Megane started school today!

My baby started Intermediate School today. She is going to St Michaels, and there are only 4 other girls in her year. I was very nervous for her but she is fine - and look how cute she is in her uniform! Dad came over after work so he could see her off :) (He was up all night with fires, false alarms and the other stuff they do). Lucy starts school tomorrow so I am trying to hold it together for her sake, until 9.10am tomorrow.

Dad 'n the stump grinder

Murra is going to be so sad his missed this!!! Dad just dropped by with Joe's stump grinder... fresh from the States and ready to grind anything from rocks to tree stumps. The trailer was about 11m long and Dad wasn't allowed to drive over 70km/hr or it would fishtail and kill everyone on the road... you can imagine how he liked that...

Beached whales at Port Levy, Banks Penninsular

As usual the photos are in reverse order, with the writing at the bottom - grrrrrrr

At this point Lucy and I are looking at the whales and she is telling me all about what happened. She is over being scared of them, finally.

Just before we left more people had gathered... the bulldozer is pulling the last of the whales up onto the grass

Lucy, Soleil and Megane checking out the whales

We are wearing gloves here because they started to leak "fluids" out of their mouths, anus' and spouts and the DOC (Department of Conservation) workers were afraid of spreading whale diseases (not sure to who... we don't usually hang with whales, and I don't know that fish diseases really affect people, but we did as we were told)

I found this really sad. The little whale was pulled up onto the grass early on. When the larger whale was dragged up her fin got caught in the mouth of the little whale and that caused her to be dragged further up the grassy bank. I was just so.... undignified for the poor whales.

The biggest whale was about 5m long

Two of the baby whales (we don't know the little boy in the photo)

I'm not sure what we are so darn happy about, but this is a nice photo of my pretty friend Soleil :) So glad you came Soleil! and I am also glad that you *were on the news* (shame about the tooth though)

If you look closely in this picture you can see, just above the corner of the whale's mouth... her eye. They do not seem to have eyelids as they all had their eyes "open". (double click on the photo to make it bigger)

The baby whales were carried up from the edge of the beach, the bigger whales were dragged up by their tails (and a rope/chain) and a tractor

As you can see by Murra's face, it was quite traumatic when we first arrived...

Lucy is not happy about the whales (and she is also very carsick)

Port Levy, Banks Penninsular (about 1hr30 from Christchurch). You can kind of see in this picture how the whales got stranded. The beach has a very gradual slope out to deep water - at least 200m. This is what we saw when we first arrived.

Sunday 24 Jan 2010 - I read a report of a pod of 48 whales beached at Port Levy and help was needed to keep them alive until they could be put back out to sea... We picked up Soleil and headed straight over there (and got hideously car sick on the way due to the windy, hilly road). By the time we got there over 30 of the whales had been floated back out into the harbour and the head female rounded everyone up and headed out to sea. The Project Jonah scientist that we spoke to said that Pilot Whales have great sonar for rocky beaches, but in mud their sonar doesn't work at all well, and the evening before they had been feeding madly on the fish in the bay and didn't realize that they were trapped in a really shallow bay until the tide went out and they were stranded. As is typical of whales, when they realized some were struggling they all stayed on the beach and would have died if they were not taken back out to sea. All of the 16 dead whales were female, and the babies were only a week or two old. The dead whales were protected overnight by Project Jonah workers and the local iwi, and then some might be used for research but all will be farewelled and buried by the local maori. It was of course sad, but amazing to see them up close. I don't know if we will ever have a chance to see whales like this again.

Rust on the roof at BB

Dad, this is the After shot - see below for what the roof was like when we got to BB xxxx

Deforestation at Dad's house - 20 Jan 2010

Hmmm, weird, all the pictures uploaded in reverse order again. Oh well. Today we went over to Dad's "fish house" (that is what Lucy calls it (as opposed to his "real house" in Leithfield Beach) to help cut back some of his overgrown plants... As soon as we got there Dad gave Dom and Murra some gloves and told me and the girls to go play! HA! We were to be purely ornamental since he didn't want us to "get hurt"! Sheesh, provide the man with a couple of boys and suddenly his daughters are useless! Anyway they set about denuding the section while we played and took photos... At one point I asked Dad why he didn't prune the plants back earlier since he totally believes in "a stitch in time saves nine" and he said "you know what they say, do it once, do it right... " - I wanted to know WHEN he came up with this theroy in regards to serious-pruning-in-the-garden and he said "ummmm, 8yrs ago" DAD!



Here is Dad next to the one piece of living vegetation down the side of the house... Gaye hates this plant and ironically it is next to the stump that was once her favourite climbing rose bush... there were some words said about this, I can assure you! PS the plant is now gone.

Lucy really loves Gaye (and Gaye is still smiling because she hasn't seen the rose stump yet)

Lucy and Frocky Dog (she played with her for house and showed her lots of ballet dances...)

The two rascals helping out in the final clean up

If you could hear Dom he was saying "no problem, we can get this on and then more... tons of room...."

Stamping down #3 - this is before they started lashing down the stamped-down greenery and things got Serious

At this point the branches were hanging over the sides of the trailer by about 2 m on each side... they fixed this problem by folding the branches over and tying them

"I lub you Oogah!"

Dad is blaming Dom for the blood all over his face, but really THEY WERE BOTH TO BLAME when a rose bush snapped back and got Dad in the gum (ouch, my poor Daddy!). Not that he even stopped to clean up, this is dry blood you are seeing.

And we were Chicken Fightin'....

(ummmm, these pictures were supposed to be at the bottom of this post - scroll down for a bit of explaining...)

have we EVER had a combined activity where Monica hasn't been maimed, beaten, bleeding or in some way wounded??? uh, i think NO!

Lucy got in on the action...

Does it look like the Lallemants are about to crush the poor YW? It does to me....

oh how cute... the couple that hops together, stays together xxx

You sure missed out if you weren't at Mutual tonight! We had a 3-D poster competition on Joshua 1:9 (the Mutual theme for 2010) and as you can see from the pics all 3 posters were amazing... artistic, punny and symbolic - they covered all the bases. We finished off the evening with a couple of games of Chicken Fighting (Dom's fave activity from his time in YM, go figure) and Hano rules the roost!

Mon, Shawn and Alan Grey (Sophia, we missed you)

Hano, Dindi, Sariah, Lucy, Harmony

Jordan, Trevor, Ellen, Aaron, Tree

"great idea Mon!"

Just wanted to show that it was the boys & Ellen that had the most detailed and artistically symbolic poster... who would have thought? (certainly not Jordan)

Teensy tiny photos

Sam, just in case you didn't know, you can double click on the photos and they get bigger so you can see everything xxx love you

Jan 2010 and Lucy is a rascal STILL

On the 2nd Jan we climbed Mt Thomas (ummm, not sure exactly how high it is.... Blimin' high is my estimate but I think I read that it is about 1050m) with the (available) YW of Riccarton and Rangiora and their families. It was 33C but we had a great day!

This is our sweet Lucy asleep in bed one night.... She likes to wear her crown like this believe it or not - something about being Barbie Muskateer???

This is one of "our" ducks. Pup and Willow have been coming to our house to eat for years and this spring they started bringing their ducklings too. Only 2 survived ducklinghood - we call them Baby and Chick.

Here you can see Dom and his Girlfriend (the BBQ, not Lucy)

He he he, can you tell Lucy LOVES ballet? PS rejoice with me - this old couch is now GONE!

Christmas Day 2009

Christmas day was so much fun, and we had good weather! We went out to Leithfield Beach to be with Dad and Gaye since they were having a holiday out there... well wouldn't you?

Leon and Claire were down from Wellington so we got to see Claire's 6 month pregnant tum, cute! and since she was there Gaye made some AMAZING vegan food....

No trip to LB is complete without a ride on "the bike"... Dom took the kids to the beach and forest for an hour ("and Mum it was so great, Papa went too fast, and got collected 5 million pinecones for Oogah so he won't get cold in winter..." and then since it was *so much fun* and the kids didn't want me to miss out... so they came back and took me for a ride to the local pool for a quick dip (them, not me)

It was a great day and we can't wait for Christmas 2010 when Bluey, Sam, Shane, Jack and Thom will be home from Brisbane, Jessica from Sydney and Leon, Claire and Baby will be down again from Wellington.

Fun Holiday Times!

Well well well, here is our little Locksie-Lu playing around instead of going to sleep... Sebastien taught her how to climb up doorways a couple of years ago and her legs are finally long enough to be able to do it to her satisfaction :) It's funny, when I was little I stayed up late to read, kids these days however....

And this time she was actually showing me her skills... I should have growled at her probably but instead I got the camera (note to self: toughen up as a mum)

And this is Dom and I running by the river this morning (by Hagley Park, just as you come to the museum)... Megane was so funny, she had the camera and kept biking ahead of us to take photos (this one was taken from the other side of the river) and somehow this is all she managed to get - apparently we kept moving out of the frame! ha ha ha!