Our One Year Anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of our arrival in New Zealand. The task of describing all my thoughts after a year in our new home is too daunting to tackle in one blog entry.

Some quick thoughts we've shared at the dinner table the last few days:

1. All four of us have worked hard in different ways to root ourselves into our new community and to make new connections.
Doug - playing and coaching sports and his local investment group that he meets with monthly.
Carolyn - volunteering at school with sausage sizzles, Shelterbox, skiing, Tournament of the Minds and in the boys' classrooms, also with the NZ United World College Trust based in Queenstown.
Liam - sports, school extracurricular activities like Chess, Tournament of the Minds and the Family Arts and Variety Show.
Colin - school, Chess and joining the Queenstown Alpine Ski Team.

Being in school five days a week and in sports lots of afternoon, the boys are our cultural consultants/ambassadors. Liam helps with vocabulary and grammar. Learned is spelled learnt. Hair along your forehead is a fringe, not bangs. Colin is our pronunciation guru, especially with Maori words. In fact, he has discerned two acceptable pronunciations of Maori: Mar-ree or Mao-di. He was once again instructing Liam and me on the way home from school on Friday.

2. Sometimes this move feels like a reality show idea or social experiment - a family of four picks up and moves to a location where they don't have a single friend, acquaintance or connection...watch while they try to settle into a their new life.

3. Each of us decided that even if we were able to roll back the clock and decide whether to do this move, knowing what we know now, we would still choose to move to NZ, and particularly Queenstown.

4. Though there are few new lessons/challenges:
Doug - Working from home - setting up a space/time that is quiet and uninterrupted by the rest of the household. Missing the interaction/stimulus of his colleagues.
Carolyn- Having Doug home ALL day ;-) Building a new social network. Discovering that I am no longer a teenager, unafraid to jump on any horse.
Colin - Colin has learnt (several times) that in a less supervised world, kids tend to work things out their own way. For example, if you throw a snowball into a bigger kid's face, he will pound you into the snow with more force than you threw your snow ball. Experiential learning/natural consequences in their most basic form.
Liam-Being a minority/outsider for the first time and feeling different and singled out from the others. Liam has learnt that people from other places sometimes base first impressions on stereotypes. Liam has experienced that Kiwi classmates think Americans eat tomato sauce (ketchup) on everything, talk with squeaky American voices, and all love George Bush.

5. What Colin, Doug, Liam and I miss most are our family and friends.

Colin and Liam also miss the Logan School. Liam says he would never complain about anything at Logan if he was there again. He would keep small challenges in perspective when he compares them with some of the bigger challenges he's experienced in his new school. Both boys know Logan is a remarkable place and draw on their Logan foundation every single day. I too miss Logan - my colleagues and students and the most remarkable learning environment I have ever encountered.

Doug missed work (crazy, huh?). I am not sure how or why in these tumultuous economic times. (He just started back doing what he did in Denver but doing it from here and happy to be involved again).

8. We have been welcomed and included by so many new friends - dinner parties, road trips, ski trips, bonfires on the beach, hikes, walks, movie nights, birthday parties, book clubs, investment clubs, sports teams.

9. Sometimes all the new experiences, connections and friends is a little overwhelming. Even just remembering where and when we've met everyone is a challenge, as everyone is a new acquaintance.

10. All of us have more new projects going than we can manage.
Doug - figuring out NZ/US tax laws, life on a sheep station
Carolyn - horses again, gardening, NZ UWC, school volunteering, raising chickens with boys, composting/worms, helping out on the station (like halter training Alpaca), studying Pilates again
Colin & Liam - Happy Hens business and newsletter, raising a little lamb (which means more afterschool chores)

That is why blogging has fallen off for me. I have had trouble focusing as I have so many new things going that I can't seem to fit it all in day. I have decided that maybe I don't have to do everything all at once and in the first year, which is probably a reasonable idea considering the first year ended yesterday.

11. Despite Doug's raised eyebrows, we've added more than one animal a month:

-already had one dog that immigrated from U.S.
-Santa brought a kitten
-Carolyn got a horse
-Colin and Liam adopted 12 hens and a rooster
-yesterday the farm manager delivered an orphaned lamb born early in the day (more details coming from Liam with pictures). The lamb spent last night in the kitchen in a dog crate with the cat looking in from the top and the dog looking in the side.

12. This year plus period (13 plus months) is the longest stretch of time all of us have been out of the US. (Doug may have been out for this long as a child in Iran but he can't remember. Grams, do you remember?)

13. Until we went to Fiji this month, none of us had been on an airplane since arrival in NZ (11+ months). We've seen a regular stoplights twice, in Christchurch in February and in Auckland (on the way home from Fiji) this month. There has been so much to explore at home and locally that we haven't even felt the urge to leave the Wakatipu Basin.

Tonight we head out to the Queenstown Jazz Festival with new friends, Cath and John, to celebrate John's birthday and our anniversary. Their daughter Hebe is Liam's classmate and friend. Hebe's going to spend the night at our house and help take care of the lamb.