A Canadian in New Zealand

Today I brought my two young boys (2 and 4) to the local Playcentre. Playcentre is a state funded facility with fabulously energetic, paid child care workers who genuinely seem to love their jobs and respect their employer; fascinating! Parents are encouraged to stay with their child while at Playcentre, although this becomes optional once your child reaches two and a half. The facility itself is absolutely decked out. There is a large outdoor play area, partly covered with transparent plastic for rainy days and shaded areas for hot days. In this space there is a playground, balance beams, a huge pile of wood chips for the kids to climb on and move around complete with wheelbarrows and shovels available at the base of the pile, large wooden boxes to climb on and jump off of, a vegetable garden and apple tree for the kids to water, enjoy and harvest, a water station complete with tubes running out of it for the kids to explore and some kind of soapy foam to add texture and fun. There is also a play house, a clay station, a large sandpit, and my all-time favourite: The tool station. My boys, I must add, are thrilled to bits with the tool station. This station is decked out with kids building tools; hammers, saws, screw drivers, drills, clamps, magnets, wooden blocks, bolts, nails and screws. These are all real, metal toys, by the way. Heaven!

While I’m not sure what makes up for the difference, I am absolutely certain that no kid’s centre of any sort in Canada

would offer up anything sharp and metallic to kids. The general rules for toys in Canada, as far as I can tell are as follows: Nothing with a string long enough to choke a child with, ie- no more woolen mitts attached by strings, and certainly no pull-along toys (whereas the Buzzy Bee, including long extension lead, is a national icon here). Magnets are absolutely forbidden. Didn’t you hear about the two boys who were playing with magnets and one of them ended up swallowing two of them? He ended clamping together his intestine as a result. The boy died, in the end, from ingesting the two small magnets. Small choking hazards are not recommended for children under 3. No Metal toys as they can be used as weapons. And certainly no tools. Tools break many of Canada’s “rules” regarding safety. Nails, for example, are a small metal choking hazard that may magnetize to another piece of metal in the digestive tract. Danger, danger and danger! New Zealanders are amazingly calm when it comes to parenting, and it is only to their children’s advantage. This free range parenting trend allows kids to explore on their own and maintain their incredible self esteems.

There is a road we use almost every day as it is on the way to my daughter’s school. The bridge crosses a river and is called a “one-way bridge.” The funny thing about the one-way bridge here is that both directions of traffic can use it, just not at the same time. There is a yield sign that detremines who has the right-of-way, although I’ve seen more than one car have to reverse back up the hill to get out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. The other interesting thing about this bridge in particular is that there is no rail on either side of it and, as I mentioned earlier, is only just able to fit one vehicle at a time. It is very narrow. This takes some serious concentration on my part to watch for oncoming vehicles and keep our family van on the road while crossing the school bridge. When the river floods during heavy rains, you have to navigate your way across the bridge and through the water. While I feel terrified at the possibility of falling from the bridge (be it that it is only a few feet above the water) it also makes me giggle every time we cross it. New Zealand is known for offering adventure to its visitors, who would have thought it would come in the form of an everyday road in town! The bridge was one of the first “attractions” we showed grandma when she arrived over summer holidays.

When I signed my daughter up for soccer a few weeks ago I said “So I guess she’ll just need to bring along her runners and some water at game time?”

“Oh no,” said the woman, “I mean she could wear shoes if she wanted, but most of the kids just run around in bare feet.” This comment immediately made me feel self-conscious. It made me feel a bit gear-head’ish. As if putting my daughter in shoes was over the top kind of parenting. Sure enough, when we arrived at the field, only a handful of kids were wearing their shoes, my daughter being one of them. We have a lot yet to learn about NZ culture, especially with regards to chilling out, and allowing kids the freedom to feel the grass beneath their toes!

I was born and raised on the Candian Prairies, even so I was one of the only people I knew who admitedly enjoyed travelling across the prairies. When I was 18 I booked myself onto a via rail bus which left from Edmonton, and dropped me off in Halifax. Not that I wasn’t stunned by the gorgeous scenery when we entered the Maritime provinces; I was, but the most memorable part of that journey was when me and my fellow passengers had a 30 minute stop in some prairie town during day two of the five day trip.

I had eaten all the Maltesers my friends had given me and was almost through the homemade granola bars from my mom. I didn’t, of course, have any cash for the rail food as it was expensive and awful stuff so needless to say, I was hungry and ready for a stretch by the time we reached this tiny town. We jumped off the train, ran across some farmer’s unused field and madly lined up at Subway for a sanwhich. I was after a BLT. A favourite of mine left over from my childhood. Although soon after landing in Halifax I converted to Vegetarianism, so this would be one of my last carnivorous prairie feasts!

Ten years later my husband and I packed up our house, and our three kids and did a final prairie good-bye. We left Calgary and headed North to Edmonton to visit my sister and her husband; garden fanatics! They have converted almost their entire 700 square metre property into a giant edible paradise, and it was harvest time when we arrived. We snatched at green peas, so perfectly ready and crisp. Dug up carrots; something my Grandma has always claimed to be one of the best prairie delicacies; she would have us bring her some prairie carrots out to the coast as she claimed the ones in BC just weren’t as tasty. We plucked apples from their tree, with my brother-in-law lifting the kids up allowing them to do the harvest. Once our bellies were full and we’d overstayed our welcome we drove to Drumheller; home of the Royal Tyrell Museum. While we didn’t go to the museum on this trip, we did manage to tour

the town admiring all the hilarious purple and red cement-built dinosaurs, much to the kid’s’ amusement.

Then we were off to Medicine Hat, the hometown of my dad and his mom; my Granny. My electric-guitar-playing, singing and hair-dying Granny! Her first comment when my first baby was born was “this only makes me seem that much older.” She never even wanted us to call her Granny when we were little, but the name stuck and she couldn’t shake it. In Medicine Hat there is the world’s largest Teepee, a brick-making factory and heaps of huge greenhouses in which they grow tomatoes year

round as energy in Medicine Hat is cheap. It’s the land of oil and gas. While we were there we stumbled upon another Medicine Hat specialty; the Leopard Frog. This frog was near extinction a few years back, but has recovered significantly, and while we were there on our trip we saw heaps of them to my 3-year-old son’s delight! Good-bye to 80-year-old Granny, and her house which stopped progressing in style back in the 70’s. Her basement, museum-like, never touched anymore as Granny’s knees are bad. Her out-of-tune piano is still against the wall adjacent to the bar that has been full of old cardboard boxes since I can remember. Her orange leather (plastic?) couch with its stiff and heavy cushions still in perfect nick. All the long-legged ashtrays (my Granny never smoked, but it seems it was a common courtesy at some point to provide other smokers with ash-trays in your home for their use) still sitting next to the twriling three-legged slime green chair, and the curtains perpetually drawn over the non-existent windows. The type-writer is one of the saddest I have seen; having found itself a good home, it eventually ran out of ink from one too many papers being writen, my Granny revelled in her creative writing after her husband died. The typewriter now sits on its otherwise unused desk next to the closet full of my granny’s old fur coats from the 50’s. Good-bye Medicine Hat.

One of the first things I noticed after landing in Nelson, New Zealand were the hills. Everyone here has a view, even if it is a “poor man’s view” as is how my husband’s uncle refers to his own spectacularly placed nest. He is perched in the crook of the hill, right at the top. His house overlooks the ocean and harbour, and faces North, something coveted by all Nelsonians. I think he exagerates. Anyway, the hills! We stayed with my husband’s uncle for the first two weeks of our life in NZ where we enjoyed his view, were charmed by his teenage daughters and laughed and laughed when he introduced us to New Zealand’s own; “Flight of the Conchords.” We would take daily strolls to encourage our never tired two year old to have an afternoon nap, but the hills were intense. We’d take turns pushing him up and down the hills in his heavy “push chair” and one day, after struggling to pass a 70 year old woman on a downhill, I commented that my ankles couldn’t take anymore. They had become so stiff from the descents, not the climbs, it was the descents which killed me! The seventy year old laughed, but said she’d lived in the hills her whole life so the ups and downs never bothered her.

Six months down the track I am finally able to get around without suffering from achy ankles, but by the same token I insisted on moving to a flat part of town where the only climb is from our carport to our house (about 50 steps up). And yes we have a view, or we did until summer came, but I’ll save that story for another day.