It's Saturday in NZ and tomorrow at high noon we fly to the Philippines. We are a bit nervous about the flight with Liam, his first time on an airplane and at a very precarious time in his life. He is now 10 months old and is very mobile and does not like sitting still for long. He is also very vocal when he is not happy (quite vocal when he is happy too). I am hopeful that he will do alright. We just need to be able to walk him around a bit and keep him involved so he doesn't get bored.

It's quite exciting to be getting away from it all for a whole month. It will be a lot of fun to hang out with the in-laws. They are all very excited to have Liam around. I'm hoping to spend a day just hanging out with Gil (he doesn't know that yet) and I am sure we will spend plenty of time hanging with Van and Kim. More than anything else though, I'm excited for Let and me to have some time together alone. Time to go to movies or out for drinks or even out of town for a couple of days, that has really got me happy.

Life is good!

Hope everyone in the US of A had a lovely Thanksgiving and gave lots of thanks for the Prez-elect!!!

We didn't have the forethought to get a Turkey early enough for it to thaw in time to eat on Tday so had a roast chicken instead :-)

Today I am manning a stand at a mall for our Engineering programme. I've never done such a thing before so it will be interesting to see how it goes. Not a big fan of malls, but so it goes.

We tried to add another dog to our family but it did not work out. He terrorised Samson and Liam was not so fond of him either. It didn't help the situation that he was marking the entire house as his territory in the only way dogs know how. BLECH! So he went to another home that would have more time to provide the guidance he needs. He was a very cute and sweet little guy though.

Oooops, another unexpected hiatus.

I must admit, plenty has happened since I last wrote.

We have now been living in our very own house for over a month. Unfortunately, our old place did not get rented until...officially today I think. So we paid about 6 weeks of extra rent, not fun, but worth it to have our house!

The house is great. Of course it has issues, but nothing horrible. The funniest part of it is that we have a white picket fence! How cheesy is that? It is also one story sorta ranch style. Those of you that know me would know that I would never have expected to buy a ranch style house in the 'burbs. I love it though, it's a cool little suburb that has a great café called Aunt Daisy's. They even have life music regularly (which we've yet to attend).

We have a massive back yard! We just bought ourselves an EnviroMower. It has a rechargeable battery and is quiet (for a lawnmower). It seems to work quite well in it's first use yesterday.

Work has been quite busy, we have our national liaison seminar for a few days last week. Luckily it was here in Wellington so I didn't have to travel to attend. I always enjoy the times when we are all together for a few days. We have a couple of events coming up that I've been busily planning as well.

Liam is now 9 months+. He's a master crawler now and is just an awesome little boy. He's becoming so much more aware of everything around him. Unfortunately that also means he is hitting the stage where he gets upset when one of his parents leaves the room. That has just happened in the last week or so. He just does a little bit of a grump right when we walk out but we'll usually just pop our heads back in and make him laugh then he is okay with it (so far). I really worry that he will become one of those children that cries their head off when left at childcare. I'm hoping because he has already been there for so long that it will not happen (fingers crossed).

More about the house? 3 bedroom, bath with separate toilet, some storage space under house (not sealed like basement though). We get all day sun, have a little view of Porirua Harbour from the back yard. We have a few trees. I've done a little DIY work so far. Replaced the separate hot/cold taps in kitchen and bathroom sinks with single mixer faucets.

Also, as we are going to be in the Philippines for a month we were looking for housesitters (yes plural as we feel the house is big enough and it gives more attention to the house and Samson. Well, one of the housesitters we found had just moved to NZ from the states and was staying in a motel in Porirua. So, we offered to let him stay with us until we leave for PH and he just moved in yesterday. He's a really nice guy with a husband and twin (almost) 5 year old boys. The fam is still in the states figuring out their move. It's a bit funny having a housemate but I think it will work out fine, plus we are just so relieved to have people to take care of Samson while we are away.

Hey, it's Friday! We still haven't found someone to take over our lease, but we will survive this. And we are still very excited about the new house.

It is a beautiful sunny day here in Wellington and I am hoping to take the dog to the beach when I get out of the office. He loves it so much and gets so few good walks these days.

One change I want us to make after we move is to give him two walks every day. Perhaps I can take him in the morning and Celeste can take him when we get home. I think he will be a much happier and better adjusted dog if he gets some good regular exercise.

I thought I was all healthy when I posted last but then I got sick again, still very sinusy and coughing up all sorts of unfortunate things. YUCK!

Work is good, school visits have mellowed but we have quite a few visitors and campus tours as well as planning our year end events for younger high school students. That is a bit of fun because we work with people all across campus to make it happen.

Who is reading this these days? I know penguindevil continues to hang out, any others around?

Just watched the sunrise on what looks to be a beautiful Saturday in Wellington.

I'm feeling healthy after about two weeks of, what felt like, a losing battle against a sinus infection. I had never had such a painful infection before. There were hours at a time where I literally felt compelled to hold my head (some subconscious fear it might explode?) from the pain. It made being productive at work a very difficult task indeed. So, for the past week I have been taking my antibiotics and a lot of codeine laced pain killers.

Last night Celeste went out for after work drinks with her friend Kym. Apparently she only had three glasses of wine but arrived home at 7ish extremely...tipsy? Slurred speech, difficulty walking :-D It was quite amusing. She is always very loving when she drinks though, that's nice. She is still in bed this morning while Liam plays by himself in his 'exersaucer'.

Things continue toward taking possession of our house. We have hired movers to not only move us but to also pack our things. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have never hired movers before, but with a little boy and a dog, it just seems worth the expense to have it all done by professionals. It will save us heaps of difficulty on the day. Celeste's drinking buddy Kym has offered to come help us on the day (I think she realises that will not entail much work). We are very excited for the new place.

The only negative to be seen at this point is that we have yet to find someone to take over our current lease. Our agreement with our landlords is that we find someone to take over our lease, otherwise we are still responsible for our rent. Hmmmmmmmmm

In other news, Liam is still a happy healthy baby. He does have this tendency to fall over/down. This is probably due to his immense love of standing up though he is a bit too young and uncoordinated for it. He has bonked his head a few times now. Celeste stressed that a whole lot, I figure it's just another part of growing up. He usually only cries from the surprise of it and if I put him back in position to enjoy himself he is promptly okay again.

Enough for 6:30am.

It's a sunny Sunday in Wellington. I think I shall take the dog to the beach. Hopefully Liam and Let will join in the trip. We're still waking up and we have a very messy house to deal with. Hmmm. Definitely need to go beaching though.

Last night we went to Stokes Valley (aka Stokes Vegas) for dinner with some friends. Three little boys of different ages, Liam at 7 months, Jos at 1 year and Olivier coming up on 3 years. It is fun to see the differences and realise what we have to look forward to. Besides that we got to eat a gourmet meal cooked by an Englishman (whose wife is French and doesn't cook, doesn't drink much and does NOT like CHEESE!!!). Yes, a strange family indeed :-)

We went unconditional on the house Friday. Yes, I am a homeowner now. It is very exciting. We will move in after the 10th of October. We both can't stop thinking about the house and what we'll do to it over time. First we just have to get all of our possessions from point A to point B, for the first time in my life I think we'll hire someone else to do the moving for us. I think the time has come, we have too much stuff to bother friends with.

Now we desperately need to find some nice people to take over our lease in the house we live in currently. Less than a month to get that all sorted...eeeeek.

Life is good down under!

Hmmm, about three months with no updates. I guess nothing worthy of writing about has happened...

Liam just gets cuter and cuter. Now he is three months cuter than when I last wrote, that's a LOT! He loves and is loved at his childcare centre. The other day we were dropping him off and the mom of a little girl said, "Oh, my daughter is always talking about Liam" :-P He's popular with the ladies.

We did get the Wii and Wii Fit. We used them a lot for about a month and then we've gotten so busy lately that we have not been good about using them. I do love it though. My favourite right now is Tennis, but a lot of the games are really enjoyable. Hopefully we'll get back to using it regularly soon.

Our time at home consists of entertaining the boy, feeding the boy, getting the boy to sleep, running to the boy when he wakes up, cleaning up the boy's dishes, dealing with Samson's needs and then trying to do everything else we need to get done in between (along with some sleep somewhere in there).

Honestly, I would not trade this life away for anything. That little boy makes me smile so big and has taken such a chunk of my heart that I can not even imagine being without him. When I have to leave town for work trips I miss him very much. Every day I feel I learn more about him and that he becomes that much more his own person. He is now crawling (backwards). That is exciting. Today for the first time he pulled himself up on the inside of his cot/crib. He is a strong Liam ;-)

Along the way we have also decided we wanted to buy a house and in fact found one to buy. It has been a bit of a whirlwind process. We almost bought one well outside of our range (physically and financially). Luckily it did not work out and we have found one much closer to affordable and though it is in the outer suburbs of Wellington it still is only about 20 minutes with no traffic and has a lot of amenities handy to it. It is not officially ours yet but it seems the largest hurdles have all been jumped and it is just the details being worked out now.

Enough for now, we are going through a cold snap here (down to 1 celsius tonight and only 13 here in the lounge/living room). I need to crawl back into our nice warm bed :-)