First "professional" performance.

Alana has been invited to play with her Oboe teacher when he accompanies Jonathan Lemalu later this year. She gets a travel allowance, food, accommodation and an appearance fee; all this at the ripe old age of 14. We're all really looking forward to it and the whole family will travel to enjoy the occasion.

Eye Eye

Over the weekend Alana was in Twizel for rock climbing competitions and on Sunday she won a spot prize – a whole Mt Cook Salmon. By the time she got home it had started to defrost, so tonight we baked it and enjoyed every morsel – what a treat.

After tea, Sam started dissecting the salmon, looking at the spine and then freaking Danielle out by placing the salmons eye on her plate. Such comments as “we’re keeping an eye on you” were heard while Danielle squealed with disgust. Sam then dissected the eye, suggesting that he might glue the other eye to Danielle’s door. Blair then dared Sam to do a ‘Fear Factor’ challenge and eat the eye. As you can imagine, there were varied reactions and squawks. Blair upped the challenge by offering Sam $10 for a successful chew and swallow of the eye. Considering Sam is a food texturephobe we thought we were pretty safe in our dares. But to our complete surprise, Sam popped that little eye in, gave it a decent chew and down it went!!!!!!

So you never know what your kids will do!

Out of the mouths of babes

For a few months now Paige had had a wee imaginary friend called, "Bubby." Where ever Paige goes and whatever she does Bubby does as well.

When Ann took Danielle to Alexandra for camp Bubby went. Unfortunately Bubby fell out of the car and had to be scooped up in Ettrick on their way back through!

Tonight after tucking Paige in she exclaimed that Bubby wasn't in bed! "Yes she is" I replied I saw her hop in before you got in. We prayed and then I tickled Paige, managing to slip my hands out, wiggling my fingers and saying, "that must have been Bubby."

Paige looked me straight in the eyes and said with the most amused grin on her face, "Daddy, Bubby's not real!" I was totally flawed by this comment for I was convinced Paige believed she, Bubby, was real. 

Which is just as well because apparently Ann ran over her in the car earlier this week.

A dogs life

Young Adults (YA) Lunch

Many months ago now I volunteered us to host a lunch for our YA from church.

Some of the reasons for these is to encourage YA to build relationship with each other, for those in the church to serve the YA group by ministering in this way and get to know the YA better. Also, it is to provide a positive environment in which to encourage YA to keep the sabbath rather than just going home to study.

While 3 soups, 2 curries, 4 lots of rice, oodles of bread, rolls, fruit and baking was a massive effort it was worth it. As a family we enjoyed having 40 YA over. They ate everything like hungry locusts. Our kids got right into it and Sam even baked a cake to help.

The touch rugby game over in the back park was awesome and a highlight for Sam, Alana & Oscar too!!

At one point I said to Ann, "now that we know what's involved we could do another one next year." Thwack, I didn't see it coming as Ann swatted me; "what do you mean next year, you signed us up for two this year!" Whoops!!

New ladder unusable

A few weeks ago we bought a new ladder, Ann ran over the old one! One of those new fang dangled jobs that contorts into a gazillion different ladders, "all for the low, low price of ..." ok so you get the idea. Well it took so long for me to get round to opening the box that Ann decided to assemble it without me as she had given up waiting. All good as Ann was always better at flat pack furniture than me. The snag was little two year old hands stealing the bolts and "misplacing" them. We looked everywhere and in the end, despite them being a custom bolt, I went to M10 to replace them. On my way home, delighted at my prowess at finding the bolts, washers and lock nuts that, while not exactly the same, would do the job just nicely The thought did occur to me, "what's the bet we find them in the next day or two." Anyway, once home I got the folding contraptable assembled with a minimum of fuss and proudly left it up for Ann to duly admire. Instead all heard was a call to "come here." As I was in the middle of wiring in a bank of four new replacement kitchen light switches I couldn't. Instead I received the following showing what we had searched for, for days, safely stowed by Paige in the very item we were trying to assemble!!

Danielle returns home

Danielle has had the last week at Roxburgh Health Camp, she absolutely loved her time there. The swimming - 4 hours in the pool, the fashion show where she got to dress up as a Cheer Leader were favourites. Apparently the food was better this time too.

One very excited, very tired and glad to be home wee girl!