I give up!! I keep starting to blog and every time I get started there is so much to catch up on that I run out of time before I’ve even got to the end of the England trip – sooooo, I have decided to work from May backwards!!
Although, just in case you are too impatient to hear about the trip I will only say, at this point, that it was absolutely fabulous! Fab to be in England – particularly London. Fab to shop at M&S and Gap. Unspeakably wonderful to eat Pork Pies and Curly Wurly’s again! Was brilliant to have time with Mark and the girls which was completely off the clock – and fantastic to see the girls rediscovering a little bit of being English – and having the chance to reignite some old friendships and to enjoy some that had only barely begun by the time we left for NZ in 2001. And it was just gorgeous to have a proper English Christmas with cold weather, turkey, twinkly Christmas lights, Hamleys, mistletoe and hot toddy’s in the pub!! Thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Dominic! And I absolutely loved having time, though not enough, with Dunc and Dad, and lots of old friends and family too. I did about 2500 miles and slept in 14 beds in the course of 5 weeks. Ate vast numbers of pub lunches, dinners out and takeaways – not to mention some rather marvellous roasts and home cooked meals too. We were thoroughly spoilt and I don’t honestly think that there is anything that could have made it better – except maybe an extra 2 or 3 weeks – or the knowledge that we’d be back there sooner rather than later!
Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to talk about England and was going to start here and now instead!!
Well, the girls went back to school in February. Louisa is still at Birkdale Intermediate and Becs is still at Chelsea. Both are still massively busy – On Mondays Louisa has netball practice at 7.50 am, Dancesport at 4.00 and reffing Becca’s netball matches at 6.00pm; Tuesday we just have Becca’s gym after school – but I also have 3 spare children to fill up my afternoon! Wednesday Lou has Trash to Fashion (!), Orchestra and Production practice (all during school hours!!!) followed by Production practice after school and then Guides! Thursday is Becca’s netball practice and Lou’s match – and Friday is empty!! Although Saturday we have flute at 8.45am (!!) and swimming at 10.30 and 11.00! That little lot plus the school runs clocks up about 160km per week! Or approx $80 - 90 of petrol per fortnight! (Currently 200.9c per litre here) Deep joy!! And don’t get me started on the price of cheese!! (900g or 2lb is $17.00!!!!!!!)
In more depth… (cause you know I can’t do summaries!!) Lou is thriving. Very happy little girly at the moment. I’m making the most of it as I figure that sooner or later we will get rampant hormones and teenage traumas! – but all is good for now! She’s got one of the lead roles in her school production as Mrs Danvers in the Rocky Monster Show. Mrs Danvers is the housekeeper who turns into a vampire at the end! Apparently she is meant to be ‘cold and stern’ but prior to her audition Lou had thought that maybe she’d ‘play it happy’!! Fortunately for once, Mum was able to do the right thing, and provided a little directorial insight, suggesting that cold and stern might be the way to go - which may have helped in securing the role! Anyway, we now have 4 months of Louisa practicing being ‘cold and stern’ and singing even more than usual! – she started walking to school this year (about 3k) and she tells me that she uses the time to goes off into the little space in her head which is Louisaland and practices her dialogue, faces, gestures and all, en route – and then wonders why she’s late for school now and again!
Even apart from all the extra curricula stuff, school is still going well for Lou. Her last report was as good as ever and I think that the only thing she is particularly concerned about is that she can’t think of a topic for the Science Fair project which is coming up rather quickly. Tomorrow the year 7&8 ‘smart’ classes are joining together for a day out – apparently they are going to try to simulate what it would be like if a disaster struck. The kids are not aware of the agenda / theme of the day so it will be interesting to get Lou’s take on things when she comes home!
Her best friend is Rachel, who is a poppet – very nice girl, very polite, very responsible and seems to be quite a lot of fun too.
Both of them finish year 8 in December and come February will be starting at ‘College’ i.e. senior school proper! Rachel is going to Birkenhead College, as are most of the kids from Lou’s class, but we are going to look at both Birkenhead and Westlake Girls before we decide. We went to the open evening at Birkenhead last week and I think we were both quite impressed. I liked the head – he talked about producing ‘well rounded individuals’ who are ‘have confidence in themselves and in their abilities’. Academically the school is well thought of – and although I always thought I would like Lou and Becs to go to an all girls school, I would be perfectly happy if Lou ended up at Birkenhead. So I guess now we will have to see whether Westlake can surpass it!
Actually, can’t believe the facilities and equipment that are available to kids at school now – I mean, the science block had everything from a weather station to a radio station in it! The PE block was just vast – 2 massive gymnasiums (one had about 5 badminton courts set up – the other about 4 basketball courts), 25m x 8 lane outdoor pool, Astroturf for football, hockey, all weather (bouncy!) courts for netball and tennis - and a fully equipped gym – in 1981, at the Abbey, I’m sure we just had bean bags and hoops!! Mark thinks that Louisa should go to Westlake and I should go to Birkenhead!! I rather like the idea of giving up work and going back to school! Who knows, maybe I’d be more diligent in my study now that I’m more mature? Maybe I could even learn the 13 irregular verbs in French?
Oh, and Lou had Jamboree after getting back from the UK as well. There was a point when the English airports were going to be on strike (I’d forgotten the joys of strikes! Kiwis don’t seem to bother with striking very often – which may be why we have such rubbish pay!! – but anyway!) when it seemed that it was going to be a bit touch and go as to whether we would be back in New Zealand with enough time to get Lou onto her Friday morning flight down to Christchurch. As it happened, the strike was called off, we still got our 24 hour stopover in Singapore and Lou went off to Jamboree so pooped that she missed ‘supper’ every night for the first 8 days (Jamboree lasted 10!)! (Supper as in snack before bed at about 9.30/10.00). She had a fantastic time but it seems that I still have a way to go on the nagging front when it comes to personal hygiene. As directed, her luggage consisted of 12 pairs of knickers and socks, 12 t-shirts, 5 shorts / jeans etc – she came home having had (in 10days) 2 x 30 second showers, having cleaned her teeth only twice and having worn only 3 pairs of knickers, 2 pairs of socks and 3 t-shirts! Has to be said that she was a bit of a smelly bint when we picked her up at the airport! She also managed to sprain her wrist quite badly while seeing how many guides could be fitted into a rickshaw – Lou, being a bit dim on occasion, decided to go on the floor and was surprised when her hand got pummelled by anonymous foot / feet! She had physio on it for about 8 weeks, but finally it was pronounced fit and she was able to get back to swimming, softball and flute!
Becs meantime, less news – but she is about to turn 10 and is having a Grease themed party. We have a dance instructor coming to teach them to do some of the dances of the 50s! Becca wants to dress as ‘after’ Sandy, but I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that!
Netball is still a passion and she’s still a bit of a whippet in terms of speed. Her team won last night 9-2 and she played a stonker of a game. Mind you, it was the first time that Lou had reffed this season and she did a fantastic job too. (And no, I have decided that there are many things that I am good at – but reffing is not one of them! So I am keeping schtumm this year!)
Academically, Becs is still doing well – she has another year at Chelsea before we have to think Intermediate schools for her, but I suspect she’ll go to Birkdale too – certainly Lou has absolutely loved it. She had Brownie camp last weekend and was soooooo tired that it rather reduced her brain capacity I think! I have never seen anything quite so pathetic as a rather grimy 9 year old in her fleecy pjs sitting at my bench with her big eyes all welled up with tears as she grizzled “it’s tooooo hard” about her maths homework! Probably it wouldn’t have been quite so hard had she done it the previous week when she was not quite so tired! Amazingly, the next day she managed to pass her spelling test at the first attempt despite not having looked at the list at all! Just to put this in context, list 6c has about 300 words on it. List 6b also has 300 words on it but it took her about 4 months to pass that one! I suspect it was probably more luck than judgement - but hey, maybe Becs is just a spelling genius?!??
Bec’s best friend Hayley had her birthday recently and for her party she took two friends, one of them being Becca, to help her wash the elephants at the zoo. The pictures are amazing and Becs was buzzing about it for weeks. There was a limo involved at some point in the proceedings which was also considered to be pretty cool!
As for me, also a very happy little soul – although it has taken a wee while to get back to normal since England. I had prepared myself for the fact that I was going to homesick when we came back here, but confess that I had not been ready for feeling quite so bereft. I don’t remember feeling so lost even when we first moved here – but I guess part of it hitting so hard this time, is just that having looked forward to seeing everyone for sooo long and then seeing everyone and everything just clicking straight back into place makes it harder knowing that it’ll be maybe just as long again before I get to enjoy those special times and really close friendships. It’s been a bit like being untethered. Can’t even begin to explain it. Coming home was like the proverbial Chicken Soup for the soul. I loved it – absolutely!
Anyway, fortunately I am now over my wibbles, as I knew I would be eventually and I had a gorgeous summer with Mark and with the girls and Auckland is back to feeling like home. However, my spare room is feeling underused – and if anyone would like a little visit down under, it would just be gorgeous to see you!
So, me? Am still at the gym – working very hard every morning at 5.30am and have been at Weight Watchers too. This has all been extremely necessary after too many pub lunches etc – I managed to put on 5kg (11lbs) in 5 weeks while we were away, which takes some doing! – Initially I did really well and managed to lose about 10kg in about 7 weeks – but since then I think I haven’t been counting to 22 very efficiently because the scales have barely budged!! That said, I am feeling incredibly fit and the two pairs of jeans I bought in England (1 which I couldn’t fit into when I packed them in my bag home) are now on the baggy / too big side. However, I still need to lose another 21kgs which may take a wee while at this rate! I did rediscover Step at the weekend – was great fun but my calves are buggered today! And last weekend I did a 10k run!! Which hurt quite a lot but made me feel incredibly pious!
Work is fine – few bits happening at the uni at the moment which we will keep an eye on – but Dianne is looking at cutting her hours so that we are going to be reversing positions in the near future which will mean that I become manager and she is my staff!! (At least technically! – it’s never really worked like that anyway and don’t expect that very much will change until Dianne retires – but is quite nice to have a little bit more money and slightly fewer hours)
Home is lovely. Cold but lovely! This morning we had temperatures at 8℃ which suggests that winter is here, near as dammit! Think that the electric heaters might be out this weekend!
House is great. We’ve not done anything to it since we got back – actually, that’s a lie – I do now have a vast walk in wardrobe! I could actually sleep in it if I wanted, but that seems a bit pointless really as the bed and the flannelette sheets are far more comfortable! The study is now up and running too. We managed to get a VAST desk (could hold a party on it!) on Trade me for $100 – and we still have the IKEA book shelves too! – Once things have calmed down a bit in the economy and we have payed off a little bit of the house, and England, I might see if we can get a good comfy armchair in there. There’s loads of evening sun, and I rather like the idea of me curled up in a corner reading a book while chaos reigns elsewhere at number 39 Monarch! (Mark would obviously be playing computer Scrabble just across from me!)
Mark is as gorgeous as ever, of course! Obviously he was completely gutted last Thursday when Manchester beat Chelsea in the match in Moscow (can’t remember which cup it was! Bad WAG!!) – The game was on at 6.30 so he had booked the day off so that he could see the end of the match if it went to extra time. Sadly his day off was slightly less good than he had hoped for, but he did take me out for lunch and the girls were happy as they got picked up from school by him!
Meantime, the ‘Winter League’ has started over here – he’s playing in the Over 35s for a team called the Internationals – he seems to be enjoying his season already although he’s had some problems with his Achilles and his groin. He has now started running again (He used to run when I first met him – but stopped soon after – not sure if the two events are connected!) and apparently some of the aches and pains are easing off already, so cross fingers he’ll be back to his athletic best before too long.
Oh, and I learnt something last weekend – Don’t cook a really yummy smelling Peppered Steak in Red Wine Casserole in a Pyrex dish on the hob (not even just to warm it up before you stir in the Crème Fraiche) – as it will explode quite spectacularly leaving shards of glass in quite obscure places throughout the kitchen!
I have the Internationals coming for dinner on Saturday – I think I may give them Bog – on the basis that a casserole dish is not required!
I will try to put some photos on here – but if I can’t figure it out, you’ll have to have a look at the albums on Picasa! http://picasaweb.google.com/LiliinNZ
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