New Zealand Day!

Our son Christian chose New Zealand for his country day. We made the national dessert, Pavlova, a cooked meringue dish. Daddy learned that egg whites don't whip into a meringue in two minutes like strongly implied in the YouTube video (more like 30 minutes of hard elbow grease), and that next time they would be better off using an egg-beater. We used the homemade whipped cream leftover from the Pavlova for the fresh strawberries and kiwis, and to give it a slightly more NZ taste supplemented it with fish.

For the movie, we wanted to watch Whale Rider, one of Rachel's favorites and considered one of the best New Zealand films. However, neither the local library, the Baylor library, Netflix, nor Amazon carried it. Ditto Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and Once Were Warriors seems a bit dark for our kids, but all three of those films are on my get-to list. We thought about watching Fellowship of the Rings, but our library didn't have a copy of that either, so we ended up watching some New Zealand All-Blacks rugby instead.