It's Offical

All the papers are signed and we are moving up to Paraparaumu!

Settlement date is the 4th of December allowing us to get our house here ready for renting out. If we are lucky in renting this place out quickly then we can hopefully move the settlement date forward.

I'm so excited to be making the move - I think that they house and area will give my family so much more freedom than we have at the moment.

I've been a busy girl and have been working my way down my list of things to be done before we can go. I've organised carpet today for the bedrooms to be redone.

Wayne's about to go on a work trip for the next few days. I'm still laughing at the name of the conference "back to basics". Why? It's being held here - he is carpooling to it!

Wordful Wednesday

Trelise has moved on from carrots! I found this hiding in her bed (or should I say nest)

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BFF Gold Card

A blogging gold card - why wouldn't you want this! Lit and Laundry passed this along to me. I just love it and it's my turn to share the love!

The rules:

Rules: You may choose 5 awardees

Choose 4 faithful readers of your blog.

1 should be someone new or someone far away. This is obviously not difficult for me!!

Laurie

Jenni Anne

Tracey

Jamie

and because I'm a sadist

Carissa!

What's up with the Olivers?

I've already apologised for being slack on the blogging front! All our free time has been spent recently looking for houses, looking at houses or debating houses!

We have made a decision and will be putting an offer in today or tomorrow.

Here's the house


And for those more interested here's the real estate link - you will need to see past the clutter to and embrace the 70's!
http://www.nz.open2view.com/Property/173777

Wordful Wednesday

It's tough in the hood!


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Descent into Chaos

As an experiment I decided to take time lapse pictures of the insanity that happens once my children are at home5pm - room tidy and childless. Keen eyes will notice that my children have broken a door on our new entertainment unit already!
5.30pm - the mess is starting to seep in already. The white stuff on the carpet is talc!
This is about 6pm. It's dinner time hence no children in picture
7pm bedtime!!!!

Carrots

Carrots are pretty harmless enough.

Most kids wouldn't even notice them and when they do probably just complain that they are on their dinner plate.

Our house used to be like that. Normal in our carrot usage.

But one day it all changed......

Trelise has discovered an affinity with the humble carrot and has taken to having them around her at all times.

Why am I complaining? Well she still won't eat them but instead carries them around.

For the past few days I've been on carrot patrol. My keen eyes have been on the lookout for little orange critters that can be hiding anywhere - the washing pile, her bed, various handbags anywhere but here
This is today's haul that I have retrieved (carrots don't look so good after Trelise has loved them!)
and then this
Just as I thought they had all been retrieved I came across this
I am thankful - tomato's would be far worse!

Nappy Changes

I wanted to talk about a process in my house that is not so close to my heart!

I didn't realise when told that I was having twins that this would be such a source of frustration to me! Trelise as a baby was an angel when it came to nappy changes. She would lie still on the change table and allow me to quickly take care of business.

Oh how my life has changed. Maddie and Jules are sweet, fun loving babies until it comes time for nappies or clothes to be changed! Then the 'fun' begins!

First task to to identify the baby that is the best target for capture. I have found that Trelise is a good sheepdog and is quite handy at rounding up a rowdy sister if needed. All those trips to Lindale have not been for nothing!

Once baby has been caught wrestling them to the ground is the next challenge. For little girls they are quite skillful and usually it will take me 2 or 3 attempts to get them in a position where removing clothes and nappies is possible.

Right, so I have a baby down on the ground. With these two I wouldn't even attempt a change table unless I had rope to tie them down with. I then start to remove the layers and layers of clothing they are wearing. As I am doing this I'm so looking forward to summer and less clothes and hoping like mad that anything in the nappy has stayed in the nappy.

Now knowing my luck I will have hit a jackpot and a full clean up job will be necessary. For most people this is annoying but not particularly stressful. In our house however this task generally is performed with one hand as the other is needed to hold back the other child from beating her defenseless sister over the head with whatever weapon is around. No weapon no problem poking eyes or any type of face pulling has the same effect and once this gets boring turning attention to your mother and attempting to climb on her also increases the nappy changing challenge.

We have had a bout of nappy rashes currently so I'm using a variety of creams and powders to solve the problem. Generally I look up just to see the tube I'm about to use disappearing and being swung around like some sort of baby trophy.

Getting clothes back on the child is the next step. Sound effects usually kick in now. Jules has developed a high pitched scream that is most unpleasant to the ears. Legs and arms are going crazy and the child is flipping over constantly. Usually I manage to get clothes back on them with only 2 or 3 escapes. About now a niggling pain in my back appears.

I release the beast and strangely she usually lies on her back laughing.

The best thing

I'm only halfway through!!!!

Wordful Wednesday

You are a bad bad man Daddy

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Paraparaumu verus Wellington

I've woken up this morning and feel like I've been hit by a truck! I know my posting has been erratic and it's because we have so much going on here and trying to decide where the future of our family is.

We have decided that Paraparaumu is a better place for us to be than Wellington central. More space and family friendly houses. It's probably only 15 - 20 mins more for Wayne to communte than he's doing now.

We headed up on Saturday to look at houses for sale. I still love the dream house however there is a few issues with it - mainly someone else already has an offer on the property. The offer has a long lead time so it could fall through if they are unable to raise the money. It does however have a few finishing issues, two of the bedrooms are marginal on size for us, and there are a few questions about a few structural issues. So we have decided to wait and see what happens and go from there if the current offer falls through.

We saw alot of other houses and while none of these are quite right I'm confident that one will come up that is just perfect for us. We are debating at the moment on moving up and renting a property just to make sure that Kapiti is the right place for us. We would be renting our home so it would only be a short time until we moved back if it wasn't the right decision.

So I think that all the stress and emotional turmoil has caught up with us (well me at least!)

I saw a Kiwi!!!

For Fathers Day today we went to the zoo. It was a lovely day today and just right for walking up and around our hilly little zoo. Wellington Zoo have just redone their nocturnal house and it's really good. It's been given a facelift and the internal lights have been changed to red ones. It obviously has made a difference as I have only seen a Tuatara in the enclosure before and I was convinced that there was no kiwi in there.

Anyway today Trelise started screaming Kiwi, Kiwi, Kiwi (being 3 she was unable to read the sign's requesting silence!) and sure enough there it was!

I know for my overseas readers it will seem strange to be so excited about this but I've only ever seen stuffed ones before!

Wordful Wednesday

I can't make this the right way sorry - but I just had to post it!

I want to suck your blood!!!
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I've fallen in love

We are in the middle of trying to decide what to do property wise. Our current house (in it's current state) is to small and most importantly has no indoor / outdoor living. We are coping with the space at the moment but it's obvious that time is going to run out for us here unless we do something to fix it.

So we can change the house back into one house (currently it's 3 bedrooms upstairs with a 1 bedroom self contained flat downstairs). If we make our living space downstairs we will gain an extra bedroom upstairs and could put in an ensuite and walk in wardrobe. The living space and kitchen would be able to access a deck and garden. We will need a bit of earthwork to gain enough space downstairs. There will be a bit of disruption but we can do everything downstairs without touching upstairs so it shouldn't be so bad.

Our house here has amazing sun and a double garage. Wellington is really hilly and our access is ok - not the best but not the worst! We have a sportsfield and playground at the end of our street and it's a cul de sac so traffic is not bad.

We live in a nice part of Wellington but you do need to either drive or catch the bus everywhere
- no walking to the shops for me.

Anyway we have been looking at properties for sale in Wellington and running into a few problems - 4+ bedrooms in the areas we like aren't common so there is not a lot of choice and what is out there needs work - alot of work! (at least in our price range) . It's hard to go from a house you like to one that has alot of aspects that need changing. In alot of ways we feel like we are just changing negative points for other negative points. The most important aspect is the indoor / outdoor flow (and access to a lesser degree) and really we haven't found anything that 'floats our boat' to speak.

Until now and this popped up in a search - Jo and Wayne's dream home

What's wrong with it - nothing apart from it being in Paraparaumu (about an hour out of Wellington)

It's very tempting to make a big move and gain a lifestyle that we can't get here.

Cake Wrecks

It's almost been a whole week since my last post. I swear I just don't know where the time goes sometime!

I haven't got really anything to say so instead I wanted to share a blog that I've come across that's given me much amusement!

Cake Wrecks - when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong!