We arrived in Queenstown exhausted and sick after a busy fun season. We started off with 6 weeks of house-sitting.

I curled up like a cat on the couch and enjoyed an enormous flat screen T.V with Netflix.

I was excited to start school again after a year of homeschooling. But the kids did not really welcome me with open arms. The girls were horrible and the boys, well lets just say they were just boys. I was disappointed. The silver lining was my teacher Miss Adele. She was lovely.

While house-sitting we had our first flurry of snow, enough to make a snowman and hide the enormous dog poos of Charlie the chocolate Lab we were dog-sitting.

It was time to get cracking literally on our next seasons circus show. I learned how to crack a whip. Our friend Shannon stayed with us for a few days. He is a Circus pro and helped us with our acro-balance. Soon after that we came up with our new magic show (a fun creative process)and began practice.

I had a fun birthday party with my Queenstown friends. I went to regular aerial hoop classes, dance classes and musical theater classes. I was working pretty hard.

We moved into our little old house in Authers point. It is about twice the size of our house truck, really cozy and warm with a big kitchen(great for baking) and lots of good memories.

One of the highlights of winter was the Luma light festival in Queenstown gardens. There were many beautiful light displays from different artists. Some were interactive. My favorite was a giant mirror ball hung high among tall pine trees with multi colored spotlights shining on it.

While Dad was working at Dart river jet in Glenorchy for a few weeks we all went on a beautiful jet boat ride. I got to drive the 700 horsepower twin V8 jet boat and do some spins. That was fun.

That is some of what we got up to over the winter but overall we found winter to be long, cold and a little boring…that is until we went to Bali!