Baby Zebra!

Word!

I just helped carry a yacht to it's dock on the water! The yacht is really a small row boat to go on the pond but I am so excited to use it! It was too dark and buggy to take it out on the pond tonight! 

Today was one of those days I wish I had a camera glued to my hand! I want to make an animal album with all the animals I have seen! Today I saw the baby cows I have been meaning to take pictures of. A rat, I actually would never want a picture of that but I saw it today so it's included in this story. Teeny-tiny baby turkeys who may have no daddy because I ate him but I still wanted a picture because they looked cute for having such an ugly mommy!  And the thing I wish I had my camera for the most...a wild male peacock! He was so pretty and I hear peacocks at night all the time and finally saw one! Another awesome picture would have been of Sam fast asleep in the car with food spilling out of his mouth! Oh I just never know when I'll need it, mental pictures I guess!

My favorite baby zebra as a stand in for the pictures I did not get to take today! Isn't he adorable?!

 I did have my camera this weekend when I met a bunch of girls from around the world. I took many pictures I have yet to put up on Facebook--"the stalker website"! Often we hear negative comments about Facebook but it is great for some things, keeping in touch with old friends and meeting new ones! That sentence inspired me to sing this "Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other is gold!  Anyway, all the girls I have been meeting via Facebook are also au pairs/nannies in the Auckland area!  I now have friends from; Belgium, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the east coast of America and the group is still growing! Each and every girl is so sweet and fun! It's easy because we are all away from home therefore very open to meeting new people. And we are all taking care of kids and not so familiar with each other's culture so we have lots to talk about! I love learning about other parts of the world from the girls as well as bashing stereotypes of California! Some people think California has no farms and is all beach and full of girls like on the Hills. I am grateful for the beaches, the farms and especially grateful I am not a girl from the Hills or even remotely like one! I partly blame Katy Perry's recent song for this stereotype and I suppose the whole of Hollywood as well! 

My new friends from around the world!

My old friends being your stereotypical California Girls!

Per request of Grandma and maybe some silent requests from those who care, here is a weekly schedule of mine!

Monday, Wednesday and Thursday

Morning: Wake up-slowly to the sound of the boys playing in the lounge, have coffee, make sure they eat breakfast, get dressed and ready for school, then drive off!

Mid-Morning: While Sam is at school, I clean the house, go to exercise classes, grocery shop, and starting next Wednesday help at Oli's school.

Afternoon: Pick Sam up from school play at home, the library, the park, etc until we pick up Oli from the bus stop.

Mid-Afternoon: "Can I go to Jack and Taylors?" "Can Oli come to my house?" are questions Caitlin and I hear EVERYDAY at the bus stop! So usually we all go hang out at their house! The kids have fun playing and we have fun talking!

Evening: Go home for dinner baths and bed! Then I jump on the computer to catch the night owl Californians for a chat!

Tuesday and Friday

Morning: Same as M, W, Th only Sam doesn't go to school so he gets ready for a day of fun while Oli gets ready for school!

Mid-morning: go somewhere with Sam, we have gone to the zoo, on a bush walk with Coco, played at Kindy. Actually that's mostly it because Oli has had a lot of holidays from school since I've been here so we all go somewhere together! It's different everyday and fun!

Afternoon: Take the boys to swim lessons on Tuesdays! But still hear the usual questions; "Can I go to Jack and Taylors?" "Can Oli come to my house?" and on Fridays usually go there or have Jack over for once!

Evening: dinner, baths, bed.

Weekends plan something with the girls on the weekend planning Facebook group and take too many pictures! The weekend planning group on Facebook constantly gives me notifications! The current lot of Facebook notifications are about planning to go out this weekend for Halloween-American style! I'm excited for that!

I promised I'd be better with my blog! I'm trying! Despite having no homework and way less commitments than I did in Cali, I'm somehow still busy enough to not post a blog as often as I'd like!

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake" -H.D.T.

A new blog post is long overdue. I have so much to say. It's been three exciting weeks of hanging with the boys and two fun weekends since my last post! I will try to just write about the highlights to keep interest! But be warned sometimes I just can't help but think about other random cool things to write about that might only be random and cool to me!

This most recent weekend was quite eventful! I went on a weekend trip to Hahei on the Coromandel peninsula with Caitlin and our new friend from Japan, Mami (pronounced Mumi)! We wanted to go there to go to Hot Water Beach and see a famous beautiful beach, Cathedral Cove! Cathedral Cove is seen in the beginning of the Prince Caspian movie. And it is beautiful, yes, yet another beautiful beach, New Zealand is quite lucky with their beaches!  It was a nice forty-five minute walk to get there we saw some awesome views and took many pictures of the beauty! We saw random sheep on the walk we believe to be wild! I couldn't help but be jealous of those sheep--they have the best life living on the hills overlooking the beautiful bay! Thinking of which it's quite cool that most of the land near the beaches aren't covered in houses!

Beautiful Cathedral Cove, I love the color of the rocks with the light color of the water!

After Cathedral Cove, we ventured to Hot Water Beach! This is such a cool beach, I don't know of any other place like it in the World! Two hours on either side of the low tide you go to this beach, look for steam coming up from the sand and start digging there. All we had to do was dig a couple inches and viola, hot water! It was so cool! This natural spa is there because there is volcanic activity below the surface that creates the pools of hot water below the beach! At high tide, the ocean water covers the pools of warm water beneath the surface, so you have to go at low tide! The water is so hot, after digging a circular spa we couldn't get in, the water was burning us! Luckily, the ocean left behind pools of cooler water in the sand that we could dig to and connect to our steamy spa! We ended up with a bunny shaped spa or a hand peace sign-- depending on how you see the ink blot. I loved relaxing in the hot water watching the beautiful ocean! It's a whole new way of relaxing on the beach! It's too bad I live about three hours away from this awesome beach otherwise you'd see me digging holes at every chance I had! Forget the beach towels, I'm all about relaxing in natural warm water at the beach!

See the bunny/peace sand spa! Hot head-cool ears!

The view I had from my sand spa, gives a whole new meaning to relaxing on the beach, eh?

The weekend before I went out of town to the Coromandel peninsula, I explored the beaches around Waimauku. I went on awesome bush walks around Muriwai, saw the gannets and walked around Bethells Beach. I really enjoyed that weekend. I spent it by myself and enjoyed exploring alone on my second weekend in New Zealand although I am grateful to know girls my age here! That weekend, I enjoyed walking along the beach and exploring! As I was walking along I kept thinking to myself, "Am I seriously here? This is beyond beautiful!" It felt like a dream. Then it reminded me of a quote I have had on my facebook for years by Henry David Thoreou, "Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake" Seeing as it's been on my facebook profile I have tried to live by it and try to make life feel dream-like and surreal. Obviously, this doesn't happen all the time but I do appreciate when life feels like a dream--a good, pleasant dream, mind you--no nightmares please! I will add a picture of Bethells but the camera never fully captures the beauty.

One of my many pictures of Bethells Beach

It's funny the random things I am starting to miss about home! They usually revolve around food. Ok, yes, I miss the people but I can talk to you! I really miss Tapatio, the delicious hot sauce I put on everything! And authentic Mexican food! Also coffee, New Zealand coffees are all expresso, not filtered drip coffee. Where's my regular horribly made (by me) drip coffee with a little light milk? The coffee here is going to spoil me! Oh something else I miss, cheap gas! We complained when it was $5 a gallon. Well here it was $1.82 cheap right, NO, it's for a liter! And there are about 3.8 liters in a gallon so with my handy dandy math skills that comes out to $6.84 a gallon. But then in U.S. dollars thats only $5.14 per gallon. Ok, well it's as expensive as it was when gas was expensive to us Americans!

There are a lot of things I love about New Zealand. "Eh!" It's so fun to hear people with New Zealand accents say "eh", as in "That was pretty wicked, eh?".  I repeat Sam when he says "hey" (the kid version of eh) and he gets annoyed. I tell him it's because it's cute, but he is still annoyed, I guess even little boys don't like to be called cute. Little Cooper didn't like it either, maybe it's a man thing, I don't know! Anyway, I wish I could say "eh", Caitlin says I'm not allowed to say it because I will sound Canadian, nothing against them though. Plus, I wouldn't sound as cool because I don't have a Kiwi accent! I'm actually not sure if it's spelled aye or eh, I have seen Kiwis spell it both ways. Next topic, I love how they serve iced coffee! I'm used to Starbucks (which they do have here) just putting ice in drip coffee. The iced coffees here have ice cream and whip cream, sooo delicious! OO I have a picture. The picture also has a savory muffin in it! Savory muffins are the best. You can find them in all the coffee shops. I actually made some the other day because I saw the recipe on the back of a flour bag and Sam sounded interested in helping. Pretty easy and yummy, the ones I made had cheese, bell peppers (capsicum as they are called here) and celery!

Iced coffee, you can barely see the savory muffin but it's yummy!

I am excited for this weekend! I have made some more awesome friends via facebook groups for Au Paris in the area and we have plans to explore Auckland! We are going to eat dinner up in the Skytower! It's a tall touristy, needle-shaped thing, um hard to explain I'm in need of another picture--see it's good to be click happy, I have one! We currently have five au pairs going to eat in a rotating restaurant! I am super excited! 

Skytower-it's lit up pink for breast cancer awareness!

Well this concludes this blog post! I vow to be better at my blog, no more almost three week gaps! I have so much to say about living in the country, watching cool boys, the way the Kiwi's live! I also am sure to have more adventures to talk about! Adios amigos!