Dang it!

Photos taken by *me*!! Can you tell? And boys before you get mad, I had to. This is the closest I'll get to photos to put on the fridge, and I love you xxx

Dang it, who looks THIS cute on Skype?? I mean really!!??!!! And they did not even know I had the camera out so it isn't like they were smiling or posing. In fact they are going to KILL me for this. Love ya dudes xxx

Valentines Day

She would never let a fete day go by without making cupcakes... this time Meg made them for Dominic to take to work. And being funny Dom, instead of putting them on a plate for everyone... he set them out all along the counter in the lunchroom - and then took photos of them :) He's a proud father! He also surprised us by setting our roses, chocolates, gummy snakes and cards for the 4 of us, as a surprise for when we woke up. (Sam and J you will remember that table... we had it in the kitchen for a week, deep sigh) My roses are still hanging onto existance - Megane has them in her bedroom. Remind me to take pictures of her room for you - it is decorated within an inch of it's life and it's gorgeous. She seriously gets that gene from you Sam (except that she doesn't get ol' furniture from crazy foreign guys - ra ha ha ha ha ha!)

Life is for living!

Megane has changed ballet school... I went and sat in on her first class and it turns out that there are adult dancers! She must have voted for Pedro because all her wildest dreams came true and she talked me into enrolling. Of course before my first class I had to have a crash course in how to stand and what the positions are - from Lucy and Megane. Not that it helped much, you could tell I belonged in the pre-primary class! But what the heck, Megane is happy, I'm trying new stuff and Lucy gets someone to practice with at home

PS: very important note to self - head up, shoulders down, back stretched, hips open, feet turned out, thighs engaged, little fingers not dangling, thumbs in, bottom tucked under and PLEASE PULL IN YOUR STOMACH!!!!

I love my job

I really love being a teacher - especially teaching at my current school. I wish I could post some pictures of them in action, but it isn't the done thing. Suffice it to say that I look forward to going to work and teaching them French. Of course there are periods where I think I could clock their heads together for being so rowdy, but I feel the same way about my own kids at home! The other day I had a class make paper fortune tellers, and then conjugate verbs with a partner. Here's a pic

xx

Super Sid

I love this clip on so many levels... AND I bought Dad a signed copy of this book a year or two ago - so heck, I must be mega cool too!

Sebastien

Today at school, it was before we let off the balloons, the CTV cameras and the One News cameras were at our school. The CTV reporter came up to me and asked me what I wrote on my card, and where I was in the February earthquake. She then asked me what was the worst thing that happened by an earthquake. On my card it was talking about the people who died, and the families of the people who died, and the people who are alive. I todl her that I was tuning ukaleles - and she laughed a little bit. I said I wasn't scared but the drums fell down on the desk, and a pole feel in front of the door and we were stuck.
I remember that Alexander, Cheing, Caleb, Woenee and Bennett were with me, and Bennett and I forced the door open. We went into a classroom and they told us to go outside, but a Duty Teacher told us to go inside, and then Mr Russell asked us why we were inside and said we had to go outside, but then that Duty Teacher again told us why were we outside, and we told her about Mr Russell so we stayed outside. Lucy was in the Year 2 line, talking like everyone else. Like, half of the school was crying. I was allowed to go and see Lucy and told her "all would be okay and on the bright side we would get to miss out on our tests" and then I had to go back to my line. Megane was on the bus, but when she got to school she got annoyed at me because all the boys were making jokes because of the earthquake so her and the other prefects got annoyed at us. Megane wasn't crying. Oogah (my Dad) came and said "do you want to go to my house?" and I said yes. We saw him and gave him a hug, and we went with him.
I told the lady that the worst thing wasn't in that earthquake, it was on the 23rd of December one when I was about half a metre away from dying on the rock cliff. She if I was one of the Lallemant's that got rescued and I said yes. She said "tell your mother that you guys are strong."
We got to listen to the bells. They rung the big big big one, that was about 2m, 185 times for everyone who died. Mike Gravestone had to ring it. He's my hockey coach. And there were a lot of flowers around the school on the seats.
That's all I want to say.

One year on...

This is a photo of the children at St Michael's School letting off helium balloons (with prayers attached to them) after the 2 minutes of silence. Sebastien is the boy with his back to the photo, and Lucy's shoes are the in picture, she is standing behind Taylor and George (just to the right of Sebastien). Lucy said "I held it up really high, just the tip of it and then I let go! and the balloon flew, and it came by our house. I felt relaxed because I knew we weren't going to have another earthquake."
Actually in the car this morning she told me she was scared and didn't want to be left at school because she didn't want to have another quake. She thought that all the fuss about today was because there was going to be another big one... my poor baby.
At my school we had 2 minutes silence at the bottom of our flagpole, and then the students planted an oak tree in rememberance of all that we are blessed with. It was a touching moment but I will admit that I shed a tear this morning in the car after I had taken the children to school. We drove past the TV cameras setting up, the Provincial Chambers in rubble, Armagh St totally blocked off with rubble and machinary but displaying a sign "Street Closed", and of course past all the empty sections. We live with it every day and I am not bothered, but somehow today I remembered the shock and worry, and the annoyance of having 6 months with no toilet. I also felt the panic of not knowing if my children were okay, and the sorrow of knowing Megane saw the buildings fall on people/Sebastien was trapped in the music room "tuning ukaleles"/Lucy was in the school grounds listening to the screams and collapsing buildings not knowing if she should stay still, go in the building (like the teachers were telling her to do) or look for her siblings. I also remember the fear of waiting with fellow teachers as they tried in vain to contact their children who were in town, and then of course the weeks of worry as Dad worked around the clock with his colleagues from around the world to rescue and help the afflicted.
I'll be happy when today is over, but I am very aware that 22 Feb 2011 could be repeated, tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month. And of course nothing is finished. We are still living in a house that we have been told is "unrepairable", everyone we know is mourning something, our churches are condemned (ha ha, that's ironic, i get it, but they really are), our shopping malls are still closed and our water is rationed.
However on the bright side, my family is all alive.
xxx

I hope the wind blows towards our house tomorrow...

Sebastien: "At school tomorrow we are a minute silence, and then we will be having helium balloons with prayers inside them, and we are going to let them off at the time of the earthquake, and they will float up into the sky a bit, and then come down - we are using special helium so they don't go too far away - and that will lift people up, or something. So I hope the wind blows towards our house tomorrow..."
Sigh, so sweet and so innocent.
I could do with one of those balloons as I'll need some "lifting up" tomorrow. I didn't think it would be hard to live through tomorrow, but as I was going thru some photos and blog posts (still trying to sort out our contents insurance claim) I felt quite sad seeing what it was like. It is so easy to just live day to day (especially now that we have a toilet) that I forget how awful it was.

Then and now... Manchester Street (at St Asaph St)

Durham St North is now blocked off in town again as they take down a bunch of buildings (it is closed off till late May at least... the police HQ is one of them) and of course the center of the city is till completely closed off. We drove along St Asaph Steet today and I hopped out and took a few photos down Manchester St so you can see how the demolition is progressing. It sure is going to take a long time until life is normal again. Speaking of which, we were hoping for news on residential house foundations in Feb 2012 but now that has been pushed back a few months. It really will be 2-3 years until they get around to rebuilding our house. Not that I am complaining, our toilet is still flushing.

I got the fright of my life this weekend though... Megane and I popped down to Merivale Mall to get a couple of things, and it was SHUT! AAAAGH!!!! At 9am some guys in Hi Viz vests ("they are fluro, not bulletproof" he he he, I love that road sigh) walked thru the mall and gave out Indefinate Closure notices to shop owners, and then evacuated everyone.

Of course they didn't advertise this from the street. Oh no, you had to park and go up to the building and then be turned away by a grouchy lady who said "you want to know why? well there is a sight RIGHT THERE!" To which I said, "yes, but it just says it is shut, I want to know WHY because it doesn't really inspire confidence that it has taken *this long* to work out that the building is not safe, especially since we haven't had anything over 4.3 for weeks". She got really huffy and said "well, this is Christchurch you know!" And it turns out that Tower Insurance owns the buildings so I guess we are never going to see it reopen. Sigh. I had no idea how much I relied on Fresh Choice supermarket to be open 7am-9pm. If anything happens to Northlands I'm outta here.

Chinese Lantern Festival - Christchurch

About this time last year we went to the Chinese Lantern Festival in Victoria Square. Well, that is still sitting there - in the middle of the cordoned off area in town. This year, it was held along the bank of the Avon River next to Hagley Park and it is *magnificient* These pictures do not do it justice. We went at about 9pm when it was just getting dark, and watched some chinese dancers, then an incredible dragon dancing team from Shanghai. They had won competitions and you could see why. They were also acrobats, and were making human pyramids so that the dragon could do some really complicated moves. As we walked around looking at the lanterns and 3D displays a chinese reggae band played on the stage. Yip, chinese reggae!

We ate quite a bit of food from the stalls, and everyone's favourite was vegetable pancakes. Very oily but totally delicious. Lucy now believes me that she does like onions :)

It would be hard to say what our favourite lantern was... We really loved the pigs from the "Year of" animals (Dom and I are rats, Lucy is a monkey, Seb is a dragon and Megane is a tiger - no surprise there!), and the dragon that was in the river, but Megane and I were delighted by the HUGE roses hanging from an oak tree.

Dad, sorry it took so long, my computer crashed just now