First Day at Another School

Poor old Molly. She's changed school a fairly large number of times for someone so young. She manages to deal with it all so positively every time though, she's a strong little thing.

It was her first day at school (in Wellington) today. And she truly seemed to love it. She came out of class with an enormous grin on her face and immediately bundled into Alfie and gave him the longest and biggest cuddle I've ever seen.

She did beg to wear her old school uniform this morning, but as it was designed to be worn in the desert it wouldn't have been particularly suitable in this climate and we persuaded her to go with lots of layers instead! It's a little odd seeing her go to school in normal clothes, but very few schools in Wellington have a uniform.

We've been trying to piece together exactly what she did today, but some of the stories are a little confusing....we do know that she did PMP (PE to us oldies!), more cross country running, computers, maths, and learnt to write New Zealand print letters (which are different to Northern Territory cursive letters). She also might have planted some seeds with some older kids at lunchtime, but we're not entirely sure how much of that story was her imagination. I'm sure we'll find out given time!

Some developments

Our new life in Wellington has been a bit exciting this week. Jake started work, we’ve signed a contract on a new house, and Molly unintentionally started school yesterday!

We went in to our chosen school in the morning to hand in her enrolment forms and they asked if she wanted to stay for an hour. When we went back to collect her she begged to be allowed to stay for longer and ended up spending the rest of the day there!

She came home full of tales about why stars twinkle (something to do with gas and wind), why the sky is blue (with a full explanation of how sun light refracts through water), and all sorts of other things which I’m sure I didn’t learn until I was in secondary school, certainly not at the age of five?! Anyway, she had a great time and is really looking forward to starting properly on Monday.

In the meantime, three and a half years in small, remote communities has left us a little bit unused to city life, and we’ve all been feeling a little bit overwhelmed this week by the huge amount of traffic, roads, people, buildings, shops, etc.

So we drove around the coast today to Eastbourne/Days Bay to get some peace & quiet and spent a while relaxing in the sun on the beach. It’s amazing that this area is still part of NZ’s capital city yet we felt as if we were miles from anywhere. Alfie and I had stone throwing competitions while Molly collected yet MORE shells, and Jake just fell asleep.

Next job for us is co-ordinating the shipping of all our stuff from both Central Australia and Auckland in time for our moving in date. Anyone who visited us during our time in Alice Springs will probably understand how excited we are about having a proper home with real stuff in it again!

Rain!

We woke up this morning to a bit of drizzle. Help! After having lived in the Central Australian desert for the last 12 months, we have forgotten what to do with rainy days!

We still haven’t found a suitable house (although we have an application in for one, so fingers crossed and we’ll see what happens), so this means Molly hasn’t started school yet.

So we spent the morning indoors doing numbers and writing, and then learning about New Zealand birds, drawing pictures of huias, yellow-eyed penguins, kiwis and pukekos, and looking them up on the internet to see which colours we should use. Those of you who know Molly well will understand how much she enjoyed this activity!

We had a small window of sunshine around lunchtime, so took a quick trip out to a playpark, our 17^th one in Wellington. So now we only have 87 left to visit.

For the rest of the day, the kids were incredibly content playing indoors with their toys – I guess it’s a novelty to them as they’ve spent most of the last year being outdoors for most of their waking hours. Alfie has a new train set which is keeping him engrossed for hours each day, and Molly discovered a dolls’ house in the cupboard at our holiday home.

In the meantime Jake and I are also educating ourselves. Thanks to Saturday’s edition of the Dominion Post (which we’ve only just got round to reading), our word of the day has got to be “whakamarama” , meaning to clarify/interpret/translate - something we do a lot of in our family!!

Seaweed and driftwood

The weather was sort of moody today, a bit of sun, some dark clouds, a little mist over the mountains. 

Surprisingly though, we’re actually quite enjoying being in an ordinary climate again. After spending the last 3.5 years living in some fairly extreme temperatures (in both directions!), it’s really refreshing not to have to think about the temperature/wind/snow/heat/sweat/sun protection/dried out skin, etc, etc.

We pottered about on Raumati Beach for the majority of the day. The kids collected shells and stones (as usual) while we were able to wander up and down the beach, clambering over huge piles of driftwood and finding some interesting bits and pieces ourselves.

Meanwhile, Molly is having a little trouble adjusting to the Kiwi accent. She made a new friend in the playpark and spent a couple of hours calling her “Liquorice” until I questioned the little girl myself and discovered her real name was Alexis. “Yes, Liquorice, I told you”, said Molly. 

The Big Smoke

Although he doesn’t officially start his new job until Monday, Jake had to go into the office for a couple of hours today, so I took the kids into the Big City for a while.

A visit to one of the play parks ended in tears very abruptly when Alfie went on a suicide mission at the top of a giant lighthouse and had to be forcibly removed by a very helpful man who stepped in just in time, when some other parents became concerned that my persuasion techniques weren’t achieving the desired results and we were about to have a calamity on our hands. Thank you, whoever you were!

So we played pirates with a telescope, admired all the waterfront sculptures, and ended up at Te Papa Museum where Molly played ‘Tokatoka’ (a traditional Maori game where you compete to see who can stack the most pebbles in a tower) and Alfie spent some quiet time on the computer learning how to say important words in Maori such as “clothes” and “deodorant”. 

Accidental education

Any concerns about Molly missing out on a couple of weeks of school during our move were relieved today when she spent the best part of the morning in class at a local primary school while Jake and I met with the principal and had a look round.

When we came out of our meeting we found her engrossed in story time after having shown the class where Alice Springs is on Google Earth! She’d also done a bit of drawing, which clearly shows where her mind was wondering to: lizards, honey-eaters and gumnuts!

So, to get her into the Kiwi spirit, we went down to the beach at Houghton Bay and let the kids potter about collecting stuff. As I write this, they are both sitting in the bath with a pile of shells, pebbles and pumice stones, checking out what sinks and what floats. A great science lesson!


We also visited our favourite cafe from our last visit: the Bach Cafe at Houghton Bay. Given the choice of sitting outside in the sun or inside the cafe, to our horror our Australian desert kids chose to sit inside by the fireplace for the novelty! 

We've arrived!

And although Wellington’s heading out of Autumn and into Winter, somebody definitely laid on the weather for our arrival. It’s warm and sunny, and we’ve barely noticed any difference to Alice Springs.

Despite the temperature, Alfie has a new hat and won’t take it off no matter how hot he gets!

Meanwhile, as the only true Kiwi in the family, Molly seems to be quite proud of being “home” and spent forever collecting silver ferns today.  

Our first day mainly involved driving up and down the Northern Suburbs looking at schools and houses, and of course fitting in the requisite visits to play parks.

When we came here in March, we thought we must have fitted in visits to almost every single play park in the city, but we now realise we hardly scratched the surface! This is a city of 104 play parks, so we’ve still got a long way to go...