feijoas

I've been a blogging slacker lately.  Please forgive the silence.  We are doing well and hanging on to warm days of Fall while our friends in the north are hoping for Spring to start the defrost.

We are settled into our new house.  I keep meaning to take photos but I can't seem to keep the house clean long enough for blog photos.

One thing the kids and I are really enjoying about our new house is a large feijoa tree that is bearing a lot of fruit.  I'd never heard of feijoas before moving to New Zealand.  The fruit is related to the guava and tastes like a mixture of guava and pineapple.  We have enjoyed eating them and sharing them with friends and neighbors.

Max and Maya sitting on the back deck with the Feijoa tree in the background on the left.

Please excuse the partial nudity.  We are still working toilet training and spending time in the nude seems to help.  :)

getting ready for a kiwi christmas

This is our second Christmas in New Zealand.  In January we will have been here for two years. While Christmas still brings quite a bit of nostalgia this I am also feeling the love of being a Kiwi...so here are a couple of the joys of being in New Zealand this Christmas...

This is a weta.  They are very big insects that can be found here in New Zealand.  This one Max picked up our garden (yard) and almost brought into the house.  Being a good Kiwi child Max was excited to find this huge bug rather than being scared.

We moved into our current home last February so we missed the pretty red flowers on our feijoa tree, which will produce delicious fruit in a couple of months. These trees are related to pohutukawa trees, which are in glorious bloom all over New Zealand.   

 Other than the last week of rain we have enjoyed some very nice, mild weather.  Our landlord recently fenced our entire yard meaning that Max and Maya have created their own outdoor world, with a rain forest, jungle, mountain.  In preparation for a camping trip they made beds and stayed outside reading for hours.

We've set up our Christmas tree again this year.  It gets re-decorated every couple of days by the kids which is something I remember doing when I was little.

We were hoping to put together a Christmas card this year....I love getting Christmas cards, but I don't think I have ever managed to actually send one out.  Of all years, living in New Zealand with a new baby I thought this should be the year that it finally happens.  Have you ever tried to take family photos with a 3 year old?  Imagine having two of those wiggly 3 year olds, then add a baby (and a sleepless night), top it off with a freak wind storm at the beach.  Needless to say the photo shot ended with four out of the five of us crying.  I'll let you guess who non-crier was.  I'm still hoping to send out a Christmas card (or at least email out a newsletter), but it is very unlikely to happen before Christmas, so if I don't get to it please know that I wish you all a very happy Christmas.