Parents Centre

As many of you know, I am involved with a Not for Profit Organisation in New Zealand called Parents Centre.

They are an organisation who provide Antenatal Classes and Parenting Education Classes for new Mums.

I have been involved with them since 2003, when we did our own Antenatal Classes with them.

When Ben was 5 weeks old, I joined the committee of my local centre and now 6 years later I am still involved!

I have held several positions on the committee since joining and have enjoyed them all.

When we moved to Hamilton I transferred to the local centre here, and walked straight into the President role.

After 19 months in charge I have sadly handed over the reins.

My family no longer uses anything that the centre has to offer, not that that matters, as I was not involved because of them.

I was involved for me, for something that I wanted to do, something that I could give back with.

Sadly my interests have changed slightly, I am still passionate about what Parents Centre does, but I found that as my family have grown, then I had less time for them and was not giving the same amount of time and committment that they deserved.

So last week I handed over the role of President at the Annual General Meeting.

I thought it would be a piece of cake to hand over, as I was quite happy to see it go, but, it was more emotional than I imagined. I got choked on my Annual Report and actually realised what I was saying goodbye to!

I have not walked away totally.....I am still involved with the centre but I now only look after the website, which is one area, not 6 like I was doing before.

I have made some awesome friends through volunteering and I am eternally grateful for that.

I am not going to stop volunteering, I just need to take some time with my family and the maybe find something else to move in to that fits with my growing family at the time that I need it.

The Zoo

As a committee outing for the children we went to Hamilton Zoo the other day.

Now I can't say I really like this zoo, think I have been spoilt by Auckland Zoo.

They have lovely giraffes and rhinos, the walkway round the zoo has been done ever so nicely and the chimps have a wonderful enclosure but the rest I just don't like.

It is this maze of paths that seem to go nowhere.

The enclosures are very impressive but due to this the animals can all hide very well in their homes and you can't see them.

So you spend the whole time searching and telling the kids that "apparently a lemur lives here, or a red panda etc"

My 2 love the tigers, but unfortunately their enclosure is so big we have never seen a tiger on all the times we have visited, which doesn't sit well with Ben as this is all he races around the zoo to see!

They do have a playground that sits well with my 2 and the giraffes are so big and right there that you can't miss them.

Expo

I have just spent the whole weekend at an expo promoting Parents Centre.

I had lots of fun doing this, but man am I tired.

Today was quieter than yesterday but each day was still great.

It is fun promoting something you know so much about and are passionate about.

We have another expo in May that we are attending, so this was a good practice run for that, iron out a few kinks, see how things worked and whether we want to do them differently next time.

All good fun at the end of the day.

Life

OMG where does time go??
I just realised that I haven't blogged for a while, I haven't even been checking out all my favorite blogs either, and so much has been happening to them as well.

So what is my excuse I hear you all cry? Well, I do have one, pretty big one too......

When I was pregnant with Ben, we did our antenatal classes through an organisation called Parents Centre. They are a not for profit organisation within New Zealand. They are run by volunteers and all these people are all parents. So generally it is run by parents for parents.
They run Antenatal Classes, Parenting classes and much more for new parents.
Well when Ben was 5 weeks old I joined the committee in Auckland and 4 years later I am still involved big time with Parents Centre.
Only thing is is that when I moved to Hamilton I transfered my membership, joined their committee and within 3 weeks of being here I was elected PRESIDENT of the Hamilton branch!

Told you it was big!

Yes they are in a little bit of trouble, nothing serious just lack of people to help run it, do the planning and generally have over all direction. They have had a wonderful lady called Wendy who has been doing the best she can, but limited. She is now my Vice President and between us we are going to get Hamilton Parents Centre back on track.
So unfortunately life has been Parents Centre for the last little while and I think it still will be for the next little while too.

I have lots to tell you all about what has been happening here with us. I have some cute pictures of the boys to share. So please stick around and keep checking back and I will try really hard to get something posted really soon.

Patchwork Quilt

At the conference they referred to all the different services involved with parenting like a patchwork quilt.

Quite a nice resemblence I think.

Several months ago National Office sent all centres some material and asked us to create a quilt block. There were certain specifications involved, but generally a block representing what our centre meant to the local community and when building the block we had to try to incorperate the 2 pieces of material supplied so every block had a common thread.

I was the lucky person who had the privelige of putting our block together. We didn't go for anything too fancy, found a design that represented what we wanted to say and then I printed it onto special quilting material you can put through your home computer printer and then added some borders. I was really happy with what we ended with, simple but nice.

It was quite funny because I had forgotten about this, as it was about 3 months ago I sent it in to National Office and then there they were talking about parenting and a patchwork quilt in one of the evening sessions.

Suddenly it dawned on me what they were about to do.

The quilt, celebrating 55 years of Parents Centre, it was a wonderful moment to be part of, especially as my block was part of it, even though it was for Central Auckland Parents Centre, it was still my block.

There were some amazing blocks in the quilt. The centre block showing the logo of PCNZ was so well done. In the blue plain squares the quilter had quilted in the shape of the logo, unfortunately it doesn't show here, but looked so good in person. A lot of effort had gone into this and it showed. It was beautiful.

Conference

The conference was something I wanted to experience as it was being run by National Office, the annual conference is usually run by a centre somewhere around New Zealand.
I have had the pleasure of attending conference for the last 2 years, firstly in Auckland and then last year in Christchurch. So I was interested to see exactly what National would put on and how well it all ran.

National Office is based in Wellington so this is where conference was held this year. They held it at Te Papa, the museum in Wellington, actually quite a cool place to hold a conference. Steve and I had been to a dinner there previously but not a whole conference.

Unfortunately due to the shuttle issues we had and helping Steve get the boys settled before I went to the conference area, I didn't have time to attend the official service, but I did get to the first session at 8.30pm

They opened the conference with the Annual General Meeting (AGM) but they managed to make this last 2 days!! We had half the AGM on the Friday night and then had the other half on Sunday morning! I have never known anyone be able to make an AGM last for so long, unfortunately it meant that attendance at the 2nd half was way down on the first half.


The speakers and break out sessions on the Saturday were good, some inspiring speakers. I found my first break out session a little slow to get going, but made some good contacts whilst in the session. Got to meet someone in a centre not far from where I will be in Hamilton, so we got talking and exchanged details, so will get in touch when I move.

I also got to meet 2 people from the Hamilton Centre, so know when their meetings are being held, so will go along when I have moved. Sounds like they are going through a small bad patch, sort of what Auckland went through last year, but looking forward to seeing if I can help and working with a different committee with a different way of doing things in a different town.


The conference dinner on the Saturday night was good, nothing too fancy but had a theme of 60's & 70's. We had some wonderful costumes appear and some people really went to town on their design. The entertainment was fabulous, they got 'The Beat Girls' who were just amazing. Played all the right music and they were so entertaining.

Sunday was another good day at conference, again some more good speakers and good break out sessions.
Something new they did this year was to have a Dad's Day, generally they ran sessions for the Dad's on the Saturday, so Steve was registered for this and he says it was very interesting. In total there were 4 dad's at the day but they had good speakers and good discussions on how this day could be better organised and planned so more dad's could attend. The only small problem to it is that all the dad's are at home looking after the kids so the mum's can attend conference, so something big would have to be organised about childcare to allow the dad's the advantage of attending conference at the same time, but Steve said lots of ideas were flowing around and it will be interesting to see what comes of it, hopefully that will not be the one and only dad's day at conference.

At the end of the day this is a conference for volunteers, apart from the paid people in National Office the rest of Parents Centre New Zealand (all 52 centres) runs on the wonderful enthusiasm of volunteers and the awesome time they are prepared to give.
Like all volunteer stuff, you can be involved a little or a whole lot, just purely depends on what you want to take on.
To meet up with another 150 people all with the same enthusiasm as myself is very inspiring, so I always come away from Conference with lots of ideas to try and help our centre over the next year.
Not sure where conference is being held next year, they are talking about having a 'Volunteer Symposium' instead, but hey will give anything ago, so watch this space and will let you know where and when and what it will be.