The Ostrom Family Adventures

It’s been quite a week of getting oriented to a new workplace. I have worked in a medical role in Swaziland (now Eswatini), Belize, Mexico and now New Zealand and it’s always fun and a challenge to learn different medical phrases, medication names, different processes, and my favorite – the way that patients describe their symptoms.

“I feel quite unwell really,” a woman said in her smooth NZ accent while smiling at me – also while breathing rapidly and was found to have new onset A. Fib with a rapid heart rate of 160 and New CHF.

“Yeah, I’ve just returned from holiday and my neighbor was harassing my wife so I knocked him one.” Said the guy with the grossly deformed boxers fracture from 3 days prior.

I am finding that there are many things spoken about in beautifully specific medical terms that I haven’t used since residency because patients didn’t understand them so I have spoken about them in more layperson terms for years. And then many other things that are spoken about so casually and with significant local jargon that I have no idea what it is.

My favorite words or phrases so far are:

Jandals – Japanese sandals (Flip flops/thongs)

Chilly Bin – cooler

Leif has even started picking up some words he didn’t use as much before such as “quite” as in “I got quite good at jumps on my mountain bike today mother.” 😊

We’re trying to work in “Sweet as” (with good pronunciation of az) to our daily life but have not been great at it yet.

Phase 1 was getting here and the first 2 weeks with a rental truck and lovely airbnb. We moved out of our lakeside airbnb Saturday and returned our rental truck today and are getting set up for Phase 2. This is where we are housesitting for some amazing new friends and caring for their 2 pups while they travel around Australia.

We stopped in at the Butterfly gardens near the Auckland airport today after returning our rental truck.

The butterfly house was beautiful and I find it very relaxing. There was also a mini zoo including Kiwi birds, but they were not going to come out while we were there.

We did, however, see a crocodile eat lunch which was fun. :).

https://madehamilton.co.nz/.

We are really enjoying our friends home – they have lived here for 5 years and are really established with their 3 kids and pups. It’s a beautiful home next to the park and river and has a pool!! 🙂 We are really roughing it this adventure. 😉

I’m starting work again this next week and looking forward to getting more quick and comfortable with the processes and computer system.

Mason and Leif have some fun Biking plans and are going to be looking for a car for us to use the rest of the year and getting some things done for Leif to start school in 2 weeks.

We miss everyone back home of course, but are enjoying our time so far.