New Zealand

We’ve arrived!

The bump on Nathanh's head from his fall has disapeared but as you can see he now has a black eye.

Well, I had been dreading the 14 hour flight to Auckland but apparently I had nothing to worry about. Nathanh is a great little traveller! I think the most difficult part of the flight was the first half an hour. We were supposed to take off at 8:30 but the truck that pushes the plane away from the gate had problems and so it took quite some time to call a replacement vehicle. We had already been told to sit down and fasten seat belts so I had Nathanh on my lap...wide awake...waiting for his take off bottle...for 30 minutes. He was pretty good though and we sang lots of songs and looked at all the different things that we could see from our seats. Once we took off he got his bottle and all was good. He got up after that for the meal service. We were fortunate to have an extra seat in between us so we set up Nathanh’s new little travel booster seat and buckled him in, set up his tray and served up the infant meal the airline provided for us. I have to highly recommend Air New Zealand, they really do the a lot to ensure that babies are taken care of.

Anyways, Nathanh fell asleep at about 10:30 Vancouver time and slept for about 9.5 hours and really only woke up because the breakfast meal was being served. He did stir a couple of times but I put him in the carrier for awhile and held him while I slept, so really we all got a good night’s sleep. Even Erwin who NEVER sleeps well on a plane!

When we arrived in Auckland we picked up our car and drove to our hotel. It was still very early morning so we went shopping to get a few things for Nathanh that we decided to just buy here rather than bring with us and then we went for breakfast. After breakfast we went up the Sky Tower. Here are some pics of Nathanh high above Auckland.

Nathanh does not seem to be afraid of heights!

Sky Tower at night

When we finished seeing all we could see up the Sky Tower, we still had about an hour to kill before we could check into our hotel at 2:00 so we punched “park” into our navigation system and it took us to some lovely gardens at Carlaw Park. It reminded me a lot of Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver. So we wandered through the gardens and fish ponds until it started to lightly rain and then we thought it was time to go and check in finally.

Once we checked in Nathanh got a bottle and nap before we headed out for dinner. When we got back from dinner it was 8:00 and I wanted to keep Nathanh up until 9:00 (his usual bed time) so that his routine would be somewhat undisturbed. The problem was that since he had napped he was more awake than Erwin or me! Erwin went to bed...yeah, thanks for that...and I was “playing” with Nathanh. I say playing because I was basically asleep on the living room floor while he played beside me. Every now and then he’d walk over to me and give me a hug and then go back to playing...so sweet! At 9:00 he had his bottle and went to sleep without any problem and he slept until about 6:30 am, stayed quiet in bed with us until 7:00 and then we were all up. So not too bad, usually he wakes at 8:00am.

So all of that just to say that we arrived safely in Auckland and are not too worn down by all the travel. Stay tuned for more adventures!