Special Delivery - New Year's Package

Dear all,

For the last 9 months or so, my wife and I, have been waiting on a special delivery to arrive.

While I won’t bore you with all the details of the pick up, which ended up being quite an ordeal, you can stop worrying now – it was delivered safely.

It all started while we were watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks display, when the parcel distribution company began sending my wife delivery status notifications. They came every 15 minutes for the entire night, until at 8am, they became so annoying that we decided to go to the parcel depot to sort things out properly.

In order to stretch (no pun intended) this woeful metaphor out a bit more, we are pleased to announce the arrival of a huge package weighing just over 10 pounds (4.6 kilograms) named Hannah Elizabeth. While we got away without having to pay any postage and handling fees and luckily escaped the public holiday surcharge, we had to wait the entire day before she arrived at 9:32pm on 1 January 2015.

The package was marked ‘Fragile’, ‘Handle with care’, and “Made in Japan”, given we originally placed the order while we were on three months long service leave in Tokyo at the start of 2014. In fact we partly chose the name because it means flower in Japanese, (only after my suggestion of naming her after a small miniature tree was vetoed immediately - I still think Bonsai as a first name has a nice ring to it).

The name also means grace, mercy, or according to Wikipedia “God’s given gift to the world” – and to Him we are truly thankful.

(In case you are worried, we will return to posting inane, pointless funny pictures shortly)