Danny's News

Danny's going to Moscow, Russia!

Red Square and Saint Basil's Cathedral

The Kremlin and the Moscow River

Yдачи! Danny!

Report date:  June 27, 2018.

Danny opened his call about midnight, by himself, up the canyon.  He got us on a video conference call sometime afterward, and, while siblings made funny-photos on the web-cams, Danny gave us the news.

Danny:  "It's perfect."

Christmas Part 2 including Timber Trail

biking and exploring in Rotorua

Oak:  "I never thought our family would go on a biking vacation."  Oak's friends' families do this regularly, but now he's not quite as deprived as he used to be. :)

Sage:  "I totally get why you like biking so much now!"  (Sage to Oak after riding 'The Dipper' with Mercy.  'The Dipper' is one of the easy bike trails at the Rotorua mountain biking site.)

After a day at Rotorua, we spent two days on the Timber Trail.

Timber Trail!!!  2-Day gem of a bike trail.  Deep, deep green.

Timber Trail - forest bathing in Green-ness

The following photos of Timber Trail are not my own, but they give a better idea than mine.  It felt otherworldly.   These pictures jog my memory.

Pukekura Park Festival of Lights is just a few minutes from our house.  It's quite extraordinary, even holding the honor of being the most expensive property on the NZ Monopoly Board.  Our evening at the Festival has become my new association with the song "Time in a Bottle," both because of the feeling we had and because we listened to this song in MAVY both coming and going.  

New Year's Eve - a new tradition.  

Mike and I decided to shake things up.  We broke a 12-year tradition and did NOT plan a New Year's party; yet we felt vicariously epic through Oak and Mercy.  They camped on Mt. Taranaki to see the sun set on 2017 and rise on 2018. 

Danny and I hosted a lunch party for friends and Mr. Prasad and went on some memorable drives.

last dinnertime before Danny left

Monopoly Deal, of course

Books of the Week:

Christmas 2017, Part 1

Christmas was an especially precious, happy time this year.  Life keeps getting richer and richer.

After a series of mishaps with passport and lost/stolen luggage, Mike and I were thrilled to have Danny back in Taranaki!  We found out about his delayed flight as we were cleaning the garage.

Having Danny back home, wiser and more confident than when he left last year, was the best part of Christmas.

Sing-along without guests this year - very nice. 

 Joyce can read!  For the first time, every member of our family could be engaged, and no one was complaining that they didn't know the words.   

We also threw together a family arrangement of "Mary's Boy Child" for Margaret's awesome Christmas program at church.  

Christmas Eve

Christmas morning

Noah- a peaceful, calm listener

summertime

2017: The Year in Quotes

JOYCE, age 6

Joyce answers the phone: "Joneses, Joyce speaking."
Auto mechanic:  "Well, hello there.  How's your morning?"

Joyce:  "I'm ready for school!"

Auto mechanic:  "So you have your room cleaned and your lunch packed?"

Joyce: ...long pause...  "I wasn't talking about that part of it." 

"I can’t wait until I’m big enough to clean the church."
 - Attitude makes all the difference.  

“WE like to tackle!”

Sage and Joy were discussing why fewer girls play rugby, and Sage postulated that it might be because rugby involves tackling and "girls don’t like to tackle."  Joyce gave this indignant response.

“Do I need to understand what’s going on?”
 -Overheard while Mercy and Sage were planning out an extensive game involving maps.  

"Mom, are we white people or black people?"
  - no going back...


"I would be a larvae."
 - Joyce's response when I asked her what animal she would like to be.  Her first response was "a ladybug" but then she realized that the child stage of ladybug is larvae.


"I like doing cadences. A LOT."
 - June 2017, while practicing the piano.


"Now I want to see the famous things in New Zealand."
 - Joyce's response to our trip to London, July 2017.

Sage:  "Stop doing that, you're giving me a wedgie." 

Joycie:  "What's a wedgie? It sounds cool."

"Yes! More stairs!"
 - Tramping in New Zealand is more fun when you enjoy counting stairs.  There were 235 total on the Te Henga walkway.

Joyce to Sage on the phone on the way home from Back Beach:  "I found a new elder wand. You 

can share it if you want. I also got a rock and so now it's an instrument."
 - So much innocent brilliance in these couple of sentences

new elder wand and a rock that's an instrument

Danny: "Do you know how to play chess?"

Joyce: "Yes! But I got no strategies."

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SAGE, age 9

Sage:  "Why are Joyce and I not getting fat?"

Joyce:  "I am!"  (Sticking out belly)

Sage:  "Well, you are.  Why am I not getting fat?"

Mercy:  "You guys are both nuggets!"

 -overheard on April 9, 2017

"Why is there only one cloud doing snow?"
 - Sage wondering why there's snow on Mount Taranaki and nowhere else.  

Oak: "That seems to describe Sage a lot".
- after hearing the definition of "disingenuous"

Sage: "I've been thinking...basically I've always wanted to be better at dancing but I've never had a life goal of becoming a good pianist."
 - Sage stops piano lessons, a bigger deal in our family than in most.

"Mom, you're the BEST/ Mom, you're AWESOME/ Mom, you're the BEST/ Mom, you're AWESOME"  (repeated many times)
-This song lasted the entire 2017 school year!  

"Oatmeal"
-a moment from "Frosty the Snowman" that had
Sage and Joyce in hysterics. 
One of many inside jokes they share.  

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Mercy, age 12

"Sage is a zombie and I’m a washing machine."  
 -Describing a game played while flossing teeth in the bathroom.


"I actually had the most fun day I’ve ever had."  
  - Mercy celebrates Mike and my anniversary, April 26, 2017.  I was gone to Auckland to take the GRE.  Mike sleeping after night shift.  Oak was working at Wiltons.  Girls had no jobs and a FREE day.  They played a map game most of the day.  

Mercy asks Oak about planning the Big Bang adventure race, which is in November.  Oak replies that its too far away to think about, that Mercy is the “only” one who is so organised.  Mercy:  “I never FEEL organised, though!”  Oak:  “*I* always feel organised."

"You're dramatic-AZ."
 - Veronica Chen, runner-up to Mercy in the Te Awamutu comps, gracefully complimenting Mercy after prizegiving.


"That's where I get all of my core strength...from laughing."
  -Oct 9.


"Let's go see the maggots!"
 -Oct 11. On the way to see the gannets. Murewei beach.


"I feel like I'm forgetting something."
 -if Mercy didn't say this as she left home, she would finally be forgetting something.




____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Oak, age 16

"We should have recorded that." 

Oak after BJ Smith's home teaching visit.


"Now I understand why Danny didn’t think he could do Hillary and piano."
 -March 2017, two months before the weeklong Hilary adventure race championships.  Oak's schedule got very busy.

"Your race was about perfect."

 - memorable compliment from Nick to Oak's team after Go-4-12 adventure race.


"He used to be a caveman/ Now he’s on Instagram."
 - quote from the poem that Gavin wrote to Oak on his 16th birthday, celebrating the fact that Oak received a smartphone.

"You can’t beat a classic stitch up, I reckon.”
 - one of Oak and Jason's favorite quotes from the stitch-up YouTube video.


"Everything that happened before Hillary seems like it happened ages ago."
 - June 2017.

"I want to....just not badly."
 -Oak's diplomatic response to the girls' attempt to persuade him to watch 'Princess Bride' again with them.

"It was sad - they had no respect for the manu."
 - Oak's response when I asked him about the swim party at the Space Camp in Houston, TX.  The "manu" is a particular kind of water bomb dive that any self-respecting Kiwi kid - especially a teenage boy - has developed and which is a matter of personal pride.


"I've been feeling like the deprived child quite a lot lately."
 -Aug 2017.  Sometimes expressed as "Dibs on being the deprived child."

"I dreamt about it last night."
 -October 26. The morning before Oak picked up his new mountain bike.


"You're the head boy of our house." Joyce to Oak.
 -October 27.


"Let's go be muppets together."
 -Oak persuading Jason not to back out of a Halloween party. Oak dressed as native bush. Jason dressed as a swan. (Jay-Swan.)

muppets together

"The only reason I wasn’t going to go was because it was going to be wet and miserable.  But I don’t think that’s a good enough reason." 
- Dec 31, heading up the mountain with Mercy, hoping to watch the sun rise on the New Year, 2018.  

____________________________________________________________________

Danny, age 18

“Swoon"
 - a friend reported to me her middle-school daughter's reaction to Danny's name coming up in conversation.

"I kind of hope it's manual labor so I can get big."
 -Danny's has high hopes for his summer job as an electrician's apprentice. 

"I'm on five intramural teams."
 - When we asked how Danny was adjusting to university life during our first phone call with him after he started courses at BYU.

"Let's just please figure this out as soon as possible because my phone is pretty important to my college life."
 -humble email from Danny 13 Oct 2017 after his phone fell and broke. 

"Well, people break the rules, but it's nothing serious. A couple of guys have tasers. We were tazing each other the other day. We steal the couches from the lobby and put them in our room."
 -When Mike asked Danny if he saw other students breaking rules or BYU's honor code.  Budge hall. Oct 2017.


"Everyone I interact with is planning on leaving on a mission. It's kind of weird."
 -Oct 2017.



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Noah

"I hear more from your son than I do from mine."
 - Beth Hockey, one of Noah's friend's moms about Noah's missionary emails.  I get many comments from acquaintances and friends in New Plymouth about how interesting it has been to read about Noah's experiences in Bulgaria.

_____________________________________________________________________

Mike and Holly

Holly to kids:  "Just think about 'like' as a swear word."
 - genius


Mike:  "Did you know chewing a piece of this (gum) is negative 4 calories? Sometimes I chew 2 packs a day!"
 -more genius

Mike:  "I love peach! It's one of my favorite flavours!"
 -Moments before sticking a vomit flavoured bean in his mouth, thanks to Mercy and Joyce) General conference Oct. 2017. 

Mike to kids: "I don't get your mother. When we lived in Germany she loved the Germans for their punctuality, for their directness, for their seriousness, for saying exactly what they meant. But now we are in New Zealand and she loves the Polynesians for being almost the opposite:  relaxed, easy-going, spiritual, and rarely punctual."

Mike and boys were all out of town.  I announced to the girls that we were going to Subway for dinner and got an outcry:
"What has happened to our family!?  We're not even traveling" - Mercy

"Have you told Dad yet?" -Sage

"We should get cookies, since our family is already falling apart." - Mercy
"I still don't get this." - Joyce 

Mike: "You think every day is normal, but normal only lasts a couple of months."

"I don't know what's happened to all the Pakehas. All these others are fine, but where are all the Pakehas?"
 - the frail and elderly former convener of Te Awamutu, herself a Pakeha (New Zealander of European descent).  She had contributed 30 years of volunteer work as leader of the local piano competitions before retiring.

John S. to Holly: "You're the only Mormon I know in New Zealand." and "I assume that the strongest Mormon population in New Zealand is in the New Plymouth area."
 - unexpected comments from one of the professors in the Otago Religious Studies department after I took a few classes last term.  As a Mormon, I felt very noticed in the department.

Holly: if a capitalist could hang on to the religious underpinnings to his/her reasons for work, to a sense of calling, could the iron cage, the rat race, be avoided?

Otago religion department reading group. Long pause. "We're way past that". "It's too late"

(Last Weber reading group)

Mike: "You need a close-up using a drone!!"

Holly: "You are confirming my worst fears about you and a drone."

 - Mike viewing pictures of the gannet colony

Links to previous years:

2016 Quotes

2015 Year in Quotes

Quotes - 2014

2013 Quotes - Look for Trends

Books:

audio book for the ride to Rotorua and Timber Trail

An ER Story and the Goat

When you are married to an ER doc, you hear a lot of interesting stories over the dinner table, but this was one of the most startling stories that I've heard in a while...

Excerpt of an email from Mike:
On Tuesday this week a seven year old boy presented to the Waikato Emergency Department with a chief complaint of infected finger wound.  

The young boy had injured the tip of his right third finger 3-4 weeks earlier.  Details are a bit sketchy, because no one exactly remembered how the injury occurred.  The boy kept talking about getting a sliver in his finger.  In typical Kiwi fashion, his parents thought-- "she'll be right", bandaged the finger with a simple plaster (bandaid) and thought no more about it.

The wound didn't heal.  The kid, being a typical, trusting 7-year-old, assumed wounds sometimes don't heal quickly and stopped complaining about the wound to his parents.  On the day before his presentation to our emergency department, his finger was aching something fierce and he thought he better investigate.  He took off the plaster which he had been changing regularly for the past 3 weeks and saw something sticking out of the wound that he was certain was the offending splinter.  He pulled it out, and decided to save it to show to his school class at "show-and-tell" the next day.  He reapplied a plaster and thought all would soon be well.

The next day he stood up proudly in front of his school class and produced the "big splinter" that he had pulled out of his finger.  His teacher became immediately concerned as she thought the "splinter" looked suspiciously like a "bone".  She requested that the boy show her his wound, and after removing the plaster she immediately called the boy's parents and an ambulance to come and take the boy to the hospital.  

The teacher's instincts were good. Initial x-rays in the ED revealed that the "splinter" the boy had pulled from his finger wound was actually the entire distal phalanx (finger bone) of that finger.  The bone and surrounding tendons/ligaments had become infected and somewhat rotten, making it possible for the boy to "pull it out" like a splinter.

The child was started on antibiotics, allowed to keep his "splinter" and will be followed up daily in the hospital wound clinic for the next two weeks to ensure his infected wound heals appropriately.  He'll have a shortened finger.  Social work and traveling nurses are on the case to ensure these follow-up appointments are kept.

Just one more example that "She'll Be Right, Mate" isn't a universal truth-- no matter what your Kiwi friends tell you.  

*********

Pictures from the last few weeks....last weeks of school...beginning of summer...

Ready for school

Watching the sheep shearing competition at the Stratford A&P Show, which was a lot like a country fair in USA,
but gumboots instead of cowboy boots, and no country music.  The fact that Oak happened to know 2 out of the 6 shearers that we happened to watch gives some insight into our community.

on the way to the "Goat" mountain race

Oak, Mike, and I all entered.  Oak finished 20K in just over 2 hours, finishing 4th out of 600 athletes.  I finished 570th!

what a course

end of the New Plymouth rogaine series - Joneses take the high family score

dance recitals

on the way to Ratapihipihi - one of the 5K loops from our house

Mercy and friends found Goat Rock in the Kaitakes.  Mercy is 'dux' of Yr. 9!

swimming after school

Oak on Tongariro camp

time for snowflakes

Books