Last weekend we joined forces with a British family and walked up to Packhorse Hut in the Port Hills (Banks Peninsula, just 30 minutes from our house)….except in lieu of horses, we had PackDaddies. Emma carried their youngest, William, I carried Milo, Joe and Amelia used their own two legs, and the Daddies (Ian and Jeremiah) carried the rest.

Look Amelia, if you stand on tip-toe you can just see the roof of the hut. We’re almost there! Amelia was so proud when she got to the hut without any Whinging (Complaining, in British).

This hut came with resident games! Milo was nice and gentle with Baby William. For some reason he views kids his own age and older as competition, but if I tell him that someone is a baby, they usually get special no-pushing treatment from Milo.

The Banks Peninsula is wonderfully accessible from Christchurch and you quickly get out into a rural feel (we started our hike in a sheep pasture). That pine forest in the background is being logged and we could hear cattle mooing way up from the valley, so it’s not wilderness, but it’s a wonderful backyard to Christchurch.

The hut sits up on the crater edge of an old extinct volcano, the center of which is now Lyttelton Harbor. I wish I could see a fast-forward film of what it used to look like when it was active until now, grassy and eroded.

Breakfast Mayhem! Yum! It’s impressive that this stone hut built in the early 1900’s has survived all the earthquakes. Only the chimney toppled.

The kids all stayed up way too late playing Quiddler and were consequently tired the next day, but they had fun.

Tea with a View. And I even got to drink it while it was hot, this leisurely morning.

Pretty posh spot for a stretch! Trail runners started arriving around 8:30, touting camelbacks and Icebreaker merinos, two hours into their morning exercise. The hut makes a nice destination for both walkers and runners.

Everyone did some climbing!

Milo’s ready and waiting, new backpack filled with survival gear (two rubber duckies, a bug catcher and a tennis ball).

Over the style and down the hill, we’re on our way home.

Milo is thrilled to walk, and thankfully our friends were happy to dawdle along. Joe there in the background is becoming an expert bee catcher.

When we rented this house we negotiated full rights to make the backyard a veggie garden (or “Vege” patch as they say here). We have to put it back to grass before we leave, but for now it serves a useful purpose. With the warmer weather the zucchini and cukes have started their bounty and I’m guessing that the tomatoes will come into their own in 3-4 weeks. This soil seems to need more fertilizer than I’m used to (to be fair, I haven’t used compost like at home). My other steep learning curve has been with something as simple as watering–the plants need a lot more watering than at home where it’s more humid and where we get rain more frequently in summer. It feels great to not purchase every bit of food we consume, and with Jeremiah’s recent hunting successes the freezer/fridge is feeling more bountiful.

The box of Christmas goodies dispatched from the Shaw residence in Greenwich NY arrived at our house on Monday, stuffed with family gifts and items we had bought online in the States. So we scheduled our Christmas gifting for that evening, beginning, as Harro tradition holds, with the stockings. Milo was thrilled. He had shopped at the grocery store with us and knew which stockings belonged to whom, and what little kid doesn’t recognize a cookie when he sees one? He may not have experienced the other items yet, but he somehow knows they’re delicious. Don’t worry Omi, we included a new toothbrush as well.

Green Eggs and Ham, Jamberry, Are You My Mother? (in Spanish and English), and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom were a few of the classic titles my Mom and Dad sent to augment Milo’s library. I think I love reading the familiar lilting rhythms even more than Milo does.

The beads were on top, and Milo claimed them straight away.  Thank you for all the lovely surprises, family!

The Busker’s Festival is in Christchurch this week, so Friday night we went to see the Kiwi Campground Circus. It’s a humorous (irreverent) hour-long acrobatic show poking fun at Kiwi culture. Set at a DOC campground, there’s a straight-laced DOC officer, a bogan (beer-drinking hillbilly), an acrobatic Maori, a camera-toting French hiker, and a bbq king. It was a hoot! Milo even stayed awake and attentive during the whole performance, clapping on cue. As much as suburb life isn’t our style, the Busker’s Festival is just one of the many perks of living in a city.

This week an amateur theater group put on Robinhood in the park, so we packed our picnic dinner and camping chairs and went out to enjoy the show. It was definitely an amateur performance, but the play is written for 5-10 year olds, with players asking them questions and getting them involved, and the kids just ate it up. It was a fun time.

We weren’t sure how Milo would do, sitting down watching a play for 2 hours, but there was music and dancing and he was surprisingly attentive. Our choice of food helped, I’m sure. For dinner I packed a noodle salad for dinner (salmon from Mark and Maria in Alaska, thanks!). Milo’s packing contribution was a jar of peanutbutter. And he ate it by the spoonful, not bothering to waste time even licking it off a pretzel. He diversified to include a peanutbutter cookie at the end….Oh well, it was a treat. At least we managed to get his teeth brushed before he fell into bed.

I was a little surprised how keen on blueberries Milo is, since they can be a little tart if not completely ripe. But needless to say, the pie version was an even bigger hit. He didn’t make a peep all the time it took him to spoon up his piece, dabbing it on his belly and cheeks and forehead in the process. He even liked the crust, but no wonder, it was made with lard. We can’t find Crisco here. and I figure lard is no worse for our health than hydrogenated vegetable oil. The lard crust’s perfect tender/crispy flakiness even elicited a special compliment from Jeremiah, so perhaps it’s time we again embrace this maligned fat. The happiness hormones (neurotransmitters??) will surely counteract the hardening arteries, right?

I took Milo blueberry picking this morning at a you-pick place within biking distance of our house. It’s completely bird netted, the whole field, which I’m guessing is around 2 acres. Thankfully the owners are happy for kids to eat the berries as they pick, because every berry that entered his bowl got eaten, and he’d often help himself to handfuls out of my bowl. Just like Blueberries for Sal, minus the bears. I expect him to poop purple tonight.

Friday evening we packed a picnic and headed out to Birdlings Flat, a long rough beach of flattened stones half an hour south of our house. Molly’s ulterior motive for the outing was to collect little stones for a mosaic, and Jeremiah decided that a barbeque would make it worth his while. There’s plenty of driftwood at the beach, but Jeremiah had to get creative with the other details, since we don’t have a grilling grate. That meat is suspended on a coat hanger propped up by driftwood, finished off by searing on a hot rock. It was really good!