Ducklings

Spring is in the air along with duck feathers. The ducks who live next door to Aunt Melanie have twelve fuzzy yellow ducklings that hatched on Sunday. We've told Eddie and Chamille that ducklings are off limit for snacks and we hope they listen.

Sari Charlie

Lots of people from India live near Aunt Melanie. Today we stopped by the Sari Shop. The clothes are shiny and covered in sparkles. They even have versions for kids.

These clothes come in lots of bright colours and are worn for special occasions.

Waikaretu Caving

Today we went caving in Waikaretu (Why CARROT two). We saw stalagtites, stalagmites and creepy crawlies. We walked through water up to our knees and mud that went past our ankles. The mud sucked one of Melanie's shoes right off of her foot!
 

One part of the cave is a tight squeeze. We had to crawl on our hands and knees through an underground stream for 50 feet. The water was cold and the stream was rocky. An eel lives in that part of the cave. Eels are slimy, but don't bite people.
 

At the end of the cave, we climbed up stairs into the light. The surrounding bush is lush and thick with moss. Do you see the Dr. Suess trees? Those are called cabbage trees.

 

We saw a cave spider and many glow-in-the dark glow worms. Because their light is a soft blue glow, we weren't able to to take a picture of that. But you can see the long sticky strings that the glow worms use to catch their food. There was fungus that looked like hair. And outside we saw a bird called a tui in the flax plants.
 

New Zealand Toilet

Commodes in New Zealand don't have a handle to flush. They have two different bottons. The buttons on this one show a circle half filled in and a circle all the way filled in. The half filled in button flushes with half as much water as the button with the completely filled circle. Sometimes you need to use the button with the filled circle to flush down anything REALLY big.

 

They don't use the word commode here either. They just call them toilets. Ed the cat likes to jump on top of the toilet and push the buttons to make the toilet flush. Like a lot of animals, he likes drinking out of the toilet more than drinking out of his water bowl. And if he flushes the toilet, he gets very fresh toilet water to drink.