Tree Hugger

I love this tree. It's in our front garden. I think it's a Robinia. The leaves range from deep mustard yellow to the creamiest, mint green. Wherever you are in the living room, dining room or sitting outside the front of the house you can see the gorgeous thing waving its branches in the breeze. Knowing that the tree belongs to us makes me feel very grown up. More grown up than being a Mum or a wife or paying a mortgage. Apart from the fact that it can stand alone as a thing of beauty it is quite special because the spit of land upon which Mount Maunganui resides is made entirely of sand so these sorts of trees are few and far between. There are more Norfolk Pines than you could shake a stick at and plenty of palm trees. My tree knocks the spots off all arboresque competition however and I adore it. It reminds me of home. I miss the countryside in Britain. I'm thinking of skinny, never ending, windy roads surrounded by ancient, leafy woods and fringed with cows parsley. Rambling old pubs with low ceilings, wooden beams and locals at the bar. Where we live in New Zealand is pretty distant from that picture. We live on a beautiful beach (see the pic at the top of my blog) in a town which boomed in the eighties. I think it would be fair to say that Mount Maunganui is not the jewel in New Zealand's architectural crown. During my first year here I could think of nothing but the gorgeous, chocolate box villages at home nestled into my beloved English countryside. I grew increasingly irritated looking at the houses here at the Mount and had no interest in the one we bought whatsoever. During a conversation with my cousin in England who is planning to move to Australia with her Aussie husband, she said that the one thing she would not do would be to compare Australia to England. I gulped and blushed as I realised that I had been doing exactly that for the last year. Coming back to NZ I found it so much easier to enjoy the place for what it really has to offer instead of what it lacked. When I walk through our streets now I am interested in why the houses were built as they were, think of the generations of families who have been here a long time and seen their sparsely populated idyll mushroom into the busy, tourist hotspot it is today. I'm becoming rather attached to the house we live in. The husband tore it back to a shell and lovingly built a new house house to cater for our growing brood.

I'm writing this today because I was looking at the title of Iota's blog which is called 'Not wrong, just different'. She moved to America as a Brit and was wary of her reactions to a new place. It seems that I could have benefited from reading that a couple of years ago. The other reason I'm writing it is because I'm really enjoying feeling positive about New Zealand and feeling lucky to love Blighty so much but be given an opportunity to enjoy a different country too. On the note of positivity I shall leave you with this little anecdote.

Not one hour before typing this I was trawling twin1 and twin2 round the supermarket. At the checkout the homely Farah Fawcett lovely told me how lucky I was to have twins. I agreed and asked her if she had any children. She said she had had four children, then her husband left her and ended up looking after 8 children as her oldest daughter had a baby at home and 2 cousins came to live with them plus a boyfriend as there was so much trouble in the cousins' families. She fed them all on $60 per week. Let me tell you she looked beautiful, perky and happy. She said "well it never did me any harm looking after them all'. I looked at her name badge and she's called Miel which means honey in French. What a legend of a lady.

Hallowed turf

Check out the pictures of the lush, beautiful lawn which now replaces the slope at the back of our house. The husband has many talents - one of which is that he is a 'finisher of projects'. Two weeks ago ready grown lawn was delivered to our doorstep and the husband painstakingly laid it. We were told to water it regularly and to wait 10 days before we walked on it. It all sounded fairly basic to me but the husband treated the grass with the kind of attentiveness a newborn baby affords. Every night for the last couple of weeks if he has woken up in the night he would go outside, check how wet the grass was and tinker with the rate at which the water came out of the sprinkler. His alarm was set for 5am every day and he has been out there, studiously watching the water pitter patter onto his pride and joy. When we drove to Taranaki for the weekend to see Fleetwood Mac his brother was drafted in to get up at 5am and turn the sprinkler on (luckily they are very close and the brother didn't think this was either odd or too much to ask). This was suplemented by several daily strolls round the perimeter watering the places the sprinkler couldn't reach with a hose. After 10 days I tentatively asked if we could walk on the hallowed turf. "One more day" I was told. Two days later I was informed it should only be a couple more days until we can use the garden. Today, 19 days after the lawn was laid, the lad ran riot and we moved the trampoline down there too. The obsession has paid off and we now have the most fantastic extra bit of garden. What a clever man you are, thank you oh husband of mine.

This year I have a goal. I can't really call it a resolution as such but something to work towards. A few months ago my brother married his lovely girlfriend. She has changed his life in the most profoundly positive way possible and has made him a very happy person. Although they live a mere 11,000 miles or so away from us (they are in Chamonix, France and we are in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand) I would like to spend more time with them and get to know my new sister in law better. A fairly fantastical wish but I have a few ideas up my sleeve. Unfortunately all the ideas need pots of cash to finance them and involve travelling the aforementioned 11,000 miles. We had talked about going to France for the winter season at the end of 2010 some time ago but a few other spanners have been thrown into the works since then. Anyway we can but try, can we not?

I am a Hercules engineer as well as a patisserie chef

This morning revealed itself to be thick with fog and dense cloud. As there is no Kindergarten today for the boy and the Goddess that is our housekeeper comes on a Wednesday at 9am I decided to take the children for a walk round Mount Maunganui. We set off with supplies of honey sandwiches, strawberries and carrot sticks. Looking after my three small children can feel like a grind. The relentlessness of the routine can make you really grit your teeth hour after hour, day after day. For instance there is no way the twins can wait longer than twenty minutes or so after waking in the morning for breakfast. What if I don't feel like making breakfast so quickly after waking up? Tough. It's what they want and the screaming is an effective if nerve jangling catalyst to pull my finger out and throw weetabix down their necks.

Having said that I often crave more time with the children and in particular with each of them on their own. I had two lovely years hanging out with my son, having him sitting on my knee for long periods of time and more recently, sitting in cafes or on the beach chatting about all sorts of things. The little twins tend to be together all the time so you don't really look at one intently for a long period of time - your eyes flit between the two. I love the intensity of gazing into your littlies' eyes and smiling at them as they gaze myopically at you before crumpling into a gummy beam.

This morning as we toddled round the Mount I soaked up the wonderful feeling of just spending time with the children in the fresh air, listening to the ocean swilling through the narrow aperture between the Mount and Matacana island and smiling at the many friendly comments our fellow strollers passed to us on the way round. Because of the warm fog, the shifting views were truly beautiful. Check out the picture of the handsome, brave man protecting the entrance to the harbour and the tops of the cranes at the Port just visible through the fug.

An afternoon making lemon drizzle cake for a birthday tomorrow and building a Hercules and a bi-plane from Lego makes it a near perfect day for enjoying the deeply precious early years before they all dash off to school.

That's all well and good but BRING ON THE WEEKEND as I'm off to the big smoke with a friend for a night talking constantly, drinking wine, seeing the Dalai Lama and enjoying the relative peace and quiet of a million other Aucklanders.