Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Yesterday, I wrote about having a Murphy Law Day (did I just coin a new acronym, MLD?). It was so bad I didn't even post it on Facebook, as usual. Today, we had a total rebound. We ate breakfast in our apartment and then headed out to a nearby park while the temperature was less than 90 degrees. The first part of the park was Jubilee Playground, where Henry created his own "ninja warrior" course. Then we headed up into Fort Canning Park. The old fort was unexceptional but the gardens and other natural features were spectacular. Back at the apartment we had a session of school. It went better than I expected, since school often doesn't go well the first time in a new place. We were wise to set our expectations low! Newly refreshed and educated, we headed off for lunch. Our friend Randy was in Singapore nearly 3 months ago and send us a cryptic note that he had left us something "under table 118 at the Maxwell Road Hawker Centre." Fir...

Probably the southernmost site on our trip: Slope Point, New Zealand Everybody was right: the distances in New Zealand are very deceiving. It takes a really long time to go anywhere. I'd guess our typical travel speed has been 45 miles per hour. One funny thing about this is that the national default speed limit is 100 kph (62 mph), which our navigation displays no matter where we are, including this gravel road. Going 42kph in a 100 zone; out the windshield you can see the gravel and in the nav you can see the curves! Anyway, we left Dunedin mid-morning on Wednesday and took about an hour to reach Balclutha on the motorway. We found a lovely municipal park with a picnic table, a great playground and a weird, small zoo. Then it was on to the Nugget Point Lighthouse, where we enjoyed a short hike hoping to see Penguins (no) but got rewarded with some baby sparrows in their nest (in the blind from which we hoped to spot the penguins!) Hoping to see some Yellow-Eyed Pengu...

Things didn’t go badly today but they did go wrong. First, school went quite well. Lily is struggling with her latest essay, a report on Treasure Island, but she’s making good progress. Elise has advanced her technique for teaching phonics to the twins and that seems to be helping. I don’t know if I’ve written it down anywhere else so I’ll say it here: Henry’s biggest problem with school is reading directions. Heaven help this boy if he every has to assemble IKEA furniture.  Second, we returned to the amazing playground at Kings Park to have lunch at the cafe. A meal goes quite well when the kids have that amazing facility to enjoy while the food is being prepared. They also ate quickly and without fuss so that they could get back to their play. We even had some fun kicking around a soccer ball together (all six of us doing one thing, mostly happily). We snuck in a picture of our twelve feet just to memorialize the place. Third, we headed downtown to rent bi...