Work-Life Balance - and a lot of dancing

It’s been a big week for our little girl. On Thursday morning she took her Grade 1 ballet exam, which is a huge deal and a massive achievement for a six year old (well, I think so anyway!)

The level of emotion, excitement and hype in the dressing room beforehand was enough to make any adult burst into sobs, so I wasn’t surprised when Molly’s eyes welled up in panic tears a moment before she was due to go into the exam studio. 

But she managed to compose herself again a few seconds later, went on to do her exam successfully and came back out again smiling and giggling.

The hairstyle (using 75 hair clips, 6 hair bands, two hair nets, a tub of gel and half a can of hairspray) remained in place for the rest of the day as she wanted to show it off at school in the afternoon, and was kept in place until Jake came home from work at 7pm.

The next evening was followed by more dancing at the school Halloween Disco. I don’t remember going to any discos until I was at intermediate school, aged about 10. But these days they start them early and Molly’s been to about 4 or 5 already. I’m still not entirely sure that the playlist was completely appropriate for her age group (eg I’m Sexy and I Know It – but luckily Molly has interpreted the lyrics as I’m Sixteen and I Know It), and it’s crazy to watch the kids dancing and singing along to all the pop songs, word perfect.

The disco was preceeded by a “getting ready party” at her friend’s house where six girls squealed and shrieked for a couple of hours while they put their outfits and make up on, and was followed afterwards by a sleepover at her friend's house where I believe four girls squealed and shrieked until 10.20pm. They got up this morning at 5.30am – therefore Molly is a bit of a mess today! 

Meanwhile, I have taken on a number of extra freelancing projects lately which means I’m going to be working full time, 40 hours a week, for the next 3 weeks or so. Yikes!

I know, I know, people do it all the time. But Alfie’s only at pre-school for 15 hours a week and this is where the plan falls short. In order to fit the work in I will need to drop some other stuff out of my life for a while, eg cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, paperwork, school drop offs and pick ups, and taxi-ing to and from the kids activities. And house hunting? Ha ha, that’s not going to happen any time soon! I guess I also need to strike off the list zumba, coffee/cafes, playing the piano, walking up the mountain, reading, blogging and anything else that usually makes my life fun! 

Alternatively I could just reduce my sleep time down to 3.5 hours per night. I can handle that for a month, surely? Wish me luck... 

We ♥ Auckland (and Wellington too)

We love our new home town of Wellington. The size of the city suits us, its facilities are great, the people are awesome, the setting amongst the mountains and beach is stunning...and our list goes on and on.

But we do often miss our old home on Auckland’s North Shore. We miss the lifestyle and the people. So we’ve been talking and dreaming about a visit there for months now and have been keeping an eye out for low air fares. When a local bank ran a competition recently and Jake won $150, we put this question to our kids:  shall we buy new toys or shall we buy flights to Auckland. Phew – they chose Auckland!

So we made our trip last week. After we got over the initial shock of arriving in such a big city (no sarcasm intended here – Auckland may be a city of “just” 1.4 million, but in New Zealand terms that’s pretty massive and no other city in NZ comes close to that sized population. Not to mention the fact that our homes for the last 5 years have been in tiny, remote communities in other countries. So anyway, traffic, crowds of people larger than 1000 in one place, and lots of skyscrapers are a little out of the ordinary for us these days).

Anyway, after the first hour, we all settled right back into it, and enjoyed 4 days of re-visiting old haunts. Our old beach. Our old playpark. Our old house. Our old friends. Our old high street. Our old cafes. Our old walking routes. Molly didn't remember much from her early years, but the kids both loved it and we certainly packed a lot in and wore them out! It was just like old times, and surprisingly hard to leave at the end. 

After numerous debates about if and when we should move back up to Auckland one day, we were starting to feel quite confused. So when we flew back into Wellington yesterday I think Jake and I both felt some degree of relief when the scenes from the aeroplane windows began to fill our hearts up with that lovely feeling of being "home". Although this does all leave us in the slightly odd position of not really understanding where home is anymore...  

Food Additives

Our friends from Auckland have been staying with us for the last 6 days. They have two children, roughly the same age as ours, so with four under sixes in the house you can imagine how our days could have revolved around mealtimes, snacktimes, hunger, etc.

However, our friend’s little boy has a number of food intolerances, mainly surrounding additives like preservatives and artificial colours and flavours. So our food choices had to be made very carefully.

We're not a family who usually has great stocks of chippies (crisps to you English readers!), burgers, sugary drinks and such like in our cupboards. Although we do normally stock up on a few treats when we've got visitors coming! But anyway, I thought we'd be fine serving up most things we normally eat. 

With the help of my friend, I went through our fridge and cupboards and pulled out everything that had these additives in them and I was fairly gobsmacked to find how much I had underestimated our consumption of food additives.

Vegemite, hummus, pesto, rice crackers, gravy powder, tortilla wraps, ham, dried apricots, mustard, sausages, margarine – all our staple foods had to go!

(Ironically, our sugary strawberry jam and our stash of chocolate were free of additives and ok to stay!)

The need for our food to taste more sophisticated, look more pretty and keep fresh for longer is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s only really arisen in the last 50 years, but it seems to have skyrocketed in the last decade or two. Thousands of additives have become so normal and commonplace in our lives that we very often don’t even realise they’re there. The food industry is a fairly profitable one, and is using these chemicals to keep costs down and sales up, but I just wonder at what cost to our health?

Anyway, the consequence is that our kids have pretty much been on a detox for the last 6 days! I can’t promise that we’ll be able to remove all additives from our diet from now on with immediate effect (as that would mean an awful lot of our food supplies would need to be thrown out), but I’ll certainly be checking my food labels a lot more from now on.

The Wairarapa

It’s school holidays again, already! (Where did that last term go?)

We kicked things off this time with a few days holiday in the Wairarapa, a beautiful region north-east of Wellington which is famous for its vineyards, farming and wild coastline. For a change, we’d decided not to stay at a beach house this time, but chose to stay on the most delightful farm about half an hour inland from the coast - we had a little tin & wood cottage next to the farmhouse, very basic, but just perfect for us. 

On arrival, the kids belted out of the car and just ran and ran for hours around the farm, while Jake lay down on the sofa and read the paper and I tried to explore a bit. Unfortunately I didn't get very far as I was bullied by 3 large cows who blocked my pathway and gave me evil menacing stares, as if they were daring me to walk any further. I chose not to risk my life and returned to the cottage where I found the kids still running around (now caked in thick mud) and Jake still on the sofa (now playing games on his iPhone). 

By day 2 we were well and truly into the swing of things. The kids were now proudly responsible for feeding the farm's pet lamb 3 times a day and checking the chicken pen for fresh eggs,  and had both decided they wanted to remain on the farm for ever and never go home again.

But I persuaded everyone to explore a bit more and we managed to get down to the river, where we found the biggest pile of driftwood and set about making a teepee, digging mini rivers, and having stick throwing competitions. 

Meanwhile back at the farm we all completely and utterly enjoyed the feeling of being away from everything, with no phones, no internet and no TV. We played tennis, walked around the farm collecting big bags of pine cones, had pine cone throwing competitions (!), read books, drew pictures, and had plenty of very much needed sleep. 

The Wairarapa is an extremely beautiful and wild part of New Zealand and we feel very lucky to be living so close to it. In fact, much as we love our home city, we found it very difficult to return to Wellington - Molly in particular was in tears when she had to say goodbye to "Lamb Lamb" (named by the farmer's 2 year old Grandson, not by us!).

It was a great trip - big thanks to Karen & Clayton at the farm for making us feel so welcome! Next I need to plan loads of distractions for the rest of the holidays to take the kids' minds off their dearly missed animal friends!