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it’s waitangi day today which is a public holiday.  the last two years it has fallen on a weekend day so we’ve missed out on an extra holiday.  but this year it fell on a week day so we were in luck.

jane went for a walk with debbie this morning whilst kezia and i finished constructing her desk.  she’s now busy moving stuff from her old desk to her new desk

this afternoon we drove to shakespear park and did one of the walks there which was very excellent taking in a variety of different sorts of scenery

we saw (and heard) plenty of tuis and this magnificent kereru 

here’s some of what we saw

 

something’s gone a bit wrong with my photo processing tonight so apologies for the gloomy look.  it was overcast and did rain a bit at one point, but it was quite bright (hence the sunnies)

 

 

we finished the walk with hot chocolate on the beach. then this evening we’ve been finishing chores ready for back to school tomorrow

 

Here is the birthday girl opening her cards and presents after church. This afternoon she went to her friend Emma’s birthday party at a climbing wall place. Emma and Kezia share the same birthday.

The rest of us fiddled around at home this afternoon and cuddled the guinea pigs.

 

Kezia had her birthday party today as another friend is having hers tomorrow on her actual birthday day day.

I’ll let you work out what they got up to from the pictures

jane ran an excellent party (as she does) and her friend Alex kindly helped

Alex was great as she was really good at helping.  And it also meant that i didn’t have to help which was a benefit to both me and the kids.

there was some swimming for half an hour in the middle of the party.  i was the life guard so got to sit on a high chair and panic for 30 minutes whilst they jumped on each other.   no one died.

 

this morning esther and i went shopping for a school diary for esther and a couple of groceries whilst jane was doing party prep. 

as soon as the party was over we went round to our next door neighbour’s house

 

 

this was the first time we’d been round to our neighbour’s house as a family (the girls had been round to play with their daughters, and the mum and daughters had been round to our house).   We had a really great time, so that was lovely.

and now we’re all exhausted.  no change there then.

i worked from home today as i had a meeting 10 minutes from home at 11.30.  it was with the CEO of TCF, the telecoms industry group.  Their office is in Albany which is handy.  The CEO was really positive about some work i’ve been doing for the last year so that was nice.  it goes to their board in March and i was after some final guidance on process etc.

 

then i had to drive in to auckland for a follow up meeting with the regulatory representative of another company who turned out to be the wife of the CEO.  New Zealand is a small country!  I was given directions by a guy from the TCF who has been helping me on the project but his sense of direction was a bit dodgy and we ended up in an underground carpark which was too small to turn round in in the building next to where we were trying to get to.  a 10 point turn and plenty of laughing saved the day.  and in the end that meeting only lasted 6 minutes long as she was also happy with the work we’ve done! 

 

kezia had another good day at school and esther met a few more of her teachers who are nice.  her class is mostly the same as last year, although one lad has been moved to another class as he didn’t put the effort in last year.  two other boys have left for other schools – esther was glad about both – one was annoying and the other was the best at spelling, so now esther is in with a better chance if there’s a competition!

this evening they both had swimming.  we watched some family telly (frozen planet), then after the girls had gone to bed we watched another mike leigh film from our dvd rental.  and that was that.

during the day jane kept popping out for coffees with chums.  and did more preparation for kezia’s party tomorrow.

esther had her first day back at school which seemed to be mostly a team building sports day thing.  kezia had a good day too.

our washing machine broke and there’s a man coming tomorrow.

jane sorted her CV and a covering letter for a job application

and i had two two-hour meetings back to back at work

no photos today.  sorry.

It was Kezia’s first day back to school today. She is in year 6. She seems to have had a good day. Her teacher is Mr Cowell. A busy day for Kezia as she had violin after school and swimming after that.

No idea what Dave did at work, but it looks like he found an apple. Esther and I mostly did shopping for Kezia’s party.

we dragged ourselves out of bed early (ish) this morning for kezia’s last day of school holiday and headed back to tawharanui in the hope of getting some better weather than last saturday

 

it was quite windy when we got there and the waves weren’t great so we decided to go for a walk first

 

we walked along to the far end of the beach where there was a geocache.  but unfortunately the tide was too far in so we couldn’t get round and turned back

i found some broccoli

and a bit later a tea-bag.  rather middle class fly-tipping

 

 

 

then we parked up on the grass area above the beach for our picnic

 

the girls went boogie boarding until they discovered the black moving blobs in the water were in fact sting rays and not bits of seaweed and made a hasty retreat back to the land.  they were quite close to them most of the time they were boogie boarding and there were plenty of people in the sea.  so chances are all would have been well.  but you only need to stand on one by mistake and … ouch.

here’s kezia watching a sting ray near the shore

and here’s jane watching kezia 

 

and here’s kezia with her legs buried.  she was keen i showed you this picture

we then went home (via Charlie’s ice cream shop, which had run out of chocolate fudge ice cream so i had sorbet instead – kezia and jane both had a scoop of coffee and a scoop of dark chocolate.  esther had something with a very complicated name and a dark chocolate scoop).

and this evening kezia has been sorting her school bag, sharpening and naming up her pencils etc.  and they’ve both had a pre-sleep swim.

i spent the day at the Laneway Festival in auckland. it was excellent. And i’m going to tell you all about it. if you aren’t interested in music this will be a bit boring. sorry about that.

That’s Neil Finn of Crowded House in the picture above who i spotted in the crowd after he’d played

first up, and possibly my favourite of the day were opossum   A sort of NZ supergroup. sort of.

they were on first at 12.30 so it could only be downhill from there

 

  

Then Ema (better on record than in person i thought)

the festival was in a car park next to the fish market.  near the Silos.

 

Austra reminded me of dr and medics, but that might have been the flappy backing dancers

I absolutely loved ‘Girls’.  here’s a nice song by them.  they were a nice surprise

Yuck were scruffy and excellent.  i’d been revising their albums so knew most of their songs.  good

pajama club were excellent.  they are made up of Neil Finn (of Crowded House) and his wife. 

 

here’s a video of them live

Feist were another surprise and were very good (i was quite far away for them)

and the last band i saw was the Horrors who were very excellent and the main reason i went in the first place

i left before M83 and Gotye. sorry about that

meanwhile jane and the girls had a day at home of domestic organising

lots of skyping this morning, then off to church

kezia and i walked back from church through esther’s cut through and enjoyed the little bridge through the bush on the way back

there’s still plenty of workmen digging up the street to put ultra fast broadband in our neighbourhood.

i think i’ve managed to get on the Telecom trial so hopefully we’ll have a taste of that in a few weeks time

then this afternoon we had ‘the gang’ round which meant lots of youngsters in the pool (8 i think) …

 

… and olds round the table (also 8 i think)

when everyone had gone we had a family game of Cluedo and a then i did a little more skyping. 

now it’s now. good night

  

We had planned to spend the day at Tawharanui today, but the weather wasn’t looking too great.  And I spotted there was an A&P Show on at Warkworth which is on the way to Tawharanui. 

So we headed there first

and ‘a&p’ show is an agriculture and produce show.  A bit like a country fayre in england

 

complete with craft competition with vegetable animals, livestock showing, kids egg and spoon races etc  All great fun.

here’s a rabbit that was happy to lie on its back (even when the lady removed her hands from its ears)

the compere was our favourite celebrity Te Radar who we seem to be stalking at the moment (jane and i went to his history show on thursday night and we saw him in ‘The Twits’ as a family in December).  the girls were delighted to meet him and he was very nice so that’s all good!

one highlight was the sheep racing

 

and some cute alpacas

it was still a bit windy and a little chilly in the shade, but we thought we’d risk going over to tawharanui so we did

the girls got their wet suits on and spent an hour body boarding.  there weren’t huge amounts of waves, but they managed to catch a few good ones

it was pretty busy (for new zealand), but then it is a public holiday weekend

although there was plenty of spare space on the next bay if we were that worried

oh, and remember that ship jane posted yesterday?  it’s front page of the weekend paper today (not my picture, but the same boat).  you saw it here first!

 

 

and finally, here’s some woodchoppers (neither won the competition, and the chap behind had to change axe half way through)