Long Weekend

Hello Friends...
so great to see you all again. This past weekend has been a long weekend for us. We have been celebrating Queen's Birthday. Which just so happens to have fallen when they are doing all the celebrating in England. However just in case you don't know, here in New Zealand we have a long weekend to celebrate the birthday of the current monarch. They keep it the same weekend each year, regardless of when the actual birthday falls.
So as I write this post most people are enjoying the fact we have a 4 day working week this week.

Friday
the evening started with us coordinating all the activities we had for the weekend

• soccer
• staying at my cousin's house
• Judo
• Travelling home
• Alex's 7th Birthday
• Friends over for lunch

so despite a few protests from the lower ranks, we had a game plan in our heads as to what had to be achieved  when and possibly by whom!

Soccer

This was meant to be one of our easier weekends of the sport. The boys, most conveniently luckily, for us had both their games at school.

Because of this I had stupidly happily in my helpful mode agreed to assist with the fundraising sausage sizzle we were running. This fitted in with what time we had to be at school for Alex's game so no worries.

The morning however did not work out too well, we had to remind the boys 3 times to ensure they had their soccer bags organised. We successfully left the house, arrived at school only to have them both inform us that they had in fact not put their soccer shorts in their bags!

To say we as parents were a little annoyed was an understatement! I think Steve was ready to contact CYFS and have them taken into care!

Consequently, the boys have lost the privilege of all things electronic in our house for a week.

As you can see it was a normal early morning winter day for soccer, yes that is fog!

There was some sun somewhere, however it was at least 10am before it shone through enough to clear the fog.

This however did nothing to stop our little soccer players.

Saturday afternoon

The boys decided a few weeks ago that they wanted to participate in the Waikato Bays Judo Tournament that was happening in Tauranga. We are fully supportive of their judo so were happy to attend, however weigh in started at 7.30am on Sunday, so we decided to stay with my cousin who lives 20 mins away from the venue rather than a 90 minute drive first thing in the morning.

So we took bedding and dessert and had an awesome relaxed evening with the family, eating gorgeous lasagne and apple crumble with ice cream, to say we were all stuff is an understatement, it was a great winter dinner that filled you to the top.

We did however sit and watch the movie "War Horse" which after watching I am not so sure of. It was an interesting story, although sadly I spent the whole movie waiting for something to actually happen. I found the whole movie a little jumpy, jumping from this part of the story to that part and then on to another part, no real flow to it! But hey that is just my opinion of it.

Judo
at 7.45am on a cold Sunday morning, we joined the ranks of several other families and had our little ones weighed, all 22 and 25kg of them!

Then we went and got breakfast to be back for 9am to watch them fight their hearts out.

Sadly their fights didn't quite go how they would have liked!
Alex had only himself and 1 other in his class. So they had a best of 3 fight. The other person won the first fight and then sadly went on to win the next fight too, so Alex walked away with nothing. He had to win 1 fight to get a medal. He was devastated and very annoyed.

 Ben had 3 others in his class so he got to fight 3 times. He won 1 and lost 2 thus giving him a bronze medal.

They both did extremely well in their fights, even if they did lose some, but at the end of the day they both went and gave it ago and tried hard. We are very proud of them for getting out there and trying.
Grandma even came and watched them fights, so they had lots of cheering from the stands when they were fighting.

Home time
After judo we called back at my cousin's house and collected our bedding and then hit the road for the drive home. 90 mins is not far but when you have had a long tiring day it can seem like forever.

We were on the road at 5pm and got the pleasure of seeing a wonderful winter sky as the sun went down.

I got the camera out and took 1 picture and then Ben suggested "I get closer!"
Steve and I just fell about laughing as we tried to ask him exactly what he wanted me to do, because there was no way I could get closer to the sky!
Turns out he wanted me to use the zoom button on the camera, man they come out with such cute stuff all the time. Although he did go on to inform us that because it was a nice red sky then the next day would be nice, think he has been listening too much to his dad when he says:

• Red sky at night sailors delight
• Red sky in the morning sailors warning

I took more pictures and we all ooh'd and ah'd over the pretty sky ahead of us

I am aware that this post has turned into a long one so will end for now and tell you about the last day of our long weekend which just happened to be Alex's 7th Birthday.
Catch you soon.