Christmas Wrap-up

 Well, Father Christmas arrived as anticipated and filled the stockings I had the foresight to bring from Canada!  The boys got scooters and bicycles from us, Lego and Transformers from Santa and swingball (pole tennis) for each other, and many of their favourite edible treats - even hokey pokey ice cream and Calippo popsicles (called ice blocks here) were left in our freezer!  

  A calmer affair at Nana & Poppa's . . .

Christmas dinner! YUM!  

 Boys enjoying their scooters . . .

but it was such a hot day that they resorted to playing in buckets full of water by late afternoon!  (Not many kiwis have backyard swimming pools)

So, we headed to the beach!  (OK it was actually 2 days later, but the story flows this way.  Boxing Day consisted of groceries and Renee working, so we'll just skip it!)

As you can see, the boys are putting their engineering talents to good work  . . . (yes, I do mean the tallest boys in the bunch, those with actual engineering degrees!)

We collected fresh pipi (shellfish) for Nana to boil up in a pot for all to try.
 

Now some of you are thinking:  it's all play over here and no work . . . and, well, you are mostly right, but we do manage to sneak in some heavy labour occasionally.  We carried and stacked most of Kim & Luke's 8 cubic meters of firewood for their log burner . . . and we spent an inordinate amount of time cutting up shoestring french fries into little cubes to make my hashbrown casserole for Christmas morning (you NOCC pot luck people will know what I'm talking about!) as you cannot buy small hashbrowns here, only large patties.  Who knew??
 

 So, when we're not working . . . we're doing other cool stuff:

 

YES, even ice skating in the middle of summer on a temporary outdoor rink!

(PS  The boys are growing up folks, but you'll still recognize them.  Thanks for the t-ball caps, Coach Ryan, they've been protecting the boys' heads from the sun for 4 months straight now!)