Entries Tagged 'Urban family' ↓

Meet Vernon everyone – the newest member of our Blenheim urban family!

Got a text yesterday while we were out having coffee with this photo and the message “Meet Vernon, perhaps you could come and visit him?” – was very excited! Obviously I knew who the text was from but I didn’t tell The Mister, just showed him the photo and asked him to guess (the floor is a giveaway for us) but his first horrified comment was “oh no, Tess hasn’t died has she?” The plan was for cats after the dogs had gone to doggie heaven but as we’ve since discovered, Vernon is such a lovely, placid family cat abandoned at the SPCA that they’re not worried about having a dog and cat at the same time. So far all is well. And Vernon slept on Aidan’s bed last night so he’s right at home already – he knows who the boss of that house is!

Now off to find the next cheap flights to get down there and meet him!

It was great to see Aidan again after 6 months – my first comment when I saw him was “he’s huge!” He’s becoming a real boy now. When we left he wasn’t saying anything very understandable, maybe “mummummum” and “Tessssssssss” (the dog). Now, 6 months later at 2 and a half, the stories we’ve heard from his parents and the mumblings we’d heard in the background over Skype are in fact true – he speaks in pretty full and quite understandable sentences. The most used sentence at the weekend: “Where’s Craig?” (guess who was Mister Popular?!) I was called “Taffy” most of the weekend but slightly better pronunciation by the time we left had me as “Coffey”. He also did an excellent rendition of “GO YANKEEEEES!” that he’d been coaxed to practice in the weeks leading up to our arrival which was pretty tear jerking (for The Mister!)

He has quite a determined mind of his own now and does everything a little boy should – rides around the garden on his bike bashing into neatly trimmed lavender, outdoor furniture and fathers; is mad on cars (toy ones and real ones) especially emergency vehicles; can do everything for himself including pushing the buggy, ‘making the coffee’ (any old excuse to climb on the bench and get water everywhere!), keeping you informed about what the neighbours are up to and other general boyish activities like farting proudly, leaving clothes all over the doorstep, being an idiot in front of the camera and getting furious when something doesn’t go to his liking!

This is one of my favorite photos from this trip – apart from the fact he’s wearing the vest I knitted him, he’s just taking a break in a suitcase snacking on a piece of frozen bread!

Starting to come out the other side of my man flu thankfully – have had to lay pretty low in Blenheim this weekend. However this afternoon I got out for a bit of a slow walk

then sat on the sunny steps at Dean & Steph’s for afternoon tea (got Steph to sit still enough for the once-every-5-years photo!)

while Aidan played with the hose

Love this photo taken of the 4 of us outside Customs Brew Bar yesterday after a morning sampling coffee just before Bev and Dan got back on the plane home to San Francisco.

(By the way, you’ll have noticed that we’ve switched to larger photos on the blog now – if this presents a problem (display, speed or otherwise) for anyone, please let me know.)

Had 2 sets of friend in town this week requiring 2 dinner parties mid-week. By the end of the week I was glad to take a rest from meat! We had an ‘American’ theme with Sara seeing as we hadn’t seen her in a while and hadn’t given her a New York debrief so had burgers

and Bev brought and cooked some steak to go with the kumara & feta salad that Dan requested for old time’s sake.

It was great to get around the dining room table with them again, and they’ve now all gone back home overseas.

Following true to our offer to take ingredients over to Cousin Grant’s flash kitchen to cook him dinner, we shopped, prepped and transported food, tinfoil, apron, salt, napkins and oil (it’s a New York bachelor pad after all) over to his apartment in Soho. He was away in London for the weekend so we had to let ourselves in and work out how to use the oven and locate dishes so that dinner would be on the table when he arrived back that night.

This presented the perfect opportunity for The Mister to try pulled pork. We’d got into a long conversation with a chef at Williams & Sonoma (kitchen store) a few weeks ago about it after going to the Madison Square BBQ Block Party and after that and the pulled pork he always orders at Morrell’s he was really wanting to try it.

So when Cousin Grant said he loved pulled pork there was no holding us back.

In a very cool cooking 2.0 experience, The Mister tweeted @EatMeaty – the butcher in Chelsea Market and asked if they had pork for making pulled pork and any advice. They responded and expected our visit on Sunday morning. Very cool.

It was great hanging out at Cousin Grant’s and using his kitchen – his place has central air (we were there one of the days of the heatwave when it was 39 degrees C outside), extremely sharp knives and a massive gas oven. Eventually we found the light switches, a casserole dish and some piggy salt & pepper shakers (felt kind of cruel putting them on the table but they were orange), and luckily we took a few other supplies of our own because everything I didn’t think he’d have, he didn’t!

We put the pork in the oven for 4 hours and enjoyed a nice cool quiet afternoon working.

The house smelled great! And Cousin Grant said so when he burst through the door right on dinner time. We toasted the family gathering with champagne, assembled the burgers with pulled pork and some caramelised onions I’d made the previous day and coleslaw I’d made that afternoon and sat down to an extremely delicious family dinner.

So now we have to set about finding BBQ sauce (not something you’d normally find in our pantry) and other tomato-based basting ingredients to try it at home ourselves. Perhaps our Thanksgiving Dinner this year will be a burger feast!

Had a wonderful coffee catch-up with cousin out-law Charlotte today. I haven’t seen her in over 10 years and she’s now settled in New York with a family. Actually I think we only met and talked that once all that time ago but it was like catching up with an old friend – such a shame that we discovered her here when we’re just about to head home! However, great to know another semi-permanent here for when we come back!

My Swiss Friend is on her way right now! Only a couple more hours and she lands!!

It’s been touch and go all week whether she’d be able to come because of the volcanic ash over Europe but the skies cleared enough for her to take off. Apparently some concern she might not be able to get back due to a second cloud heading for Switzerland so we’ll see. So a weekend of coffees, shops, Chelsea Market and wandering is coming up … yes everyone is shown the same things but we love it!

Update: thanks to The Mister’s comment when he saw this just now I feel that I should explain that the image is taken exactly as was from the Flight Tracker page on the JFK website. The flight path line is not stunted due to my below average Photoshop skills, it’s like that because “Flight Tracker cannot guarantee the path the aircraft took outside of US airspace” so I’m guessing where the line starts is about where she entered that airspace. Hrummph

He’s getting quite chatty now according to stories and imitations from his parents plus the occasional ‘word’ beyond “ooooo” that he’s said to me on Skype. He’s almost there with orange, although it comes out as a sing-songy “awREEEnge”. Also apparently he’s mastered “Craig” but Catherine is a bit difficult, he tries, then just resorts to “peeeeple” – ah, relegated to one of many for a bit longer yet.

Here he is looking pretty grown up in the orange vest I knitted him,

and even more grown up now sleeping in a big bed, vest and all!

We’re had our first visitors – mother & father-in-law for 3 days. And what a busy 3 days! The sun thankfully came out to give days of about 26 degrees, and we walked and walked and walked everywhere with a few spins on the subway. Mother-in-law had a list of things to see and we crossed them all off. Our sofa bed seemed to work out alright and luckily they’re early risers so the sun blasting into the lounge at 6.30am wasn’t too much of a problem!

In brief, and there are loads of photos on Flickr:

Day 1 – Soho, Chinatown, Financial District, Battery Park, Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Park, takeaways and first game for the Yankees on telly.

Day 2 – Chelsea Market, Central Park, 5th Avenue, Rockefeller Centre (including trip to the top), dinner at Morrell’s.

Day 3 – A wander over to Macy’s and back before they left for the airport at lunchtime.