Doctor's

We are very luck in the fact that we have a wonderful Doctor's surgery not too far from us.
Although sadly we are leaving them and moving somewhere else!

As you know Steve has Diabetes, and with this comes the need to have a good family Doctor.
Steve had a great one in Auckland, had been with him for 18 years. Several times the Doc felt he had failed Steve and would tell him so, informing him that he needed to find a new Doc because he was unable to maintain Steve's Diabetes, really this was just his way of telling Steve that "hey I am doing my part here, now you have to get on board as well to maintain your diabetes at a good level!"
When Ben arrived, I too joined this Doctor's practice and it became our family practice. It was lovely. We all loved the Doc and he was a wonderful person to have in our family, I think he even treated mum on occassion.
Him and his wife came to our wedding here in Hamilton 2 yrs ago, that is how well we knew him.

When we moved to Hamilton we chose the local practice, little larger than our old 2 Doc practice, this one had about 12 Docs, but still we were happy with them.
We got assigned a Doc and all was great until last year, when sadly the Doc had to leave for personal reasons and dissappeared overseas.
Since then we have not had the same Doc twice.
Now for most people this would be ok but for Steve this is no good.
He needs consistency, he needs someone who knows him, knows what he is like and knows when to kick him up the backside when he is being so so about his diabetes.
The Doc we got assigned dropped her hours and suddenly she was only working 2 mornings a week, the other Doc sharing with her has since left and now there is someone new. We feel like we are always repeating ourselves to the latest Doc when ever we visit.

The other day I mentioned to Steve that there was another Family Practice in the other direction, ok this new one is 2ks away instead of 600m, but hey we are not fussy.
He liked the idea, so today I checked them out.
They have 6-7 Docs, several of them working fulltime. They have all the other necessary facilities that go with the practice and low and behold they also have our old Doc (the one who left last year)
Turns out he only went overseas for 6 months and hoped to come back to the old practice when he returned, but they sadly were unable to accomodate him on his return.
So he is now working permanently fulltime at the new practice and that suits us just fine.

4 lots of enrolment forms completed and hey presto we now have a new Family Doctor.
Looks like it is one we all like and now know is going to be around for a while. Ok it is a little further to go when needing to collect a perscription but still just round the corner, so not too much hassle.

Skool Time

Bac to Skool update over here
I might just be about to finally start my first paper

Movies

So we are heading into summer at the top of the world and just about to start 2 weeks of school holidays down at the bottom of the world.

So that can mean only one thing.......a whole heap of movies are about to come out.

The boys are anxiously waiting for Toy Story 3 to come out, but then so are Steve and I as well.

My 2 just love 1 & 2 and so this will be a fun time out as a family when we go and see it.

We have a Buzz and a Woody here at home and Alex will happily get them out and play with them whilst watching the DVD's.

I also treated the boys, although they don't know yet, to some glasses with Toy Story 3 over them. Buzz, Woody, Rex and the Aliens.

Maybe it might get them to drink more if they have fun new glasses to drink from?!

Me, well like every other female across the land, I am waiting for the 3rd installment to come out from Twilight. Although I won't be rushing out to catch 1 & 2 and follow straight on into number 3, I will after the school holidays enjoy a pleasant evening watching it with some friends.

I have also just managed a night out with friends to catch Sex in The City 2.
Was it worth it? Yea, it was ok.
It was typical SATC style, over the top fashion but at the same time hitting on some real at ground level problems. It was funny and had a slight feel good factor, but worth a night out to see.

I saw many others advertised that looked like fun to watch, can't remember the names, but sure they will be out soon.

Judo

The boys Judo club held a fun day on Sunday.
I was not actually here for it, as I was in Rotorua at a Cardiac Conference.
But...I can tell you the boys did very well in their little Pee Wee Class.

I will tell you more about it when I manage to get a picture of them

Whatever You call It?

Football or soccer, whatever, it is something I have grown up with. Dad was a referee and brother has played, so does my 9yr old nephew, very well in fact.

Blogging about football (as I call it) is not something high on my list either but........
When the All Whites thrash Italy, all be it with a draw of 1-1, then I am happy to blog about it.

New Zealand is small, I will give you that.
BUT look what we are capable of doing.

GO THE ALL WHITES

Books

Lucky for us, although totally all our own doing, the boys love books.
This was always something important to me, I wanted them to have that ability to loose themselves in the imagination of the books.
Ok they are still not reading on their own, but they have a love of books and so I am hoping it will continue.
Ben is at that age where he is just starting to consider books that are not mainly pictures. Maybe even books that have a chapter or 2 in them, rather than a book that takes 5 minutes to read.
At the library today I managed to find one or 2 books that are easy readers with about 6 chapters in them.
Ben and I have read the first chapter and already I have managed to get his imagination running overtime!
He has understood everything that has happened in the first chapter and he is thinking about where the story could go from here and what might happen.

We will have fun tomorrow when we read the 2nd chapter.

I also managed to get a few books to read, which will of course be read before the 4 week loan period is finished.
I did however, just as we were walking out the door of the library, find myself a book that doesn't take too much reading.
It is a book all about Art Quilts.

'500 Art Quilts'

An Inspiring Collection of Contemporary Work

It is a fairly new book published this year and it is amazing.

The details people go to with material etc to make a quilt for the wall is just mind blowing.

Now these are quilts for display, not for your double bed in the spare room!

This book is making my imagination run wild, wild with ideas on pictures I would love to see in quilt, although I am not sure my imagination runs wild enough to know what products etc to use to create something like this, maybe it is all trial and error at the end of the day?

Although having seen some of these quilts up close at a quilt show, it just takes a lot of talent with using material.

Yes, for those that haven't seen this picture before, that is a quilted book that hangs out from the wall.

Simply amazing, aren't some people just so clever.

Computer Usage

I seem to have read a lot of magazine articles recently that are criticising everyone's day to day computer use. Are we spending too much time on Blogger, Facebook, Twitter etc?
They happily gave facts and figures, trying to convince us that this is bad for our health, our lives even our families!

However, times have changed.
I remember when I was growing up that people lived in the same town as they were born in and they never moved, well, apart from to a new house several streets away!
Your family and relatives all lived close by and you probably had lunch/dinner with them at least once a week. Grandma's house was the local meeting point every Sunday afternoon.
Your friends were people you caught up with at least twice a month, if not weekly and you always knew what other people were up to because you would always pass someone in the street who would know you both and happily pass on the latest gossip/news.
If you did ever move away from this town, it was usually for work training etc and then you more often than not returned to your home town to raise your own family and so the cycle began again.

Times have changed.
I have had the lucky experience of living in 39 different houses in my life, and at least 12 or 13 different towns.
I have friends and family all over the world but I can't just drop by every Sunday afternoon to catch up or even meet in town to catch the latest movie.
I am still friends with people I knew when I was 17, ok so we are not the closest of friends, we do not know each others daily lives, but we know enough about each others families etc to be able to have a decent conversation when we do meet, even if this is every 10 years!

So are these web sites useful to me, definitely.
I started using Blogger in 2006 because at one stage Grandma was overseas and it was ideal for her and Grandad to keep up to date with their growing grandchildren, even though they were only gone for 2 years, at least at the end of it they didn't feel like they had missed out on so much of their grandchild's lives.
I posted about what the boys were up to, the latest pictures of them and even things that affected our lives, the same as I would now when I pick up the phone to mum.
This has lead on to my Aunties and cousins in Great Britain also logging on and catching up with what the family is up to, how they are growing etc, so even though I do not keep my blogs (I have 2 of them, Life Today and Bac to Skool) up to date daily, there is enough information on there for everyone to keep up with the boys and what they are doing.

I also use Facebook, yes sometimes I do post that 'it is raining' and how this effects my day but mainly I use it to keep up with my friends that do not live within easy reach of me, people that I now know more about than if it was left to hand written letters!
Now I love receiving hand written letters, although I seem to have stopped sending them like everyone else in life. But I am an avid Birthday card sender and probably send more than my fair share of them every year.
We may not be able to go to the movies together but that doesn't stop us talking about the same movie when we have both seen it.

So can these sites get addictive?
Yes of course they can, I sometimes feel like I am having an affair with my computer.
But then there are other times when there is nothing to post about for a day or two, no pictures to upload and no one you need to catch up with.
Someone once mentioned that her blog was her personal journal, she no longer kept a handwritten diary every evening, she posted on her blog instead.
It was also her personal journal to her children and she was looking forward to the day when the children could look back on what she had posted about and remember their childhood.

Times have changed, the world is a bigger place now, although it seems smaller with our ability to travel round it so quickly. People no longer live down the street but that doesn't stop us wanting to keep in touch with friends and family.
So the computer is here to stay, it will always have a place in most homes and I don't think people are going to complain about that too much.

Boys Weekend

A couple of weeks ago, whilst catching up on the blogs I follow, one of them (Leisy) talked about how her husband was taking their 3 yr old away over night camping.
I thought what a great idea.
Steve has never done anything like that with our boys and I decided that it was about time he did!

So I went and told him he had to organise a weekend away with each of our boys individually.
We checked the calendar and came up with 2 weekends.

I helped them plan the time away, well with regards to food anyway. I asked them one evening what they wanted for dinner on the Saturday night, Alex knew straight away that he wanted Fish and Chips.
So when I did the shopping I ensured that they had everything they needed food wise. They went late on Friday evening, so dinner was had at home with everyone, then they had to sort out breakfast and lunch for Saturday, dinner was takeaways and then they had to sort breakfast and lunch for Sunday.
They took bikes and scooter, swim stuff and dvd's.
So just over 2 weeks ago Steve and Alex disappeared to the caravan for their weekend away together.
Alex was really excited about this, so was Steve come to think about it!

This was quite significant because Steve has never had nights away with the boys due to his diabetes.
When the boys were little I was always worried about what would happen if he had a hypo in the middle of the night? When they were so little it was very easy to got lost in the moment of looking after them that it was easy to forget to eat. Now this is fine for someone like me who can get really hungry and then eat, for Steve, then his sugars would get really low and he would then probably ignore the headache because the kids needed him and then he would eat wrong and maybe suffer for it later when everything all came to a head in the middle of the night!

Someone once told me, when the boys were little, that it got easier when they were older?
At the time I was head deep in life with them and I couldn't quite believe that this was going to be true, but when they are older it seriously is true, life does get simpler.

But the boys are now older, they are less demanding on your time, you can have 5 minutes to yourself and the world does not come crashing down around you. Time is flexible now not so restrictive, in other words life is fun with them.
So now I am not so worried about Steve, I know that he has the time to eat right and therefore will be ok during the night. I also know that he worries about it when he is with the boys on his own, so I know he won't be stupid and will have dinner at a sensible time etc.

So today is Ben's turn, they are heading away tonight after dinner.
The shopping has been done and they are all set to go.
Steve did take the camera with him when he went with Alex but sadly there were no pictures taken (guess you can tell who takes all the pictures in this family?)

What will I be doing I hear you ask??
Well I get to stay at home with the child who is left behind. As we are still a 1 car family then we don't get to go too far.
Ben enjoyed sleeping in mummy and daddy's bed for the nights and we had an adventure on the bus to a friend's birthday party.
Alex and I will be staying at home, although my brother has told me they will be over this way on Sunday due to my nephew having some soccer games to play, so we will go and join them watching him play his matches.

I also think this may have to become an annual event, 'Daddy and Son weekend away'
I am sure we should do a Mummy and Son weekend away too, but I already get plenty of time with them that I am happy for this to wait a while!
Maybe one year we will think of stepping up from a little weekend away to the caravan to something a little more elaborate? Maybe an over night stay in Auckland or something in a hotel?

Preview

Have you noticed any changes to the 'Posting' page when writing your blog posts?
They have moved the preview button.
Was happy with that no problems.
Was even more happier when I realised that they have fine tuned the preview altogether.
It is amazing, when you view preview now, you actually get a preview of your blog page, you can actually get to see what it will look like when published, no more small box showing you an approximate idea, this is an actually post on your blog with 'preview' written across it.
So way much better.

So the next time you are sat writing a post, preview it and see what happens. It will make getting your layout exactly how you want it from now on

Kitchen Update

Well the kitchen has had some small work done on it in the last week.
I finally got the back splash surround for the stove area.

When we changed over to a gas stove last year, the builder put up a fire sheet for us, because by law we had to have something.

So we went from nothing to this

Now there is only the painting to do and the kitchen will be finished.
Yea, 1 room down, many more to go!

Party Time

We have just had a long weekend here, Queen's Birthday.
But with Alex's birthday then it has been a long weekend of party time.

Alex was lucky enough to get 3 cakes this year, but then it was a special occassion.

He took a cake to Daycare on Friday as this was his last day. Apparently he ended up with several cakes there, because they made one for him too.

Because his party was going to be on Saturday, then I made sure we had a small cake after dinner, just for the 4 of us.

Just a little ice cream cake with a candle.

Then at the party on Saturday he had his main cake.

Of course the party theme for this year was his dream party, Ben 10.

To say he likes this theme is putting it mildly, he gained t-shirts, jackets and even Lego of Ben 10!

He was in heaven and had a great day.

Schooltime

Here it is....the much a waited first day of school.

How was he.....he was awesome, so eager and happy to be going.
He looked so cute walking down the street with his big brother, both of them in uniform with their bags on their backs.
He was happy for us all to take him to his classroom, and even for us to hang around for a wee while, but soon he was telling me I could go now! The bell hadn't even gone!

You would never have known, if you were a fly on the wall, that today was his first day!
It could have just been any day of the school week with a mum dropping their child off and lingering for a wee while to see what has been happening in the classroom.
How was I? No worries at all, no tears, no heart break, no feeling of lose.
Maybe that will come tomorrow?

Baby is 5

Ok, could someone please tell me where the years have gone??

My baby turns 5 today and all of a sudden he is off to school

My cute little blond headed boy is full of beans and so excited to be turning 5.

I remember the day he was born like it was yesterday, does that ever fade? Not that I particularly want to forget it, it was a great day.

He has been ready for the birthday for weeks now, or more to the point he has been ready for what this birthday represents SCHOOL.

He is so eager, he has had 2 successful school visits and each time he has wanted to know if he can go back the next day!

He is actually allowed to go to school today if he wants because he is now 5, but I knew with it being a Friday that Daycare would really be upset if he didn't come in today, plus with it being a long weekend a head of us, I decided he could wait till next week when I have a few days off for him to start school.

So Happy Birthday Alex, hope you love school as much as you think you will.

Au Pairs

Someone I know in Hamilton has had an Au Pair for a while now.
I remember her talking about it and thinking WOW what a fab idea.

Of course my mind went into overdrive with the 'What If's'

• What if we had the space
• What if we had the spare room
• What if we had the 2nd car for them to use

Of course nothing ever came of it, but it was a nice wish/thought

Back at Easter time, some very close friends of the family were talking about childcare and I of course mentioned Au Pairs. They too could see the wonder of this situation if you had the space etc. The drop in stress that came with knowing your children were home each afternon and not constantly in care. That someone was going to vacuum your house for you and you didn't have to worry about it when you got home from work. Plus the washing was folded and they may do a little housework too.
Well, when we called into their house last week, low and behold they had gone and done it.
Say hello to our Au Pair they announced.

Man was I jealous.
So I spent 24 hours racking my brain to see how I could make it work for us??
It won't, it is just not suitable for us, sadly. Well it is suitable if we want to add extra rooms on the house, if we want to totally rearrange the house and buy a 2nd car.

But someone else mentioned to me that they had heard of students from the local university childminding.
So maybe I will look into getting a student to care for the boys 2 afternoons a week, that would mean that with my 1 day off a week the boys would go to after school care 2 days a week and have 3 days a week at home after school.
I like the idea of them being here at home, having a nice afternoon tea, having someone sit down with them for 15 minutes and working through their homework with them.
Having them be able to go on a play date without having to plan it 2 weeks in advance so I can cancel after school care.
The thought of someone else vacuuming the house for you and maybe cleaning the bathroom occassionally, man I can feel the stress just flowing out of me...!

Frustration

Frustration is knowing that you started a new job 6 months ago and already you have taken 6 sick days!
Frustration is knowing that this is what can happen when you have kids!

But knowing all this, it is still difficult to swallow sometimes when I have to call work to let them know I won't be in. I have even taken to letting them know I am off sick due to a child.
As you can guess, I am at home today with a sick child. Alex said he had tummy ache this morning and he was too quiet. So I kept him home from Daycare. With his 5th birthday just days away, I definitely do not want a sick child this weekend!
He has been quieter than normal all morning, happily sat on my bed and watched tv for the morning. This is so not like him at all.

I was off sick for 1 day in May with Ben.
I was unwell for 2 days in April, finally I actually got to take sick days for me!
Before that Steve and I both shared a day each in March when Alex was not well for half a week, Steve did 1 day, I did the next and the other was my day off anyway.
The last sick day was in February, and that 1 was for me, when I had finished the 6 weeks orientation and I was knackered.

So even though it is not much, it still feels like it when I have to call them, and unfortunately we are heading into winter, but maybe with everyone having already had sniffles and sneezes we might be able to get through a couple of months without mummy having to stay home from work, although thankfully Steve does share and will take a day off too when he knows I really can't take anymore.
Although having said that, work are very good. The department is more or less run by family people, we all have kids at school etc that can not stay home on their own. So we are all very understanding to each others needs.
I don't actually feel so bad today because I have just found out that 1 of the lists had been cancelled this afternoon due to the doctor being away sick!

School Countdown

We have 1 more week until both our boys are at school.
Alex can hardly wait to go.
Uniform, bag and lunch box are all ready and named.

Not sure if mum and dad are ready for their baby to go though?