So, what have I been doing for the last week and a half?

It was mostly spent with Sarah, Aimee and Jess. They arrived on Saturday (after our club charity quilt sewing session, see Helen’s blog). On Monday all of us except Terry, flew to Auckland. Our mission was to take the little girls to visit my parents and Terry’s parents. None of them had ever met Jess and the last time they saw Aimee she was about 14 months old. Jess was very excited to be flying but it was not quite so exciting for Aimee, accomplished world traveller that she, is for she remembers flying to Australia a couple of years ago when she was 2 yrs and Jess was only 3 months old. A favourite memory of that trip is little Aimee, standing in the returning residents’ queue with us as we waited for our passports to be stamped. She had taken a little notebook out of her handbag and was standing there, holding it in her hand just like everyone else who was standing in the queue with a passport in their hand! My memory of this trip will be Jess, sitting across the aisle of the little airplane, telling me in a hushed voice, eyes very big, “we flying!”

We stayed with my sister Susan in Auckland. The photo shows Aimee and Jess helping Susan play nursery rhymes on her piano. It’s a bit of a sad story. I grew up singing with my parents around the house and in the car and can keep a tune reasonably well. I started teaching my two girls to sing the same way but our son John, third in the family, has perfect pitch, and he objected so strongly to the unskilled (and somewhat untuneful) singing of his sisters that we had to abandon that lovely habit. So Sarah and Emma can’t and don’t sing very much. Consequently, neither do Aimee or Jess, much to Susan’s distress! They were both quite happy to play the piano but left the singing to Susan…

To visit my parents on Waiheke Island we had an hour long trip each way on the vehicular ferry. This boat trip was another first for both girls. Aimee was a bit worried about the intended boat trip. She was imagining a much smaller boat with lots of wind and waves. And when we assured her that the boat was a big one, big enough for cars to be carried on it, she then worried that the cars would fall on top of her!

One of the highlights of the trip was visiting terry’s dad in the nursing home where the sight of the little girls playing their game of chasing each other around the room brought all the old guys to the lounge area to watch. Next stop was the playground at One Tree Hill in Auckland where I tried very hard to get a smile from any of the mothers watching their children there but didn’t quite manage it – must have been my haircut I guess – or maybe its colour!