Life seems to be chugging on very quickly towards Christmas. We have booked some tickets back to New Zealand at Christmas which we are all looking forward to. Carl has one more tour to PNG before year end though so still a fare amount of work to get through both on the home and work fronts before we can kick back for a bit.

Attached a couple of recent photos - Millie performing as the "cat and the fiddle' in her school assembly item and then dancing with her classmates and then Poppy hanging out in a tree at the airport with her friends Betsy and Marian while we wait for Dad to get off the plane.

We're heading out to the Western Province next week for 4 days - will take an hour flight and 20 minute boat ride to get to small Island called Lola Island in the middle of a large Lagoon area. Is meant to be beautiful so will fill you in when we get back. Havent told the kids so they will just get out of bed one morning, told not to put on their school uniforms but get ready to go on a plane!!! Should be a cool surprise.

Island Day

Keeping three kids entertained during school holidays with Mum at work and Dad away has been a bit of a mission. We've tried a variety of tricks from trips to the beach, swimming at the local hotel, crafts, not to mention the fun they have had in Carl's hut with the neighbourhood kids.

Today we had "Island Day" an idea the girls conjured up in bed the night before!!!
They made grass (plastic really) skirts with Cathy and my help, danced to Island Music, made a fabulous fruit salad with mangoes, pineapple, watermelon and banana, and set up all our bedrooms like a tropical resort with towels and flowers on our beds. There were also flowers scavenged from the neighbourhood and placed in vases all around the house.

They had heaps of fun!! Only 2 days of school holidays to go!!


Now unfortunately not everything in the tropics smells as nice as a ripe mango or frangapani's!!! At work we have competing bad smells making life painful. After months of rats eating holes in our office walls and scavenging from the rubbish bins poison got put out......now we have the delightful smell of dead rotting rats. Add that to the fact that we again have no water in the building for toilets and you can imagine that fragrant frangapani's are but a distant memory!!!

Of the delights and contrasts of the Solomon Islands