Marrying into a Family

Marrying the man you love is a matter of choice. But you don't get to choose the family that he comes with. Some get lucky with that. Some don't. I happen to be one of the lucky ones. I should say blessed! My husband's family are the best. I love them so much, and I'm so proud to be part of them - we are having some wonderful times with cousins, aunts, uncles, neices, nephews, even neices and nephews-in-law. I tell you - these people are great; fun to be with, and nobody's getting on anybody's nerves. Well . . . as far as I know we aren't . . . or maybe they're just not telling me! LOL!

Here are some photos from the last few days.

Lovely times around the table eating and talking.

 Fresh schnapper caught by my nephew who actually likes doing the messy bits, and doesn't mind sharing with 20 other people.

Delcicious salads.

I don't drink wine, but it is lovely to photograph!

Barbeques . . .

Beautiful nieces and my wonderful sister-in-law.

Kind Uncles who don't mind carrying around a cuddly, tired wee girl.

Cousins . . .

Beautiful niece with her little cousin. Are you allowed to have favourite nieces? She is one of my favourites.

And so are these two. Lovely, clever, creative neices.

I tell you - those sweet girls in the above photos are the cream of the crop!
And two of them are not married yet.

Big cousins who read to little cousins are amazing!
(And that is my oldest son in the background with a cast on his leg - he broke his foot - another blog for another day - but he had three 'family' doctors looking after him)!

We have done lots of talking around the table outside after dinner with candlelight.

Two of my nieces and their mother. Some of my most favourite people in the world!

Stormy Seas

I am a storm lover - even when I'm on holiday.

We are enjoying a wonderful time here at our Auckland beach house, even though the weather is stormy, we have aunts and uncles and cousins to go on walks with in the rain, share meals and to help keep the little children happy.

The weather has been wild over the weekend. But there's nothing I like more than a good old-fashioned storm.
At high tide yesterday we all walked down to the beach to watch the angry sea as it pounded on the beach and cliffs. The tide was unusually high and was crashing into the red cliffs that surround Auckland. The sediment from the cliffs turned the sea into brown. I had a few nail-biting moments when my two boys tried to see how close they could get to the waves on the boat ramp. Thankfully, with me, their Dad, uncle and aunt all calling for them  to step back, they were ok. I thought you'd like to see some of the pictures. We are hoping for sun today so everything can dry out. I did like going to sleep last night with the wind howling and rattling the doors and windows, the rain beating down on the roof and the roar of the sea pounding in our ears. I was even a little bit scared, which made it more thrilling.

Summer Doings

I have been a very bad blogger this week. Somehow life just got in the way of blogging - or should that be the other way around?
Anyway, I've been running around here like a hurricane trying to get ready to leave tomorrow for our 2 week holiday to Auckland. You almost need a holiday after getting ready for the holiday!

The hot weather continues unabatted down here in Canterbury, unless you count the very welcome day of rain yesterday, and the children have been having fun outside with water. I did have the Waimakariri Council water man call in on one of those days to remind me that there was a water shortage. He was driving by, and must have seen me out in the garden with a pitiful hose trying to get the ground damp enough to drive my bean stakes in. It was like concrete before that, and there was no way the stakes were going to go in unless I wet the earth. I'm sure if he had looked around and observed the brown, dead grass and the wilting trees and the very obvious lack of greenery he would have realised that I was probably not going over my quota. I want to callt hem the gestapo - but that might be a bit over the top, don't you think? Another day a helicopter swooped low over the house and hovered for awhile, then left. We found out later it is also the council, checking to see that household pools are fenced. But we don't have a pool! We were going to put one in when we built the house (it was on the plans), but ended up advising the council that we decided against it when it was going to cost nearly $100,000 - the fencing being most of that cost. But of course, councils being the inefficient places that they are, they probably didn't take it off their books.

Well - I didn't mean to rant about the council, but really!

I went and got my hair cut on Saturday.My hairdresser knows me well and suggested that I don't get it all layered to start with - just do it gradually. So she took a good 2 inches off the bottom - because it was in a sad state, and layered the bottom of the length of my hair. In 10 weeks I'll go back and get the next stage done, I think! Thank you all for your input. It helped me alot to make up my mind. I do want to take pride in my appearance and look the best I can when you've had four children and approaching 40! Now to just get rid of the baby fat!

We are off to Auckland tomorrow, and looking forward to catching up with family and friends. It is turning out to be a busy, busy family time - but I like that and at the beach house everyone is relaxed and there's no agenda, so it's all fun.
And for all of you who follow the netball - our niece Milly debuted in her first two games this week for the Silver Ferns!

Here are some pictures of the kids enjoying summer in the backyard.

Meredith and her best friend, Susie.

My Biggest Fear

This is pretty trivial, I warn you.
I mean, it's not like I live in Iraq or North Korea where survival would be at the top of the biggest fear list.

Instead, I have a fear of looking homely. It's terribly vain of me, I know. But I am aware as a homeschooling mother that there is a little cliche existing in the modern world that homeschooling mothers look dowdy. I'm sorry to say it - because there are plenty of very stylish homeschooling mums out there, but still that little preconception exists.

And I do my best to fight it. You know - I shave my legs and I don't wear socks with sandals, and I wear makeup and jeans and paint my toenails, and I try to stay away from the shift dresses that make you look like you're expecting baby number 25.

But I do have long hair. I actually quite like my long hair. It is my one beauty.
It doesn't have too many greys in it yet, in spite of the fact that I'm turning 40 this year, I have not yet had to dye it. I don't think I'll be going bald anytime soon. The one thing that I did inherit from my Maori ancestors was plenty of lush, thick, unruly hair.

But I have a dilemma and I don't know what to do - so there's nothing like asking a bunch of your online girlfriends whom you've never met, to help you make a beauty decision.

Tomorrow I'm going to get it cut, and I don't know whether to get it layered or not.
At the moment it is all one length. It has taken me a couple of years to get it to grow half way down my back. As I said before I inherited good hair from the Maori's, but it's naturally curly and so takes forever to grow.

I've managed to get it this long, but I'm wondering if maybe it's starting to make me look like that cliched homeschooling mum. Is it time to style it up a bit?

But if I do get it layered, will it still look good in a ponytail?

I know that this question will cause you to think deep thoughts all day long, but I would value your opinion or tales of experiences with layered hair. I have 24 hours to make a decision. That is difficult for me.

Keeping it in Perspective - Project 2011

I have a had bad week as far as getting anything done on my project. It mostly came down to maths.
Maths and me do not get on together. We could never have gotten married.

I was working on a new quilt design, but it just wasn't coming together and I was getting frustrated with it. I called in my husband to do the maths for me, and that worked for awhile, but it all came undone after a few hours when something else went wrong.

So I decided to make one of the other things I have in mind. Until I realised I didn't have the right supplies. There goes that idea! So I've taken a break from the sewing for this week. And I was beating myself up about it - wasted time and energy, and still not yet out of January and needing a break. Already!, and all that, until I came across this editorial by Tracy Barnett on the New Zealand Herald. And wow! It kind of hit me straight between the eyes. It really made me think. If you don't have time to read it, it's basically about the luxury and privilege of  making New Year's Resolutions.

I think one of the reasons it really hit home with me is because I have been to this place that she writes about in Burma, and the refugee camps on the Thai/Burmese border. When I was in highschool my family visited there and we got to meet with the persecuted christians and refugees of Burma's ugly regime. We saw the amputated legs and the poverty and the fear of living with the daily uncertainty of - not if - but when an attack will come.
I often think about those people. How they took us into their little wooden huts and fed us and talked with us and prayed with us. And the children we met - beautiful, pretty children who were so happy and cheerful in the face of such horror. I wonder where they are now?. Are they still there?And I think about the war wounds hospital and the pitiful amount of supplies that my mother had managed to round up from donors in the Auckland hospitals before we left. How we thought it was such a lot of good stuff to take. Until we emptied it out onto the hospital table and saw how meagre it was. How it was just a drop in a very large bucket.

And reading Tracy's article brought it all back to me again, in the midst of my frustration over fabric and maths and making something look good. And I realised again how blessed we are in the this country to have the choice to do as we wish. I had the choice to spend my afternoon cutting and sewing and measuring. And it doesn't really matter if the afternoon was wasted, because I'll have another afternoon tomorrow to do it all again - and here's the thing . . .

If. I. Want. To.

Democracy. It's beautiful. It's precious. Don't take it for granted.

Zumba - a family love affair

It is the year of war. War against the fast-approaching middle age arms, chin and post-baby tummy. Up until now, I think my youth, height and pregnancies have disguised a lot, but in the last year I really noticed how things were starting to get worse. I have not been blessed genetically with the skinny gene. Even if I was a size 4 in my early 20's, it only took one baby to do away with that, and then my famous lack of self-discipline just took over.

But now that the 40's are within sight, and I hear from older girlfriends that it gets harder after 40 to lose weight, I've decided that this is the year where I will reclaim my - if not my 20's body, at least the slimmer side of me that is hiding in there somewhere!

We bought Zumba late last year and it has revolutionised exercise for me. I have tried gyms, fast, regular walking, painful diets and self-denial (which lasted about 4 hours). But Zumba really is fun, and my kids LOVE it, too. It's not like exercise. And being someone who naturally hates exercise, but loves dancing it really has appeal. I did once try to get my husband to join with me and a girlfriend and her husband in a dance class, but I just got the look, if you know what I mean! But with Zumba I get the best of both worlds, and there's nothing quite like your skinny, fit, active 8 year old daughter begging to put Zumba on to get you all motivated.

The Zumba instructors are skinny, beautiful girls, but they are encouraging, in a tv kind of way.

But as I said to a girlfriend recently who borrowed my dvd's, do it by yourself to start with. Even if you are reasonably well-coordinated, Zumba is hard mentally, and hillarious physically, especially if you're a spectator watching someone try it out for the first time.
It's fast - which makes it more effective than the gym for me. I like it. I hope I can keep it up.

But this is the closest you'll ever get to seeing me do Zumba!

See a demo here:

Curls!

When you yourself are born with naturally curly hair (and spend the rest of your life wishing for straight), it's only natural to expect that one of your babies might have curls. But it took until the fourth baby to get the genuine article! There'll be no haircuts for this little sweetie for awhile. I love them!

She wasn't very happy with me right at that moment because I denied her going into the pull-out freezer and grabbing her fourth lemonade iceblock of the afternoon!

Project 2011

I am joinging in with Cate and a bunch of other inspirational women to blog about my goals for 2011 and how I'm coming along with them. It's just the right sort of thing for me, because usually I start these goals with great enthusiasm, and then they slowly but surely disappear into the mist of reality, known as life with four kids, a house to clean, places to go, food to cook, etc. You know how it is! But this is the year I will turn 40, so I'm determined to give it a good shot, and really accomplish something that doesn't involve potty training and marking school tests.

If you want to join in, just hop on over to Cate's place,
The first thing on my list is getting my online felt shop (a local version of etsy) up and running really well this year, with a well-stocked shop. I'm not giving the link here, because it's pretty much empty at the moment, apart from the personalised pillows, which I am going to take off, and although these have been reasonably lucrative for me, it is just too much work at this time of my life. I would much rather sit and sew little things in the quiet of the evenings while watching something on TV or chatting with my husband and friends, than stress myself out with the pillows. They are fun to make, but they sure take a lot of time.

So I'm giving my shop a re-vamp. I might even think about a new name for it. I have lots of inspiration, lots of ideas of things to make to put on there. It mostly involves quilts and quilting and embroidery and a little bit of sewing.

So, I'm off to a good start. Hopefully, I'll be able to follow it through to fulfillment.

Along the Hedgerows

I have been promising my daughter that I would take her for a walk one of these days. Just down to the red barn and back - that's all she wanted. But with one thing and another I haven't been able to get out. The wind has been one of those excuses - it has been intolerable of late.

But today was one of those lovely summer days. Warm, but shady with a good deal of cloud cover. It even threatened rain, so after breakfast we bundled Alice into the buggy and off we set. Here are quite a few photos from our walk out of our lane and down past the hedges, calling in on some neighbours as we went past.

A Hare that got away . . .  isn't he a Grandaddy of a Hare!

 

Is anyone familiar with that delightful children's movie, Napoleon? We know it well in our household. But I'm afraid I did laugh out loud (without meaning to), when Teddy saw this neighbourly dog (though it was barking) and called out, "Is it a wild dog?"

And I made sure there were no people passing when that same little boy declared he was busting. It's a good thing that there are tall hedges for this kind of business! And do I need to add that I think boys have it much easier than girls!

Here is a creek struggling to stay a creek in the hot weather. It is normally full and flowing and full of living things like fresh-water mussels, and eels. I hope they are surviving.

Some neighbours that we know well were out in their garden. We could hear their lamb bleating as we walked down towards their place, so they called us in for a 'cuddle with Daphne the lamb.'

Of course, I had to take a photo of their gorgeous rooster, Roger. Apparently, he is only at half his height!

There are such lovely things to look out when you go walking along the hedgerows.

And all the pretty little weedy flowers. It's such a shame that they are weeds.

I do believe this is Evening Primrose . . .

  

And there's plenty of clover around . . .

  . . . which of course means plenty of these dear little bumble bees . . .

And we spotted this pretty little bird high up in the hedge.

And I bet these well-fed cows are grateful for a cooler day.

Time to wander home. I love this gap in the hedge where we can see our neighbourhood and our house.

I hope you've enjoyed this little meander along our hedgerow, too?