anyone actually read this bit?

I’ve heard that some of you are wondering if we’ll ever get around to updating beyond December.  Fair call – no excuse really.

We had a lovely Samoan Christmas celebrated in the morning by the 4 of us opening pressies at home, then heading out later in the day to celebrate with various other expats living here. Mostly Aussies, strangely enough.  

Aunty Kirst arrived on Boxing day which was lots of fun and a good excuse to play tourists for a while showing her the sights. We headed of to the big island of Savaii for a bit under a week and had a lovely time snorkeling around the coral, frolicking in waterfalls, swimming with turtles and getting RAINED on. It was the start of us understanding why they call it the rainy season – WOW.

After Kirst left we hunkered down all prepared for a tropical cyclone which managed to narrowly miss Samoa but headed on to do a bit of damage in Tonga I think.  It was a good excuse to try out our Kerosene Hurricane lamps and stock up on supplies and figure out everything that we needed to have around if a true emergency situation should strike.  Living in a house where 90% of the external walls are glass (louvers so you can pretend it's a fale) is a bit off putting with cyclone warnings.

Getting back into work took a bit of effort but we both seemed to have settled back in now. B is working on the balance between keeping good surgery skills and helping out with Practice Management – What the?? The girl who thought she would never be into Management stuff is secretly enjoying it – for now anyway. Steve’s work is still pottering along slowly with small victories every so often but unfortunately for him it’s a bit more difficult to generate good direction compared with b’s job.

Justus is loving school this year and seems even more settled and motivated to learn which is great – he’s going to be a 6 year old in a couple of days – who can believe that?? Riley continues being 99% sweet, lovely girl and 1% stubborn as a petrol bomb. She too is enjoying being back at school with her beloved teacher Joy and her friends.

Granny is here for 2 and a ½ weeks at the moment and came with at least 15kg of gifts and lovely stuff for our family – Bless Her. It’s so lovely to have visitors from home. Samoa is super beautiful, the people lovely and we’re really happy being here doing what we do, but we still miss our homeland. Loads of love to all of you – we’ll try to not make it so long before the next one.