Orange T-Shirts and Red Sausages....

Well, Phillip, Tracey and "the cousins" have been and gone. My first essay is in and is now returned; have done Wellington; School Fair is all finished up and Easter has now been reduced to chocolate egg wrappers scattered liberally around my newly hoovered carpet! It is now Saturday. The girls are with John this weekend and I have had the luxury of an extremely lazy day painting my toe nails, looking at the property press and spray painting larey t-shirts! (more of that later!)

The girls are off school for Easter and as a result, I too have been 'off'. School broke up on the day before Good Friday and was the last time I rushed anywhere! I had promised myself we would have our Citizenship application in by Easter - which inevitably meant racing round having photos taken, finding a JP for his signatures and getting all the paperwork done only on the day before my deadline!!! (When will I learn?) Anyway, posted applications by courier post and hopefully my charming offspring and I will be holders of both British and Kiwi passports by the end of the year.

Since then, there has been an eerie, unhurried calm over 5 Le Roy Terrace! I have slept late everyday, so have the girls. We have eaten together, played games, gone to the movies and generally chilled out - and God it was needed. One of the things I hate about single parenthood is the rushing everywhere. Children in general do not really understand the concept of being on time, (actually that could be nothing to do with children in general, but rather something to do with Percy family genes???!) and as a result mornings in particular are fraught with tension, and tardy children are harassed verbally, very loudly! Generally we get where we are supposed to be near to when we are supposed to be - but rarely actually when! Thus, holiday time is as much a calm down time for the girls. First day of the holidays Becca asked me how long she was allowed to stay in the bath. It was 10.00am and we had nothing on so I hollered back something along the lines of "As long as you like, Hun!" - she eventually emerged from the waters purple and prune like at 1.08pm!

Apart from the usual everyday knackeredness that seems to prevail in most youngish families, ours had been exacerbated by the recent visit from the Southampton branch of the Le Riches. It was fab to see them (please note that I have to be nice about them here as Tracey will be reading this!!) really fab. They were only here a couple of weeks but they spent time with us in Wellington (nice place, but not as nice as Auckland!), time doing the tourist track on their own, time with John and they also swung 3 days in the Coromandel with my two small people in tow. They stayed at a friend of Soph's bach in a place called Cooks Beach. I went there with Soph before we moved here and remember it as being incredibly peaceful. The house is so close to the beach that you can hear the waves as you lie in bed drifting off to sleep. (Tracey says she couldn't, personally I think that she is probably going deaf rather than me romanticising about Cooks in the intervening 6 years?!!) That said, I remember thinking at the time that Cooks was the most beautiful beach I had ever been to - and then Soph took me to three others within 15 mins drive and I had to confess that they were every bit as gorgeous - and maybe even more so!! (you may have noticed that I like the Coromandel!) Where the English coastline is traditionally adorned with promenades, beach huts, pink rock, kiss me quick hats and ice cream shops that sell buckets, spades, rubber rings and fishing nets, kiwi beaches are just where the land ends. No shops, rarely even a loo, just sparse long grass then sand then sea. Gorgeous. Anyway apparently Cooks worked it's magic on Tracey and Phillip too, as I got a message in the middle of their second day saying something like "We aren't ever coming back, we are staying here for ever and if you want to see your children again you'll have to come and get them!!!"

Having waved goodbye to Josh, Megan and the big LRs at Ungodly O'clock a couple of Mondays ago, we now find ourselves in the middle of a rather changeable Autumn. Today started grey and rainy, has since been blue and sunny and now looks grey again, which is a bit of a bugger as my painted t-shirts will probably run all over my jeans, my feet and the pavement! I ought to really get onto explaining that, oughtn't I?...

...Friend Kerry, (husband Malcolm put up the girls netball net...) is 40 this weekend and is partying. She has rather magnanimously decided that her friends need more exercise and has put together a Scavenger Hunt round Birkenhead for us to complete - whilst not very sober. I gather that one of the tasks to be completed is to order a Kilo of 'red sausages' (curious kiwi speciality - size of cocktail sausages but wrapped in red frankfurter skin and boiled in water. Adults DO NOT eat these thing - they are awful enough that only children like these delicacies and quite predictably they adore them!!) - anyway, yes, Kerry wants us to buy a kilo of these hideously awful sausages and to finish eating them before we go through the checkouts - photographic proof required!! Whilst carrying out these exploits we have to wear t-shirts in our team colours - which we have now spray painted with various birthday messages - my hands are blue and pink and my t-shirt is orange!!!! Thanks Kerry! I will be taking some photos with a digital camera - and if I can figure out how it works, I may post some of the resulting photos some time next week - I will not be in any of them - I am not sure that an orange spray painted t-shirt accompanied by an orange bandana is really going do much for my image!

I think I am rambling! Yes, Autumn. My garden is looking atrocious. The flower beds have disintegrated into weed beds and my attempts at cultivating lavender bushes seem to have failed - judging by the small black sticky things which are now residing in the places that I put the lavender! My lawn is half mown, half not. My excuse is that I ran out of time, light, petrol and energy. Plus, there are two spots that I can't mow because they contain dead animals - one is a dead mouse - the other a dead bird - at some point I will look witheringly pathetic at Mark until he gives in and moves them for me! Have already mown round their resting places twice!

I haven't finished!! BUT, my team mates are arriving here in 45 minutes and it is going to be difficult enough to look normal in orange without complicating things greatly by trying to look normal quickly! So, I will take a breath here - and return tomorrow evening - possibly with the remnants of a hangover!

Snogs xx

PS, in case I forget tomorrow - the School Fair went really well. I did the quick fire raffle - a raffle every 7 minutes with baskets of goodies to be won - $1200 in 2 hours - not bad - but I couldn't speak (ha ha!! Yes I know!) for most of the following week. The fair as a whole made $17,000 which was a fantastic result bearing in mind it was only our second fair - and the first only made $6000! Gotta go - orange t-shirt awaits!