waitangi day

it was waitangi day today which is a public holiday and you don’t have to go to work. 

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unfortunately it falls on a saturday this year which means you only get the day off if you usually work on a saturday.  no bank holiday roll-overs for this particular holidays i’m afraid.

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anyway, we decided to make the most of this most historical of celebratory days by having lots of fun.

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it started with a party for kezia’s birthday.  it was due to start at 10.30am but jane and i didn’t wake up until 10am so it eventually got underway at 11.30.

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it was really fantastic.  you might have guessed from the pictures above that it was a Gary and Grimbods themed party.  (Gary and the Grimbods are Esther’s imaginary band of frog musicians who have their own fan club and everything).

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we got to dress as different band members.  i was particularly honoured to be Gary himself

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at the party we played bowling (this is me having just taken my turn)

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we each had our own microphones

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we played pin the microphone on the Grimbod. we also played some flappy paper frog racing game and a hunt the jigsaw game and a musical dancing game.

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it was really quite fantastic.  so good in fact that esther wore a tea-towel.

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after all that fun we took kezia to a swimming pool party for one of her friends

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so the rest of us went to mairangi bay and had a wander about looking for geocaches and generally enjoying the really warm weather

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we walked along the bottom of the cliffs to the next bay and back over the top again.  it really was lovely

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then we had an icecream, picked up kezia and went home.  jane cooked up a pizza which we then took to long bay (our local beach)

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after a while swimming in the sea (for the girls) we sat down to a very posh picnic.  we gradually improving our picnic technique so expect table cloths and proper wine glasses before the season is out.  today we had cloth napkins (but didn’t use them)

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after eating we had a great game of frisbee which involved me being quite active, although not as active as jane who did some spontaneous handstands.  then we came home and watched ‘Second Hand Wedding’ which is a lovely film set in New Zealand and well worth a watch.

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and in other news, the electric mower we bought then sold on Trademe (kiwi version of ebay) broke so we had to refund the chap we sold it too :-(  he seemed ok about it, but we still feel bad.  oh well.

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here’s kezia in her new birthday dress.