really big extended family on my Dad’s side…6 boys and 1 girl, 29 grandchildren, and over 60 great-grandchildren!!  Before the family got so big we would get together a couple of times a year for a catch-up, always at Christmas and usually at ANZAC Day too.  With so many people to accommodate and a good number of them living far away, we haven’t had a proper get together since Nan and Pop both passed away almost 2 years ago.  We also realised that without Nan and Pop here, the get togethers aren’t just going to happen on their own anymore and so we organised an early Christmas BBQ for who ever could make it over the weekend.

There were a few items on the agenda (all food-related, of course!).  Number 1 was Nan’s Great Sponge Bake-Off…our Nan was the BEST sponge maker ever.  There was always a sponge cake to finish off a meal and they were highly spoken of.  So, in memory of Nan’s sponge we issued a challenge to anyone who wanted to enter the comp!

Being Nan’s only daughter, Aunty Wanda was in charge of picking the winning sponge…and Becky was the (*ahem* lucky…) winner!  We couldn’t help but think of Nan having a chuckle and loving watching us get all excited about re-creating her perfect sponge!  

The second important item was Aunty Wanda’s Jelly Bags.  My Dad is constantly asking us to cook up some Jelly Bags for him – apparently a delicious dessert that Nan also used to make, but we had never tried so didn’t know what he was talking about.  Luckily Aunty Wanda remembered them and cooked them up for us, basically they are a pancake-shaped thin sponge cake that is cooked then rolled up into a cone and filled with cream and jelly.  Here is Aunty Wanda sporting one of Nan’s old “festive” tshirts!

Aside from a lot of eating (gotta love Christmas feasts!) there was also a bit of cousin bug catching…

 Little cousins playing…

 Chatting…

 Music making…

 And more chatting, eating and cricket playing…

But most important of all, it was the beginning of grasping hold of old traditions and adding some new and remembering and honouring our family roots.

I’m starting to feel as though we are racing against the clock at the moment.  We have a few big events coming up over the next few months and I feel like I don’t have a lot of time to do all of the things that I want to!  

Australian Quilt Market is two weeks away.  Thankfully I’m feeling prepared for that, I have two new patterns ready to release which I’m sure will come in very handy for you this Summer.  While I’m in Melbourne for AQM, I am throwing a Bridal Shower for my beautiful sister-in-law who lives in Melbourne.  We only decided to do it about a week ago so I need to get myself organised with games, entertainment and food for that and hope that her friends (whom I have never met!) don’t think I’m a total loser!!!  It’s much easier planning a shower when you know most of the people who are going to be there!

Two weeks after I get home from AQM we are all flying off to New Zealand to spend the festive season with my in-laws.  We are all soooo excited (especially the kids!)…I haven’t been to NZ since I was a little girl and Jaron was born in NZ and most of his family live there still so we will have a lot of catching up to do with family members and visiting places which are special to him.  We were planning on staying in NZ for 2 weeks, then my sister-in-law and her fiance announced their wedding to be held in January in Melbourne so decided to stay in NZ for a bit longer and stop in Melbourne on the way home for the wedding.  So we will be away for 4 weeks…I’m sure we will be busy little beavers the whole time but I’m already preparing myself with things to do in case I start to get itchy feet from sitting still for so long!  Today I made a Countdown to New Zealand poster for the kids to cross off every day…

 

 

Lil decided that she might go for a quick dip…and changed her mind when she dipped her toes in the freezing cold water!!

 

 

Tommy started to occasionally string two words together this week!  Alleluia!  He is 2 1/2 now and still not speaking well at all.  Funny how we can totally understand everything he is saying (or trying to say) though as we are so accustomed to his way of communicating – need to make a more conscious effort to help him along though.  He still seems like such a baby to us and just doesn’t feel like we should be celebrating his third birthday in 6 short months!