The Reynoldz

Well, we here at the Reynoldz home, we are definitely thankful for this wonderful woman. She keeps our lives moving around here. She sure puts up with alot, and I have not been around much, so all the kid duties fall squarely on her shoulders. We all love her very much.

The next day we road quad bikes for a few hours all over this amazing valley just East of Queenstown. And on the last day we played 18 holes of golf. We were pretty horrible. Thankfully, we had booked a Monday morning so there was almost no one else on the course. It took about five hours to finish.

Today's advent belongs to our Reynolds. We really are lucky to have this guy in our lives. He is hard working, funny, creative, and caring. He is a great daddy and friend... We sure do love him!
This weekend he went away for a boyz weekend in Queentown to help celebrate a friends 40th b-day. He called and told me that they played golf, black jack, went hiking, cave repelling, rode quad bikes... and much more... He is flying back home sometime tonight and the girlz and I are excited to have him back and hoping he is all in one piece after his crazy all boy weekend bender....

These pictures are compliments of my sister Gail. I sure do love that girl.. :)

We sent the MN cousins a little advent gift of 4 grassy head x-mas figures.. (x-mas chia pets)






This is my sister Gail's beautiful family...















Here is my brother Glenn's family (and Matt)..


















We are missing MN cousin pix of Michelle and Jacquline..

Last year the girls and I flew to Minnesota and got to spend Christmas with all the cousins... We had a great time. (so much better than blogger family connections)

We really miss family and especially so at this time of year.

Here are some old pics we found from our great time back in the states last summer. That is Jeb and Finn hanging out with their girl cousins.

We got the girls, school photos back...

We went to Haidyn's choir Christmas concert over the weekend. This past year Haidyn has been attending a really great city sponsored music class on Saturday mornings.

Next year Athea will be able to go to since she is now 5. I am thankful for the music program and for the teachers that give up their Saturday mornings to expose children to the wonders of music.

(In the video, Haidyn is the one with with a black shirt on the right hand side) The song they are singing is called... SMILE, I hope you get infected - :)

SMILE

Smiling is infectious,
you catch it like the flu,
When someone smiled at me today,
I started smiling too.

I passed around the corner
and someone saw my grin
When he smiled I realized
I'd passed it on to him.

I thought about that smile
and I recognised its worth,
A single smile, just like mine
could travel round the earth.

So, if you feel a smile begin,
don't leave it undetected
Let's start an epidemic quick,
and get the world infected!

Santa is not the only one coming to town!! Both sets of Grandparents are also coming to town and man oh man are we excited around here!

My Mom and Dad (Grandma D and Grandpa Teddy Bear) are coming on Jan 1 and Grandma Jo and PaPa (Eric's folks) are coming out in February... We are sure thankful that they are taking the long journey away from winter to find us in the NZ summer!

So even though we live way out here in New Zealand, (sorry mom), we always know when my Dad is off on some adventure. That is because he has this GPS device that he can fire off whenever he is in some cool place, and an e-mail is sent out to this big list of friends which shows (via google maps) exactly where he is on earth. So I can wake up some morning, and Anna will be at the computer reading e-mails and she will say something like "looks like your dad is hunting." because an e-mail has shown up with my dad's location pointer somewhere in the middle of some mountain range in Montana. It's also cool, because this GPS device also has a emergency button, which not only send's out his location e-mail but also e-mails out something like "Emergency - Help!" and then I imagine an army of e-mail friends in Bozeman all load up and race out to his location to help him. Only to find that it wasn't a true emergency, but that he really just needed help hauling a large elk back to his truck. Ha ha. He hasn't done that. Yet. My parents are coming out this February and Dad and I are doing the Milford Trek. So any of his e-mail recipients are going to get many e-mails of his locations among the mountians in the south island.
By the way, it was a pretty good year hunting for my Dad. It isn't very often that he gets an elk of this size!

A bunch of our close friends are throwing a Christmas party on the 24th of December. We will have it in the Breaker Bay Hall. It is a small building in Breaker Bay that we all own a part of and anyone can use it. It has an old upright piano in it. I am in charge of playing piano while we all sing Christmas carols. I have many years of piano lessons under my belt, but I am pretty bad at sight reading. Anna got me a beginner's book of Christmas carols. I am practicing every day. Because once the carolers get going, they aren't going to wait for me to catch up. I'm thankful for all the piano lessons my parents forced on me. And I'm happy to see my two girls starting their own lessons. We have a wonderful New Zealand girl who comes over to our house every Tuesday and gives them both a lesson.

So the girls have been counting down the days until last Sunday. Because that is the day we told them we would be bringing down all the Christmas stuff from the attic. Haidyn started cleaning up the house from Friday on, as she knows dad doesn't let the stuff come down until the house is clean.