Chocolate biscuits, roasting marshmallows and ready for school!

Check out the weather! We have had a week of glorious sunshine, it is wonderful and warm. Our new house has a lovely open fire which is perfect for roasting marshmallows!

Tom and Ollie have now started school and loving it. We live about 10-15 min walk from school now which is great in a suburb called Forrest Hill. We are keen to get the boys used to walking to and from school as at the moment they moan!

Snowplanet

Tom and Ollie could have started school the day after their birthday but Fran understandably wanted a few days with them. She decided to try out Snowplanet as the skiing trip was so successful. They continued to love it but the difference here was that it was much colder than being on the mountain so they got colder quicker. They loved the carpet lift and sledged for about an hour and half. A fantastic way to spend their last day before 'big' school.

New house 2

Tom was very keen to show you the house as he made me take a photo of every room. It has 4 bedrooms and a study. Three toilets with 2 showers and a huge bath. There is 3 living areas next to each other heated by a stove/fire which sounds interesting at least its heat! The double garage opens onto the paved area where the boys are very keen to practice their basketball skills. There is almost a separate area for our future guests with a bedroom and bathroom down one end of the house. We are going to keep everyone together upstairs. You may have noticed some odd furniture, hopefully that will be gone tomorrow.

New house!

We always knew our house in Greenhithe was going to be short term as we found out about other areas but not this short!! For the last month or so we decided that if a house came up near Campbells Bay School we would go for it. Its 'the' area to live so these opportunities would be very rare indeed particularly decent houses. The problem was that the estate agents said we couldn't seriously go for any unless our current property was rented out.

We didn't expect this one to go but it went really quickly giving us 2 weeks to find somewhere! Cue, panic. I hated it as there was plenty of properties but all were pretty bad and we have got used to having a big house. By chance a colleague hassled me into checking on the Internet for properties and this one had been on for literally hours so we chased it up.

Harcouts (estate agents) said they had lots of applications and we just had to put one in and wait to find out who they preferred as tenants. We felt like the dream was over but they choose us! Fantastic we thought, as long as they did not have an offer to buy within next 48 hours it was ours. That was weird but hey what are the chances of that.

They had an offer the following morning which meant we had to wait another day, another day drifting by leaving us only 7 days to find somewhere if it didn't go through! We didn't sleep well that night. It all fell through and the property was ours, finally. Yippeee!

Rainbow's End 3

As you can see it was business as usual. We have loads more photos of all the boys laughing on the jumping star as they loved it so much. They had another hour and a half before we were kicked out! Over 3 hours of a 5th birthday and we weren't stressed, now that is impressive!

Rainbow's End 2

After about an hour we needed to chase them and get them to eat. The park have an area in the castle for you to sit and they provide the usual nuggets and chips! Fran spent hours creating the monster cakes and they looked (and tasted!) awesome. We didn't know what to do with them so we asked the kids to use their hands and tuck in! They took a while to get going as they couldn't believe their luck, all the smarties disappeared first? What is it with those things?

Rainbow's End

For Tom and Ollie's 5th birthday party we took them to NZ's Premier (only!) theme park. It was a bit of gamble as we were not 100% sure of what we were going to get! However, it paid off as we had an awesome day.

Firstly, the weather continues to be fantastic, absolutely beautiful blue skies and warm. Secondly, they had a semi-contained area called 'Cadbury's Castle' which was for 5 year olds. It had 7 different things they could do but the beauty was they could do it themselves! They just strolled around and chose the ride they wanted. Amazing. No queues, straight on once the ride had finished. It was unbelievable.

The rides were a real mix but the 'Jumping Star' was very popular as they dropped suddenly a few inches and the dragon roller coaster just looked the part. The kids enjoyed the freedom more than anything else.