Nelson Family

Steve comes from a reasonable size family, he is the youngest of 4.
His sister who is 5 years older than him lives in Wellington, about 6 hours drive away. His next brother, 6 years older, lives up north about 4 hours drive away and then he has his big brother, who is 7 years older!

His big brother lives in Nelson with his wife and they have 3 children. They have lived there for the past 20 odd years, so Nelson is their home.


Steve's brother Ken with granddaughter Kayla and boys

Their 3 children are not little anymore, Sarah the youngest is 28 (one getting married) and she has 2 brothers  Craig 30 and Gareth 31.

Craig and the boys

Craig, Gareth and boys

 These are of course the boy's cousins, the boys love the fact that they have cousins so much older. It was never planned for there to be so much difference between ages but Steve's brother had his kids when he was in his 20's and then Steve finally had his kids when he was in his early 40's so turned into quite an age gap.
Gareth, the oldest, is actually a father himself and has a 3yr old daughter and a 6week old son, so the boys had fun playing with Kayla for the weekend and looking out for her at the wedding.

Me, well that now means I am an Aunty, a young Aunty I may add, seeing as Gareth is only 10 years younger than me!

But with him now having children it also makes me a Great Aunty and oh how I played on this big time at the weekend, it got me lots of hugs and snuggles with Dylan (6wks old).

Kayla (3yrs old)

Kayla and Alex, her new big friend

Dylan (6 weeks)

It was such fun to laugh along with Sarah, Craig and Gareth and then remind them that I was their Aunty and that they had to behave, we all got on really well and it was a lovely way to develope a relationship with people you are just getting to know. Feel like I have cemented my status with them nicely now, which also cements their relationship with Steve (their Uncle) a little better.

Nelson

Last weekend we went to a family wedding in Nelson.
Nelson is situated on the top of the South Island in NZ and manages to catch quite a few rays of sunlight during the day.
It is a popular tourist destination and is gorgeous with views over the bays like none I have ever seen before.
It has a huge arts culture and has a lot to showcase.

I have been there a few times in my time in New Zealand, but did just realise that the last time was 7 years ago, so do not remember too much.

The boys were well excited about going on a plane or 2 or 4, seeing as we had to fly from Hamilton to Wellington (1 hour) and then change to take the next little hop skip and a jump to Nelson (30 mins).
It had been 4 years since they last went on a plane, so very intrigued.

Mt Taranaki so clearly seen, which is very unusual, so such a lucky sight

The West coast of New Zealand

The visit for the weekend was for the wedding but also an oppotunity to catch up with Steve's brother and family. Lots of pictures to show so will post more on that side of things in another post.

Happy Birthday

To me

Party Time

As I mentioned here, I have finished my study for the year.
The party could start as soon as I received my result......

Let the party begin I got my result....70% which gives me an overall garde of B+ for this paper. Along with the B+ I got on the first paper then I am way happy and quite satisfied with that thank you very much.

Summer here I come.....!

English Language

The joys of sentences! Yea right.
Steve and I are suddenly having a crash course in the English language and the full use of it....mainly with regards to sentences.
Did you know there are so many different types of sentences?

• Simple
• Compound
• Conjunctioned

And suddenly we have to be able to explain to an 8 yr old what this means again because he can't remember from school!
Luckily for us we have the power of being an English Major being a parent with the internet and Google.

We also have to remember Verbs, Nouns, Adjectives and how they work, what they do and then just to confuse things we, not Ben, start discussing over whether or not the noun we are thinking of is a proper noun or not just to confuse both of us even further!

I last did this type of English work at school and I left there in 1987!

The joys of parenting ........... may it go on for ever!

Couldn't Resist

Today as this post is posted, as I just couldn't resist, at 11.11am then if you shortened it, it would read like this....

11.11 on 11/11/11

Wonder if somewhere in the world someone now has that as their birthday date and time?

When Can You Not be Guilty?

How on earth can anyone who has been stopped and breathalised then go on to plead "Not Guilty" in court?

Surely if you have been stopped and blow a high reading then you are pretty much guilty!

Don't worry I know of no one who this has happened too but I heard it on the radio that someone pleaded "Not Guilty" to a DUI charge even after being stopped and caught!!

November 10 Things

10 things from the last month

1. The sleeps left until we fly to Nelson for a family wedding
2. The number of times I have seen the doctor in the last week! Conjunctivitus is not fun!
3. The hours of overtime I put in at work 2 days ago, although I did get the time back.
4. Number of postcards I sent this week for postcrossing
5. x this by 4 to get the Gb we now have per month from our broadband provider! They just keep increasing our amount for no extra charge. We are not complaining.
6. The age in weeks of our new great nephew who we meet for the first time this upcoming weekend
7. "Days" is an improvisation show about stuff happening in the news on tv and we are seeing their live national tour at the end of the month.
8. Sleeps until my birthday
9. Take this number away from #10
10. x this by 5, then minus #9 and that is my age next week!

Have a great month

More on Snail Mail

At the beginning of October I joined in the fun of sending snail mail every week.
I have been good so far and successfully sent something each week. Sometimes it has just been a birthday card to a friend or relative, although I did write a letter the other week and send that off.

Whilst searching the web for something at the end of October I came across this site Postcrossing.
It is a website where you register with them and then they give you an address to send a postcard to. In return your name and address gets given to someone somewhere in the world and a postcard will get sent to you.
Here is what Wikipedia is saying about it.
They even have a Facebook page.

So I joined up, and have even sent my first postcard from New Zealand to China. It took 17 days to arrive and travelled 9,350km to get there. I know cause the website tells me so!
I currently have postcards on their way to:

1. Finland 16,426km away
2. Russia 16,512km away
3. Germany 18,424km away
4. Korea 9,697km away

When you get given an address you also get given a code, this code is then written on the card and when the card is received the receiver registers the code on the website thus letting you and the website know the card has arrived.
That is how they are able to say how long it took to get there, although this is calculated from the day you request the address to the day when they register it, so if you accidently take 5 days before you send it off, and they then take a couple of days to register it then it will not be an acurate time frame but who's counting!

It is a slow process but if you have kids who want to receive postcards from around the world and you don't mind spending a couple of $$ each week (postcard = 70c or $1 and stamp = $1.90 so about $2.60 for each postcard to currently send) then you could potentially have quite a collection after a while.
Would be great for a class to do for a school year.

These are the postcards I have got to send, nice simple scenes of New Zealand and the surrounding town where I live. This seems to be what people write in their bio about what they want to receive.

I have just written a few lines on the back about New Zealand and anything else I can think to write at the time.
I will let you all know when I receive my first one and where it came from.

Funtimes

At the weekend when we visited the scarecrows they had a table set up with boards so you could take your own fun pictures.
So my family happily obliged for me.

I am thankful for modern technology that allowed me to have some fun pictures of my wonderful family and to me for having a steady hand whilst doing a close up shot of them getting these great pictures.

Scarecrows

At this time of year the local gardens does a scarecrow day.
Sometime prior, I must find out when, they make a call for scarecrows to go on display and be judged in several different catagories.
By chance I heard this on the radio so decided we would have a quick visit to view the scarecrows.
What follows is a picture album of some (yes some) of the wonderful scarecrows we saw around the gardens. Some were acting as guides to the main event. The ones for voting on all had numbers.

The one Alex loved

My favorite

My 2nd favorite

The one Ben loved

Unfortunately it rained and so we wandered around with umbrellas looking at them all and voting on our paper to say which one we liked in each catagory and which one should be overal winner.

Unfortunately due to the weather, we didn't stick around for the big unvaling of who won.

This trip around the gardens made me think of harvest time. We sadly do not celebrate harvest thanksgiving here in NZ, well they may in the churches but the school don't, the other thing to consider is the fact that our harvest thanksgiving would fall about April time as summer has ended and autumn is in full bloom then.

So for today I am thankful to all the creative people out there who were prepared to create and showcase their wonderful abilities.