And the rain came down ......

We set off for Auckland on a sunny-ish Sunday afternoon, looking forward to time seeing some of the sights of the big city with our good friends, Richard and Vanessa. By the time we'd completed the two and a half hour drive, the clouds had drawn in and by the middle of the night, it was bucketing down.  And now, a week later, it's bucketing down again.

We spent our time in Auckland chatting, drinking coffee in coffee shops in shopping malls, and going on an intrepid adventure on State Highway 1 to the Kauri Museum near Dargaville about two and a half hours north of Auckland.  The rain lifted briefly and we braved it up One Tree Hill to look over a windswept city.  It was so windy, I thought Vanessa might blow away.

Back home in Tauranga we had a brief dry morning and got all the washing dry while keeping an eye on the sky, but since then it's been pretty wet! On the news tonight we heard there had been 225mm in 2 days.  Last night Nic had to go out to a school dance and there was flooding all over the town. Some roads were closed, one of her colleagues had their house flooded up above step level.

The rain is relentless - huge downpours with wind at times and some thunder and lightning  but mostly just sheets and sheets of rain.  It feels like the sort of rain we get at home during a thunderstorm - but here it goes on and on, day after day and it doesn't end and then dry up.

Nic says it often goes on for 2 or 3 days and you just get used to it. When she moved to NZ Ray told her that it rained for 2 weeks and she was really glad that he had remembered wrong!

Emily has been a bit wild and we realised that she was suffering from cabin fever, so Nic dressed her in her "silly Billy's" which are waterproof dungarees and her rain jacket and off she went, crawling across the grass, playing with the ball and the cat. Lovely!

Rain should clear tomorrow and we hope to see some blue sky again.

Pointed hills and postboxes

My cousin Felicity is writing a series of posts all starting with letters of the alphabet. I'm not planning to go through the alphabet but a drive yesterday gave me the idea for this post and I liked the alliteration ......

This time round we are not doing any real sightseeing, but spending most of our time close to home in Tauranga, getting to see as much of Nic, Ray and of course, Emily as possible. So the sights we are seing are closer to home - when we go for a walk, when we drive out to where Pete is fishing and when we drive around be ause Em has fallen asleep in the car and needs to be given as much chance to sleep as possible.

Yesterday we drove home from Bethlehem where we had lunch by a very long and circuitous route - via a country road called Poripori Rd.  It took us deep into the countryside behind and above Tauranga where the suburbs give way to lifestyle sections ( what we would call smallholdings) and these lifestyle sections give way to farms.  We saw sheep - lots of sheep - and grazing land and orchards.  Post boxes are clustered at the end of roads, bright and plastic, ready to receive their mail from the rural mail vans. Post in the town is delivered by bicycle but out in the rural areas a post van fetches and delivers mail. Beehives, each in a different, faded color are piled on top of each other like blocks of flats, and everywhere, amongst the trees, you see the exotic looking tree ferns.

But to get to the pointy hills - this time I have been struck by the sharpness of the hills and valleys - flying from Auckland I noticed how steep and sharp the topography is. Hills have sharp edges, valleys and ridges slope suddenly down from sudden outcrops and everything looks defined. I think about the rolling hills of the Midlands and around Ixopo and I realize how much older South Africa is geologically - the hills have had time to smooth and become more rounded in a way the countryside here hasn't - this is a much newer country.

To use that awful trendy word - the New Zealand countryside is edgier than the part of South Africa where I live.

So - pointy hills and postboxes - and I look forward to more drives to see some more of them.

The end of summer

Daylight saving ended today inNew Zealand. We went to bed at the normal time, but when we woke up it was an hour later than we felt it ought to be. The clock next to our bed said the "normal" time but the cell phones had changed themselves to an hour later .

Strangely, it has suddenly got cold.  Yesterday it rained and was freezing and in the afternoon there was a sudden cold shower - they had forecast hail, but that was it - slushy rain. We slept with duvets last night for the first time and Mo, Nic and Ray's cat, was in her element - she snuggled up in bed with us and then when we got up to play with Emily, she snuggled up in Nic's bed.  The sun shone today but there was an icy wind, and when we walked around the Mount, it was quite chilly - until the exertion kicked in!

Em had freezing little feet and we had to put socks and slippers on her and went and bought her some sneakers to wear to Daycare in the mornings.

From Facebook I see that the first snow has fallen on the Berg, and talking to Kevin, we see him bundled up and chilly.  So the socks we collected for Maundy Thursday will benefit someone from Springs of Hope this winter.  Rod says there are about 10 dozen pairs, so there will be some warm feet in Sobantu.

So summer is over and we wonder what climate change will bring us this winter.

A week with Emily

We arrived at Tauranga airport just over a week ago to be met by Nic, Ray and Emily - smaller in real life than I expected her to be from seeing her on Skype, shy of us as we expected, and even more beautiful than we expected.

What a week it has been!  Emily is a delight - she has a wonderful little character all of her own - very determined, very confident, very stubborn and so loving I just want to melt when she holds her little arms up to me.

Day 1 and 2 she wasn't well and she spent most of her birthday party grizzling - especially when another babba was in her swing! Nic was chagrined, I  think - especially when she wouldn't go to sleep in her normal, relaxed way. (She still doesn't.) Our first day she stayed home with us because she had a cold - which we picked up, not being used to little ones and their germs. But despite her sniffles and her clinging to me and not wanting Granpa to hold her, we had a lovely day together.

And the days have got better and better. She's not keen on going to sleep in case she misses something, but the rest of the time she is a delight! She "talks" all the time and not just noises, real words and even sentences.  This morning I'm quite sure she told grandpa to take her to the lounge to play - the imperious forefinger pointed down the passage and she said "Bubby go there" - sure its not just my imagination.

She's developed 2 new words - Mummy, which she says with great deliberateness and such feeling, much to the delight of her mom, who melts! - and Bubby, which is what she calls her grandpa. I don't have a real name yet although she sometimes calls me Mum. Hopefully Granny will come, but grandpa is definitely Bubby.

She also needs to hear something just once to repeat and remember it - I have a picture of Winnie the Pooh on my nightie and we told her it was PoohBear. Now she whispers "Poo ba" every morning when she gets into bed with me.  But also recognizes Pooh on her stokies and swimming towel.

She's also done some more "big girl" things - her car seat now faces forward and she doesn't yell in the car any more. We had to change it around in the parking garage at the Mall because she yelled so much when we tried to put her back in to it.   She is standing up with really great balance and has taken a couple of steps.  She still finds crawling much quicker, though.  She stands up from her couch and tries to walk, but gets too excited - clapping for herself and telling us all to clap too.  She continues to enjoy gardening with her mum, but has eaten a handful of soil when mum wasn't watching. She's learnt to "high five" with Grandpa and does it to everyone - little starfish hand out and a loud "figh" when she wants us to play along. She's also had a tantrum or two when she didn't want to do things, and has become a bit of a tyrant at times - her "staff" are all ready to run around her and do her bidding though, so not much need for tantrums.

All in all, she has stolen our hearts away - a smile as she comes to play with us in our bed in the morning and that's me gone for the day!

An other 5 weeks to go thank goodness!