Holiday in New Zealand

To bring our Europe trip to a glorious end, we decided to go back to New Zealand for a five-week holiday before settling down into the English winter.

The flight from Europe to New Zealand is tedious at the best of times, but having a 15 month old baby and being 10 hours delayed makes it even worse. To be fair, Yana was surprisingly good on the flight. We didn't have any of the moments where we wanted to disappear into our seats that we had feared.

Most of our time in New Zealand we spent with my sister Nina, her husband Phil and their 11 month old son Oscar. Yana really liked Oscar. She got excited when she saw him, followed him around, and stroked his head. Towards the end she was getting a little rougher, probably because she didn't like him taking toys away from her.



We had a really nice time in New Zealand. The weather was a bit unpredictable for the first couple of weeks, but then it got really nice and summery. We caught up with lots of friends, spent a week with Lindsay's mum in Timaru, went for a nice walk on the bridle path with Lindsay's dad, and had fun and hot day at the races. Lindsay went to Nelson for a boys weekend and Kerstin did nice trips with Nina to Sumner and Lyttleton.


The highlight of our holiday was a weekend in a holiday house in Wainui, Banks Peninsula, with a group of friends. The holiday house we were staying at was very nice, with a really well designed garden with lots of flowers, a deck and an amazing view - all really well shelted from any wind. We did lots of chatting, eating, chilling out, and kite flying. We had a great time and to round the weekend up we went to French Farm for a nice lunch.

Update on Yana...

I just had a look on my parents' blog and realised that there have been hardly any photos of me recently. That needs to be remedied...

This photo shows me climbing up a slide. I love climbing up things and sliding is heaps of fun too. For a while climbing was all that I was interested in, but recently I have started doing a few steps on my own. It's not too bad, but I still need to be encouraged by my parents and prefer crawling.








This is dad and me in a playground in Llanca. By the way, I decided to be nicer to Mama and Daddy now. I go up to them and give them hugs and kisses, and I stroke or pat them (although that can sometimes still be a little rough).















This is me eating. I love eating. I eat pretty much everything and lots of it.
















This is me playing in my mirror-room (well, bathroom). I love playing in there, because there are three other me's that laugh back at the real me.