About us

We are a pretty typical Kiwi family -- Dad, Mum, two kids, a couple of cats, a house in the suburbs, a 7-seater family car.  We even have a white picket fence.

Except, I am a stay-at-home-homeschooling-dad.

I took over the job in 2009, when we realised that things worked better that way.  At the time, I wrote about it here.

So, who are we?

Me: Pre-housebanding, I spent 15 years at university, so let's just say that I swapped my lazy university life for an equally lazy stay-at-home life.  It was while part-way through my PhD that we decided that my skills were better suited to home duties.

I'm a Kiwi, born and raised in New Zealand, though I now consider myself ethnically part Chinese, as I spent almost ten years in China, living in the southern city of Guangzhou.

I previously had blogs at:

• http://blog.sina.com.cn/kiwidaddy (October 2009 - January 2014)
• http://homeschoolingwithdad.blog.co.nz (January 2014 - August 2016)

My reason for changing is here.

Mama (my wife) is a Chinese Beauty.  We met in Malaysia in 2004 while we were both on holiday.  The day after we met we did a 20 km walk together, and during that walk I decided that she was worth chasing.  So, in 2005 I packed up and moved to her hometown of Guangzhou.  Back in China, Mama had a real career as a senior academic at one of the top universities in the country.  Since moving to New Zealand in 2014, Mama has continued to be the main breadwinner, teaching privately from home.

Mulan was born in 2007.  We named her after a character in the novel Moment in Peking.

Miya was born in 2010.  I wrote about her birth here.

Maggie and Mushroom are our cats.  Maggie was found on the streets in China, and decided to move into our home there.  She lost a leg when our neighbour drove over her on our driveway.  When we moved from China to New Zealand Maggie came too (spending six months quarantined in Hong Kong on the way).  Mushroom is the latest addition to our family.  She was another starving stray who we adopted.

We've had two other cats, who sadly died.  Kitty was with us for almost ten years, and also moved with us from China.  I wrote about Kitty's arrival here, and her death here.  We had another cat in China, Mickey, who sadly died.

In our extended family, Nainai and Yeye are my parents, and Gugu and Gufu are my sister and her husband (and they have four children) -- they all live near us in Auckland.  Laolao is Mama's mama, who lives in Beijing.