Or so I’m told….

With being caught up with our trip to the States, I haven’t given much thought to Christmas. Then, we returned back to Australia, and it was the first day of summer that week. Last week was Isla’s last day of school before summer break. It feels like June, not December. I’m completely confused… It’s weird seeing palm trees with Christmas decorations.  But the neighbor’s gigantic Santa Claus has helped provide a “subtle” reminder that it is Christmas…

It is still colder than I expected it to be this time of year. (unusually cold we’ve been told) We are getting weather in the 70s now, so we did decide to brave a cold swim in the pool. Since it doesn’t get cold enough to close pools down for the winter here, we’ve been looking at the beautiful blue water yearning of summer since we arrived back in May.

As I mentioned before, Isla had some final activities to close the end of the school year. One was a special project that she was involved in called “The Monster in the Cave”. Her and four other classmates worked with their drama teacher to write, create props and act out the story. Last week, we went to school for them to debut their work for their other classmates and parents. Here they are taking a bow…

It was really special.  Click here to watch the video. If you don’t want to watch the entire thing, it’s worth listening to a little to hear the Aussie accents of the other children.

Isla also had her Christmas concert at school. Quite cute and funny as you can expect.

We are trying to get into the Christmas spirit, but I didn’t ship our Christmas decorations here. I found that I never used them in France because we didn’t spend Christmas there. But now that the kids understand Christmas and we don’t have decorations, I did get some Christmas balls (or as Greyson kept calling them “snowballs”) to decorate the trees around our fence. That’s as close to a Christmas tree as we are getting this year since we are traveling.

We are going to have to leave a note for Santa to find us in a motorhome traveling through New Zealand. I conjured up this idea and somehow convinced Brent that it would be a good idea. After almost 3 weeks in a confined space, I’ll let you know! But, I couldn’t decide on just one place to stay so I thought this would be the best way to see the country. We fly into Christchurch and spend about 10 days traveling the South Island, then take the ferry to the North Island and spend about a week traveling north and fly out of Auckland.

Some nights will be spent as “freedom” camping or just pulling into places that you are allowed to stay, and some nights, we’ll stay in actual campgrounds. Here is where we are spending our first night- pulling in along side Lake Pukaki and overlooking Mount Cook.

Photo credit

We will have very limited cell service/WIFI, so I probably won’t post pictures until after the New Year.

In the meantime… Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!