New Zealand Adventure: Thanksgiving!

     Last weekend was insane. I had Thanksgiving, went to a birthday party on a boat and went sky diving!!! Due to our crazy busy schedule we couldn't celebrate Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving so we had to celebrate it the weekend before. I have to mention how awesome Rob and Tanya were about letting me celebrate and helping pay for food and letting me have people over. They were so flexible and helpful. My Thanksgiving story really starts a month ago when I was trying to figure out how you get a turkey. This is not a turkey eating country. You can buy frozen turkeys but they are hard to come by. After calling a few different butchers I found on that could get me a fresh turkey. Saturday rolled around and I showed up to collect my turkey. The fresh turkey had gone off on the way to me so I was presented with a fully frozen turkey. This was not ideal because Thanksgiving was at 3pm and I picked the turkey up at 10 am. There was no way to thaw the turkey. Luckily Tanya had gotten a turkey breast bake that was stuffed with a cranberry stuffing and she went out and bought me a chicken to cook. Turkey disaster averted I started cooking. I had done most of the prep the day before so it was only the meat, gravy and heating up the food that I had to do.
    Kaiya and Indigo set the table. Kaiya made paper lanterns for each place setting. They also made place cards and folded the napkins. By the time that people started arriving the table was beautiful. Tess, Rachelle, Ariel and Ben all came. The girls are all American. Ben is a kiwi.
   When the guests arrived Kaiya helped them trace their hands and had them write something they were thankful for on their hand print before putting it on our thankful tree. We had made the thankful tree the day before as a way to talk with the kids about being thankful and appreciating what we have.
     Other than the turkey issue my first solo Thanksgiving went off very well. Ariel brought pie and dressing. Tess brought salad. Rachelle brought a pumpkin cake. I made mashed potatoes, turkey/chicken, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, holiday sangria and gravy (with some help from Tanya).
    After dinner and dessert Ariel and I scrambled to get ready for our boat party then drove into town. We got there only a tiny bit late. Our friend Mary and her boyfriend Nathan have birthdays super close together. Nathan works on the boat and the owner was kind enough to let us use the boat for the evening. We sailed out to Takapuna beach. It was cool to see it from the water. Normally I'm on land looking out. We had so much fun. There was lots of laughing and dancing and meeting new people. It was an awesome party.
    The next morning we woke up and got ready to sky dive. The place we were jumping from is two hours north of Auckland. Our jump was delayed because they had bad weather. It was beautiful in Auckland though so we hung out on the beach for a bit then got in the car to start heading north. We were going to stop at some markets on the way up but they said to come straight up as the weather had cleared. When we got there we drove around the air port a few times before finding the right place. We got signed in and all of the paper work sorted. Then we had to wait an hour before our jump so we went to a near by beach so we wouldn't be so nervous. When we got back to the sky diving place we found out that we still had to wait and that all four of us couldn't jump together. They have two planes. One fits one person and a tandem master and the other fits two people and their tandem masters. Elisa went first which was really good because she really liked it which made it easier for Ariel and I to go. I really enjoyed going up because the views were amazing. We could see out over the ocean and some farms on the land. The tide was out so the ocean was more sand than water. It was still beautiful though. I wasn't nervous until they opened the door to the plane. When they open the door it gets really really cold and noisy. I had a few seconds where I thought that I didn't want to. Luckily I was strapped to someone else who was jumping out of the plane. He didn't give me much warning just flung us out of the plane and did a summer salt. We free fell for 45 seconds. It was awesome! I loved the free fall. After he deployed the parachute he let me steer it which was fun. It takes a lot of upper body strength to move it about. I absolutely loved it. I would jump out of a plane again.

P.S. Due to issues with technology I haven't been able to move them into chronological order