Entries Tagged 'Urban family' ↓

Had a wonderful wonderful evening on Mt Vic last night with Sara, Lucy & Jif to say farewell and toast to new adventures. Quite a perfect spot really, overlooking the airport. Poor old Jif is being left behind but the rest of us were getting high on bubbles and pizza and looking ahead to our new lives in Sydney (for them starting today and lasting forEVER) and ours in New York, shorter, but starting next week!

We’ll miss you guys!

Had a lovely afternoon playing Top Models at the beach with a proper photographer taking family photos this weekend – everyone was together for Pen’s birthday and our gift to her was some family photos seeing as it’s not often these days that we’re all together, kids and all. Here’s one of my favourites and you can see more on Flickr.

The boys also recreated a scene with the 3 of them wearing matching yellow t-shirts with their names on them when they were (as best we can work out) 10, 8 & 3 which was hilarious and went down well. Trying to get Craig to wear his t-shirt into work but he’s not keen, apparently yellow is not his colour!

Happy Birthday Pen! xo

Great to have the in-laws visit the parents in Awakeri over the summer break – sounds like a good time was had by all with great views, ice-creams and stories.

Finally had the constant rain since 2am this morning that the Bay of Plenty desperately needs. Family are busying themselves with rainy day activities.

My Mother the pyromaniac

The Mister is making raspberry jam

The niece is making jewellery under the supervision of Father

While we’re enjoying what passes for summer in Wellington (oh the wind), Mia and Holly are all smiles in the snow in Chicago.

Twitter made Christmas interesting this year – loads of people spending time with family but still all on Twitter airing their lack of enjoyment of family tensions to their online friends and followers. And from all over the world so we all had a kind of international Christmas! Glad to say no tensions in our day – a few repeated conversations and kids being chided – but that’s pretty normal stuff. It was also truly special to spend some time in our own home on Christmas Day with friends and their family from overseas that we’d never met.

We started out at the beach house with a mountain of gifts for the kids

Happy niece #1 – got to see the mysterious beados that’d we’d searched long and hard for – they were at hit and the gift that Amy chose to play with straight away!

Home at lunchtime to start preparing for guests, with a quick sandwich lunch under the tree & some gifts from Mother & Father as we didn’t get to see them this Christmas

Enjoyed receiving photos from Father, documenting their very sunny Bay of Plenty Christmas Day – here he is in their vegetable garden (something they now have since retiring!) picking peas for Christmas dinner

Here’s Ryan who we just met that day (Sara’s brother) being put to work in the kitchen already

Lovely happy Christmas dinner with the urban family and actually we didn’t provide much of the food in the end – our guests came laden and it was wonderful! I can’t stop staring at this photo – to me it’s a perfect picture and we really did spend the afternoon and evening eating and smiling (our fridge is bulging with left-overs)

Happy niece #2 – then right on cue at bedtime I received a picture text from my sister of Georgia in her Christmas pjs – she loves them, she (& everyone) was really impressed that I’d sewn them and they fit!

And thanks to my Secret Santa for excellent gifts – Patricia Cornwell novel, Williams & Sonoma voucher (to spend in America yipeeeee!) & Obama paper dolls

Also got this completely unexpected and fabulous luggage tag for our travels from Lucy (probably a more polite thing than I’d say so useful to have it written on a tag!)

Christmas 2009 was great.

The spinach lasagne & white chocolate rocky road were very well received this evening.

Now lots of rustling as grandparents get out bags & bags (& bags) of presents! Almost spilling out in front of the milk & pinky bar & gingernut the kids have left out for Santa!

Just watched a fabulous sunset.

Had a nice day getting into the Christmas spirit yesterday. Lots of shopping at Moore Wilson’s stocking up for Christmas Eve/Christmas Day and then a coffee and Christmas mince pie afternoon tea in the park.

Then off  to my first Christmas carol evening in, I think, ever! Family and friends gathered to sing, yep even me although The Mister was convinced I was going to embarass him with my off-key “sommmmme-thing-or-oooooooother” because apparently I never know the words!

The kids were pretty cute too – here they are all lined up for the New Zealand  version of ‘12 Days of Christmas’.

Hope we’re invited back next year.

Thanksgiving Dinner was great – everything worked out perfectly with the food and timing, didn’t find a dish of stuffing left in the oven later, or forgotten Christmas fruit mince pies in the pantry, there was plenty of turkey and people said the food was lovely and stayed late laughing and talking. It was everything we could’ve hoped for.

But man it was a very very long full day on our feet cooking!

Grating one of the many oranges for The Mister’s (via Mother) stuffing.

Santa’s Little Helper with his turkey.

Pre-dinner chatter.

The marae pot of mashed potatoes (and I say marae pot because as a kid every time we stayed on a marae there were always massive pots in the kitchen used for boiling mountains of potatoes, and we always had to help with the dishes …). And there in the background is the few recipes we needed and when I was getting them out in the morning I realised the are all our own, not from books, well, when I say ‘own’ I mean Mother’s really!!

Lining up for dinner (we now have too many in our urban family to fit around our table and instead of adding into the schedule having to source an extra table and chairs we decided to try dinner on our knees).

Boys enjoying their dinner.

Yum – pie time!

I realied at the end of the evening I didn’t get any photos of our amazing table of food!

Ooops caught in my Christmas PJs finishing up the dishes this morning.

Such a great spring day to get out for some air so we had a pastry and coffee from The Garage in the park across the road.

And so the Christmas season starts in earnest! The tree is up and it might be time to start so Christmas shopping and baking.

And we’re off – made the list of jobs and timetable over breakfast (free this morning because Gotham said we’re such great customers! YAY!) and the poppin’ cranberries are on the stove for the cranberry sauce. And what a dreadful wet, windy, wintry day – good to be inside cooking.