School Holidays

The school holidays are now (already) over!

After a 5 week winter holiday last year in Alice Springs, this year’s 2 week holiday just flew by so quickly (particularly since we lost the first 8 days in sickness).

But we made up for it in the last few days – we went to playparks, we had playdates, we went to the theatre to see Pinocchio, we defaced our driveway (just with chalk, but I do need to wash it away now!), we went to a craft session where the kids made beautiful bookmarks out of beads, and we met a fairy in a shopping mall.

During the holidays, Molly has also come on leaps and bounds with her reading and we are very proud of her. She’s taken to leaving messages on the whiteboard for Jake when he comes home late from work (G&T Thursdays!) and her writing is becoming pretty great as well. She still loves her arts & crafts too and made some brilliant play dough people yesterday, then she entered a newspaper competition to draw a picture of a penguin – the penguin is truly gorgeous and is drinking champagne, singing and wearing a butterfly in her hair! 

Walking Tracks

The area we live in is full of walking tracks, but up until now we've been too busy to use many of them. (How crazy our lives have become?) 

But today was a very beautiful, sunny day, just perfect for wearing the kids out on a walk. So we made our way down to the start of one of the tracks, and up we went. Up and up and up lots of stairs. Down through thick trees. Up some more stairs. Past a lot of ferns. And bingo – a lookout over Wellington!

The kids are exhausted this evening so fingers crossed that we’ll all get some sleep tonight. I’m thinking I may have to work my way through the whole list of walking tracks this week! 

The Flu

Well that was a pretty bad virus! Alfie, Molly and I have just slept for 8 days almost non-stop. Well, ok, a slight exaggeration – we did all manage to get up for around an hour each day. Thank goodness it’s school holidays!

Anyway, we’re on the mend now and trying to get to grips with the chaos that ensues from not looking after a house for 8 days - nothing in the fridge, no laundry done, two weeks of rubbish not taken out, etc.

So we're raring to go and the plan now is to cram two weeks' worth of school holiday activities into the next 5 days!

The Bradys

We’ve just had a visit from Darren & Beth + the boys, who were brave enough to do the long haul drive from Auckland with 2 kids – thank you so much guys, it was great to see you and we really appreciated the effort you went to.

Unfortunately Wendy, Molly and Alfie were all knocked out by a nasty flu virus and spent the best part of 3 days asleep!

Luckily, before it struck, we managed to get out and about to the Botanic Gardens, a cable car ride, the beach and Te Papa. Wellington’s a great city. We hope you come back again soon so we can play the Name Game again – and hopefully we’ll be able to stay awake next time!

Busy and tired!

It’s a busy busy, busy time for us at the moment, with Jake all over the country for work and me with extra contracts, plus trying to organise a wedding and finish setting up our new lives here in Wellington. Molly and Alfie are very  tired and the school holidays next week will be a very much needed break I think.

 

In the meantime, we’ve been trying our best to grab some downtime at home whenever we can, and I thought I’d post these shots....a bit of water play outside on the deck, some fantastic drawings of Jake on the whiteboard (the left hand one by Molly & the right hand one by Alfie), and some very important web surfing by Jake in the chaos that is called our study (aka the place to dump all the still unpacked boxes).

We keep hoping that the pace of life will slow down soon, but I'm not sure when that's going to happen exactly?! 

Other than that, Alfie continues to reject the idea of ordinary sleeping positions and now prefers the floor. It doesn't help with the tiredness.

A Narrow Escape

When we left home yesterday morning, Wellington had beautiful blue skies and we thought it would be great to go up the Kapiti Coast to the beach. As we drove north we could see a serious storm brewing up ahead but carried on regardless, and by the time we got up to Waikanae we were getting close to the storm and the strong winds reminded us of a bad day in the Falklands!

But what fun we had in the wind on the beach!

On the way home we called into Pak N Save for a few bits and pieces (except it never is in Pak N Save, and for a supermarket that’s supposed to save you money we always end up blowing the budget on more bargains). Anyway, we heard heavy rain on the roof while we were shopping, but when we came out we found ourselves surrounded by fork lightning with thunder crashing all around us, we saw ambulances passing by, and discovered a tornado had just passed through.

Crikey! Hoping everyone's ok. And thankful for Pak N Save!

School Disco

Molly had her first school disco last night, and as the official bar lady (water only!), I got to witness a couple of hundred 5-7 year olds doing the “Locomotion” and screaming like teenagers as the DJ announced Justin Bieber.

It was truly unbelieveable. I didn’t even realise Molly was aware of Justin Bieber and was quite astounded to see her singing along to the entire song : “Baby, baby, baby” (in an American accent). And there was I thinking they spent all day at school learning to read and write! 

The level of excitement in the school hall was MASSIVE and everyone had such a great time. After being dragged out of bed this morning to go to ballet at 9am, our very very tired Molly has still been singing and talking about it all day long. We don’t think she’ll forget last night in a hurry! 

Wedding Planning

It’s a lot of fun planning our wedding because we get to go exploring new beach locations every weekend at the moment while we look for a venue. This weekend we looked at a GORGEOUS place by the beach which is perfect in almost every way, just a couple of small issues which we need to work through before we commit to it.

As most of you know, we are not normally very comfortable with committing to anything until we have thought about every possible angle a billion times over for several months. Hopefully we will be able to get our thought processes moving a little bit quicker than usual this time, as we know some of you have already booked your flight tickets so we really are most definitely tied to next February. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know we are now a little bit closer to having something organised for you all!

Anyway, we visited a beach afterwards where we had hot chocolate & scones, collected stones, shells and driftwood, played running races and a local lady let the kids have a ride on her horse! Molly then spent the entire car journey home begging us for riding lessons....aaagggh!

NZ Garden Bird Survey

This week Jake encouraged the kids to get involved in the NZ Garden Bird Survey, so yesterday they put some bread out in the garden and then got ready to spend an hour sitting in front of the window with their Landcare Research forms, ticking off how many of each species they could see.

Usually our garden is jam packed with tuis, fantails, sparrows, blackbirds and Kererus; however today they must have all known the survey was going on because not a single bird came into the garden in the whole hour, apart from one lone wood pigeon (perhaps he was scaring the others off?).

The kids got totally bored within 15 minutes of no action, so they went off to play and I had to sit by the window for the remaining 45 mins. Thanks kids/Jake!

PS Two hours after our survey ended about 30 birds came back into the garden.