We have really enjoyed a wonderful time while parking at the Langs and have experienced so much gracious hospitality from this special family. After making four new girl-friends, tasting a selection of special foods (Calista has sampled Coco Pops which she calls “chocolate poppadoms”) and playing with many, many toys, our daughters are reluctant to leave the house of delights.

After a week, it is time for us to move on. We have so many excellent memories from our stay in Dargaville, many featuring in the blog posts from the past week. Here are some of the other activities we’ve enjoyed.

When the weather was fine, our girls loved jumping on the trampoline in the backyard. The Langs have a lovely backyard with a view that stretches to the horizon.

We loved browsing the shelves and finding new books to read. Katrina has carefully built up a very good home library.

Everyone enjoyed watching television (including a lot of "Dora"), and our girls were delighted to share their favourite film "How to train your dragon".

One afternoon, Katrina brought out her selection of nail-polish and painted all the girls’ nails. This was a real treat — the last time our girls’ nails were painted was at a birthday party last year.

Brioni elected to have two coats of nail polish on her nails so she could have colour *and* glitter.

She was very happy with the result and even has made an attempt to minimising sucking her thumb so the nail polish doesn't come off.

Aisha feels very grown-up with nail polish on!

A trip to the local Playcentre with the Langs meant that our girls could play in a completely new environment with more toys, activities and crafts. They quickly moved to their favourite activities.

Calista picked out favourites from the dress-ups corner before heading for the painting easel.

Brioni quickly sat down at a craft table for a painting and glueing activity.

Delaney wandered around, trying a little bit of everything, including dress-ups (hence the pink tail) and play-dough.

Yuck — it doesn't taste so good, Dell!

Aisha rolled out biscuits from playdough and baked them in the toy oven.

Later, Calista found the doll corner and carefully fed her baby.

We all enjoyed our time with the Langs. We were so encouraged by Katrina and Hayden’s authentic approach to life. They’re pretty relaxed about many things — diet, television, activities, school and life in general.

We can learn from this — we don’t need to get unnecessarily uptight about issues. Somehow, many children all around the world grow and thrive under a variety of circumstances and the decisions we make for our children will be right for us!