On the second day of the 'weather bomb' we headed to Piha to celebrate Hamish's 40th with a family lunch

Our favourite thing to do is...

Op shopping, when Ang and I get a day to ourselves we go op shopping, Isabella too has inherited my love of op shopping and all things retro. The only problem is avoiding the house looking too much like an op shop. Some days you don't find much but some days there are some treasures to be had...Friday yielded
2 fabulous crown lynn plates

a vintage baby gown

3 pairs of trousers to convert into Billy pants

3 bits of vintage fabric

and lastly these camp boys to even up the barbies in the doll house

Today was a little wet--or in the words of the met service a 'weather bomb' hit. At 1030 cabin fever was setting in so Ang suggested an indoor playground...I was a little skeptical- read these places can be your worst nightmare- but we picked up the cousins en route and a fabulous time was had by all

busy boy

So far the first week back at school.....

is not going well for Harriet and by default us. She seems to have a nasty case of back to schoolitis characterised by a complete failure of her ears, a complete inability to comply with the simplest request and a reversion to tantrums worthy of a 2yr old (luckily the 2yr old is not throwing presently indulging in these).Getting dressed means a huge hassel even though she picks clothes the night before, walking to schoool went from snails pace to backwards on monday and she melts down at the smallest thing with tears, stomping and dropping to the floor...and it's only thursday. She has behaviour system where 5 crosses mean lights out at bedtime and no silent reading and 10 means straight to bed after dinner. In the last few months there have been maybe 2-3 nights where she has got to 5, and never higher, monday was a five, tuesday a nine and last night guess who was in bed straight after dinner. It was made all the worse for having been bitten by her brother, while he was put in time out and instructed teeth were not for biting I did wonder if prehaps he was just able to express how crazy she was making us all. Luckily the oldest one is neither biting or tantruming and aside from the biting indescretion the 2yr old is pretty cute. We are hoping the bribe of a special something from mama when she gets in tonight will lead to a no cross day today.....otherwise i shall be googling good girls boarding schools for 6yr olds.

1970's

A 1970's shot of Hamish Sarah and I from our South Island trip (poor Auckland kids weren't used to snow)
and Billy earlier this week thanks to picnik.com which lets you add cool effects to pics

Look how much they've grown

Harriet and I first met a group of other rainbow kids when she was 2 weeks old, Thomas was 17mths, Molly 14mths, Stella 6mths, Sarah 8mths. Madeline arrived 3 weeks later and since then Luke, Leo and Billy have arrived. The gang used to get together at playgroup each week but now only Billy and Leo are not at school yet so we have school hol get togethers. Some pics below from when they were tiny compared to this week.
Thomas, Harriet, Madeline (yes Harriet was as round as she was tall)

Sarah, Molly and Stella (on Lily's knee)
Harriet and Madeline

Harriet and Leo
x

Thomas, Leo and Billy July 2008
Harriet and Molly

July 2008

Harriet and Stella
Sarah, Molly, Stella, Harriet, Madeline

Sarah, Madeline, Stella, Harriet July 2008

Plushies

the boys spent today with us so we made them plushies from their drawings

concept drawing

stuffing

Eygpt Alien

concept drawing

stuffing and watching Narnia

finished monster

School Hols --- day 1

we went out to visit friends for lunch at the beach, the sky was blue so we put on coats and gumboots and went downstairs and the weather had changed to this


the sun came out again ten minutes later for walking on the beach
got to love winter in Auckland

Sleeping Boy

It seemed Billy was being very quiet and when I looked into the lounge I found this. Seems Quincy wasn't quite as exhausted by the mornings' activities.

It reminded me of this picture of Hamish who was apparently very miffed Golliwog had his eyes open

Winter is here....

although my garden thinks differently

winter has hit with a blast, nicely bringing with it colds for all the children, then a week later they nicely shared all their bugs with me. Time in the great outdoors has been limited with some cabin fever resulting for the smalls and the mothers. There have been some fun activities though



Billy's ( and Harriet and Isabella's old) daycare celebrated the German Lantern festival with a shared meal and a planned walk in the dark with the lanterns the children had made..owing to three consecutive hail storms the walk was abandoned in favour of the warmth of inside and mulled wine for the parents. Harriet caught up with some old friends from her time there and Billy was very excited to be at his 'school' at night.
Billy's favourite activity over the last few weeks...puddle jumping... in all the wetness the weather has brought..alot of fun when he has his pirate boots on...not so much appreciated by his mother when he doesn't.



I have been trying to get back into some crafty stuff so Harriet and I have been exploring making plushies. I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the fabulous patterns in the books I borrowed from the library so instead went with Harriet designing a creature and helping her make it
the design

materials she picked for the body

cutting the hair

stuffing the body

the finished creature

We had a great school interview for Harriet on Friday and were wearing our proud mother smiles. She has moved up a reading level to Gold (8yrs) and is doing really well with maths. Apparently she has to work on getting the ideas from her head down onto paper when they are talking about books afterwards. We found this a little hard to believe being that every thought that goes through her head comes out her mouth at home and surely this would translate to them coming out and being written down at school...but apparently not. She is enjoying some one on one time with us on sundays when Billy is with his dad and Isabella is often doing her own social things. This sunday we walked up to our local cafe in very sunny weather and blue skies...we had to buy umbrellas on the way home


Isabella is nearing the end of her second term at highschool and seems to be topping her class in all subjects. She is going in August with the other members of the marine biology club to represent her school at the enviroschools youth jam in Rotorua and presenting on whaling. She has a number of babysitting gigs and is starting another part time job which she will fit in around soccer, netball and greenpeace volunteering, combined with her social life we sometimes don't see nearly as much of her as we would like to and getting photos is pretty hard too, but here are some with her siblings from the weekend




finally the sun shone today..although apparently winter is back tomorrow so Billy and I headed outside to run off some energy at the park and have lunch with mama at the domain