i Chart You - Our Genealogy Print

For Christmas I organised and framed this i Chart You print and hung it on the wall for Christmas morning for Graeme to unwrap.

As we have been studying te reo Māori this year, Graeme has been very interested in his whakapapa and has been investigating his own family trees.

I noticed he had a few gaps to fill in, so I took it upon myself to send out a lot of emails to fill in the blanks for him! I was able to find everyones middle names too, but unfortunately many of them couldn't fit in the fields available!

Since Christmas all of our visitors have been drawn to look at it in our lounge. Usually the first thing they note is that Graeme's name is a hypenation of his parents (most people presume its from me), and also that Graemes grandparents changed their surname. 

It sparks a whole lot of conversation and is a great art piece and also information piece for our whānau to have! I almost have every person memorised.

I chart you designed this print and they have lots of other colour combos available. You simply fill in the form they have with all of your relations and they design it up and send it to you as a PDF. Take it to the printers and get it printed and framed! I bought a large design in a frame from The Warehouse and took out their "art", and replaced it with my print to be able to get a square frame this big! 

My advice is to choose your frame first, and to have all your info ready to go! It makes the process much faster, and they can design your print to fit your frame.

This isn't a sponsored post, I'm simply telling you this because I love our print and I see real value in displaying (and learning) your genealogy.

Also today while dinner was cooking I pulled off the old fabric from my footstool and replaced it with these pretty feathers! Amy originally gave me this footstool about 4 or 5 years ago. It's had a cow print on it all this time but was SO grubby from all the use over the years; I'm glad it's got another life covered in blue feathers! Thanks Deb for all the fabric!

Thanks for stopping by! Let me know if you ever get an i Chart! I'd love to see it! 

Summer Road Trips 2016

The summer of 2016 - The greatest one yet!

This summer has been filled with family, friends, barbecues, treats, lots of kilometres on the speedo, togs, sandy bottoms and sunscreen.

Can it get any better?

We actually weren't planning on going any where this summer but made a little plan a few days out from New Years to go visiting around the South Island. 

We went to Westport, Mapua, and Akaroa (over 1000km) within 9 days, only spending a few days at each destination. Just enough time to settle in and see everything we wanted to see and spend time with each of the kids grandparents.

For some of our trip we were out of data or out of range, and truly this was the best part. We read books, played games (learnt backgammon!) and did cross words. It was so nice to see my husband relaxing while we were out of touch with the world.

The girls have three sets of wonderful Grandparents that they are truly blessed by. It was great to holiday with them at each destination and have some fun together.

So, those nine days really did feel like a whole summers worth of time. And now we're back to reality; Kindy drop offs and lunches made, meal plans and washing and all the fun stuff that comes with running a home and family.

Blessed!