Rainbows

We had a couple of the most beautiful rainbows last week, big and bright.  Unfortunately there is a speck of dust in our camera (on the sensor, and unremoveable, according to Malcolm, who knows about these things).  But anyway, we took some photos...

The lights in the sky are the reflection of our dining room light, by the way

March

So... it looks like we skipped February...
We have been busy with all sorts of things in the last month or 2.
We went fruit-picking in Central Otago.  Apricots, nectarines, peaches, and plums - the kids had such fun!  Then we had to cook it all up - into apricot jam, apricot sauce (for pizza), plum jam, dried apricots, plum cake, and everything else got bottled.

Free plums from the side of the road

We've started Saturday Morning Music Classes.  Bryony's learning singing, Hannah violin, Daniel guitar and Andrew recorder.  Jean has also joined the Recorder Ensemble, to save sitting around for 3 hours doing nothing every Saturday morning.  It's been nice to refresh recorder skills which have been shelved for about 25 years.

Daniel has moved up from cubs to Sea Scouts, he couldn't wait to learn to sail so when they offered a place he jumped at it. 

The 3 older girls have been doing art lessons - a 4-week course - which they have enjoyed.

We've made several trips out to the coast to look for rocky shore creatures.  The last trip was the most successful, we found starfish, crabs and fish, and got some good movies on the underwater camera.
 

We only just noticed there's a fish in this photo, and a crab too

 The girls sold 12 baby rabbits after Christmas

We're still mulching, and the kids have been helping by carrying bucketloads of mulch from the pile to bare patches of garden.  It's our only hope to keep down the weeds, seeing as we don't want to spray.  I'm going for a cottage-type flower garden, the first patch is looking nice.

The next move for the house is to install a wood-burner - bought but not put in yet.  Hopefully it'll be in and finished by mid-April.
Oh, and Petra and Eva cut their hair, again.  It was pretty bad this time, Petra gave herself a mullet.  Eva cut the back short as well as the front.  Even a month later it still gets odd looks from people if we go out.  They told their Sunday-school teachers that I did it...

Before

After

Never mind, it'll grow.

Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas this year!  For the first time in about 12 years, our whole family was together.  But this time, there were 3 new spouses and 13 new children, 7 of whom were preschoolers.  Also a dog.  So there was a fair bit of happy chaos. 
The weather was lovely. We organised a treasure hunt for the kids, which kept them busy for about half an hour. We put up our tent in the backyard for them to play in, and had a big lunch with plenty of leftovers.  But the best bit was getting to catch up with everyone; we hadn't seen some people for years, or in the case of the smallest nieces and nephews, ever. 

Hopefully we'll do it all again in a couple of years :)

Photo: Don Rutherford

Eggs

So Daniel is pretty happy this month - his budgie has laid a couple of eggs!
They're very small and look quite uncomfortable sitting on the bottom of the box, but we gave her plenty of nesting material and she didn't want it.  The boy budgie looks very pleased with himself and spends a lot of his time sitting on top of the nesting box.

The kitchen is in!

Our kitchen is in and working!  At last we have a decent cooktop (gas) and a dishwasher, and bench space and cupboards and things!
The guys from Mosgiel Kitchens came on Wednesday with a few bits,

then spent all of Thursday and most of Friday putting it in.

The benchtop came in 2 pieces which had to be trimmed (10mm overlap) and welded together.  The welder took 3-4 hours to cut it, join it and cut the hole for the gas hob.  You can't tell where the join is except for a very slight bulge as you run your finger along the top of the bench, if you know where to look.  The sink was already welded into the benchtop, and the plumber had to put the tap in.  We got an upstand all round the bench so we won't have to worry about water getting down the wall.

We put the tiles on ourselves, yesterday.  We had a couple of goes at it, as we didn't expect the tiles to be different sixes - some were 1 mm wider or longer than others.  Also, each tile had a square long edge and a slanting long edge, and because we didn't notice that until halfway through.  This meant the wee spacers between them held them different distances apart, depending on whether the spacer was between 2 square edges, 2 slanting edges or one of each.  Very Frustrating.  I ended up cutting up some playing cards (from an incomplete pack) and wedging 2-4 thicknesses of card on top of the spacer in the narrower gaps. The current arrangement wouldn't win any prizes but at least they all line up along the top, bottom and sides.  Tiling is not something we want to do again for a while.

We still have to get one drawer shortened, as it hits the gas pipe under the bench and won't close all the way.  Apart from that minor hitch we're very pleased with how it's all turned out.  It's certainly a vast improvement on what we started with - the old kitchen was actually falling apart, and at least some of it dated back to 1961.  And we would certainly recommend Mosgiel Kitchens for anyone looking at getting a new kitchen.  They did an excellent job, were easy to work with, and have a quality product.  We aren't expecting the doors to start falling off after 3 years as I've heard can happen with the budget kitchen outfits.  They have such a good reputation that they don't have to advertise, and are always busy.

Next thing on the list - lino and wallpaper...

Beautiful!

The view on the way home yesterday - the sea was such a beautiful colour...

All ready!

Yesterday Mr Caldwell came and did the gibstopping.  He came back today and finished it, and put up the decorative moulding.  It doesn't go right round the room because we left gaps for the cupboards.

We covered the floor with hardboard, did some painting, and - tada! - ready for the new kitchen!
Thankyou very much to Dad for his help, and Mum for having the kids :)

The wallpaper we ordered won't arrive for a few weeks but that's probably just as well because we didn't have time anyway.