7canzers

Kyle!  Show these Canucks how it’s done.  I was commenting to Kyle that Canadian’s don’t know how to do bombs.  We decided it was NZ’s island culture that fosters this skill 🙂

I have to pinch myself every now again to remind myself that we live here in this gorgeous place.  Just amazing.  And I love when we get to share it with others, particularly friends and family from NZ.  We are trying to give our good friends, Kyle and Bevan a 2 day taste of our life here.  We are doing as much swimming as possible coz it’s crazy hot.  And well, swimming is just good.

Back home, and mobbed

Our magical room with a view.  Oh starry starry night.

We don’t get sunsets, living in a valley, surrounded by mountains.  So it always feels like a bit of a treat when we are away to get a gorgeous display like this. Happy Canada Day 🙂

I like flowers.  I like taking pictures of flowers 🙂

A new camping adventure

…..he was not impressed about having to go to bed, and he was giving me the morbid face out the window of the trailer!

Wahoo.  Today the kids finished school.  It concluded with an award ceremony for the grade 4-6 kids.  I went along having been forewarned by the school that the girls were getting awards. Parenting has been very hard and demoralizing for me over the last couple of years.  I thought it would be easier with the kids being older, and I thought I would be better at it.  Both have proved to be untrue in my case.  So because of that it has been hard for me to be a ‘proud’ Mum.  I just feel completely rubbish at parenting.  But today was a rare glimpse of encouragement for me, that maybe something that we are teaching them is sinking in.

Neika’s teacher was describing the qualities of the child who she was awarding the grade 4 citizenship prize to.  I was a bit confused because I knew Neika was getting an award, and this was the last one for her class.  It didn’t sound like Neika to me!!  But it was!  She is helpful, kind, hardworking, attentive, inclusive and all-round has excellent character.  I’m not typing this to be proud, but because God gives me yet another glimpse that it’s not about me…..that he works on us each individually and makes us what he wills, and that is oh-so-encouraging when I feel so demoralized about the part I play in this household.

Sequoia missed out on her class citizenship prize by a whisker, but achieved an academic excellence award.  I am so happy that this quiet, hard worker’s effort paid off for her.

And then without further ado, we went camping – straight from school.  Even though Fernie Provincial Park is probably only 1km from our house as the crow flies, it is a world away.  It was fun to spend a couple of days away, hanging with our friends, riding our bikes, and escaping the HEAT in the creek.