No exciting news to report....

Just to report in to save people the trouble of phoning or emailing us..... no, there is no baby in our house yet.... 8 (
And now the obstetrician has gone away to Florida for 5 days over the Thanksgiving holiday....
We are booked in for an induction on Tuesday 28th (obviously that's US time, so Wednesday in NZ/Australia) if nothing happens between now and then.

Here we go - the sideways shot! This was taken on Friday evening... 

Does 1 day make a difference? Or is it my imagination that this baby gets bigger every day? This picture was taken on Saturday... 

Here is the baby room! 

And from a different angle 

And here is the little bassinet in our bedroom 

A Baby Shower!

The wonderful friends at Detroit Metro church put on a baby shower for us! Although baby showers in NZ are a relatively new phenomena, I did spend the last few years of my single life actively avoiding them (although in my defence, I DID always buy a present for the mother-to-be!!). Pictures are on the Kodak gallery – click here for the link and a big THANK YOU to everyone who came (especially the people with no kids!!!).

A weekend away....

In September, we decided that we should make the most of the last few months without having a baby and it’s associated paraphernalia to take with us, and had a weekend away. We went to the northern part of Michigan – to Traverse City and Mackinaw Island. We had been to Traverse City a couple of times before (see blog entries from Feb 2005 and Jamie's entertaining travel-log from June 2005) so we even had favourite restaurants to return to! But I had never been to Mackinaw (also spelled Mackinac) Island before. The island is in the middle of Lake Huron, near where it joins Lake Michigan and there are no cars allowed (apart from one fire truck I think). So everyone gets around by bike or horse & cart. We stayed at the Grand Hotel which was quite awesome (the island and the hotel were where the movie ‘Somewhere in Time’ with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour was filmed). On the way up to Traverse City we stopped at a little farm market which had the most amazing fruit and veges. We bought some peaches and I have never, ever had a peach so sweet and so delicious. It was a shame the camera battery had died as I would have taken a cool photo of ‘James and the Giant Peach’ as it was as big as half a coconut! One of the restaurants we went to was called Amical and has an incredibly yummy tomato bisque with a pastry top covering the bowl! We also bought a cool picture for our bedroom wall (pic below).

The Grand Hotel was amazing – just like the pictures on their website. So much so that sometime we do need to go back and explore the rest of the island!! The 5 course meal was very nice and then afterwards we went and sat outside on the huge front porch in two rocking chairs and just rocked and rocked with a cool breeze blowing. Quite magical! When it was time to leave, we sent our luggage down to the boat via the horse and cart and had a leisurely stroll down the hill, though the trees and in and out of little shops before taking the boat back across the lake. We drove back up to Traverse City to buy the picture we had seen and to go to ‘Scallawags’ which is the closest thing to a fish & chip shop that we’ve ever seen in the US.

Last time we were in New Zealand (for Jac & HIgh's wedding), we bought this very cool painting of pohutakawa (also known as the NZ Christmas tree as it flowers at Christmas) from a very cool shop called 'Artport' at Auckland airport. It is the absolute perfect colours to bring the living room together and for people who don�t know what it is, it is cool enough to look like an abstract painting!

Here is the picture we bought in Traverse City - the leaves are real leaves that have been skeletonised and then coloured and it is perfect to match the colours of the stained glass windows in our bedroom. It�s hard to tell from this pic that the frame is a kind of shadow box so the black background is about 2 inches back from the glass and the leaves are at different angles (ie it�s very 3-D!).