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Expectations vs opportunities: or, why we've failed at this blog and that's okay

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  One of the themes of our sabbatical has been *expectations* vs *opportunities*, and how changing our focus from one to the other can make all the difference (in travel, work, parenting, life). Case in point: we had grand plans to keep an updated blog of our travels here in New Zealand...which has not happened! Eric and I had really high expectations of ourselves for what these blogs should look like: detailed, frequent, witty, insightful, polished. These expectations were not actually realistic, so instead we just started avoiding it. Every few days we'd point fingers and say, "You should write a blog!" "No, you should write one, I did the last one!"    Turns out that when we got here, we found that we didn't actually want to spend more time behind a screen trying to come up with some sort of forced commentary on our experience. Instead, we wanted to take this incredible opportunity to have 2 months out of our normal lives to practice just BEING where we w...
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Catlins coast, Southland farm country and the real New Zealand

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It has been hard to find time to post on the blog as much as we would like! Our time in NZ has been busy so far, all with good things. There is no shortage of possible topics and experiences to reflect on here, but when I finally get a moment to sit down and write it's hard to know where to start. So today I'll just post a quick update, and tomorrow or Monday we will try to share some more reflections on our goals for this sabbatical time and what "sabbatical" means to us, as well as go into a little more detail on what we're learning about the parts of New Zealand landscape and culture we've been able to explore thus far. Last time I posted, we were just getting our bearings in Dunedin & NZ in general. A week and a half later, we feel like we know our way around better and have moved into a house where we'll be for the next month. This past week, Soren has been attending his wonderful kindergarten, our lovely babysitter Kate has taken Avery on adventu...
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