Theo was really really sad when I got home on Tuesday. Crying, sad, sobbing. Sarah said he was about a 9/10 on the sadness scale. Poor little chopchop machine. He had a decent night sleep though, but we did give him Pamol just before he went to sleep and then I got up at 2:30am when he started to cry out and gave him a bit more. That seemed to keep him happy and he was OK for most of Thursday, but he's was quite hard to get to sleep again last night.
Our new lawn furniture arrived on Wednesday, Sarah and I spent the night putting it together. Though actually only the table needed to be assembled, the chairs are single moulded and very comfortable. It's a nice dark grey colour too, hopefully the bird shit won't show up on there as clearly.
Sarah bought a new bike seat...

We saw Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals on Saturday night. Holly very kindly babysat for us, friends of Peter and Mary's had a free ticket they couldn't use so they offered it to us. It was a pretty good night really, I used to really like Ben Harper ~15 years ago, can't say I'm his biggest fan anymore though. That didn't really matter though, he played lots of songs that everyone knew, or at least people who had a knowledge of him would know. We bumped into a few people we knew there too, being the biggest event in Napier that night it's not really a surprise.
Saturday we took the kids for a walk down to Ahuriri. We went to Smiths for a late breakfast then walked down to the Cool Cat and got an Icecream. Theo, once unsure of Icecream, has realied what an amazing treat it...

The upstairs bathroom is looking really good now, Sarah's done an amazing job (as usual) of bringing something a bit old and drab back to life. There's little shelves to put things on, the new paint looks good. Still not quite finished, we need to paint a few more bits, replace the light and probably buy a new heater. But otherwise it's looking great, certainly a big improvement on how it used to look.

Had to get the septic tank cleaned yesterday. Of late I've noticed water out of the bath and sinks has been quite slow to drain. Plus when I've been out in the vegetable garden I've really noticed the smell from the septic tank area. I did a bit of reading up online and apparently those are two signs that the tank is full. So the tank sucker people came yesterday and confirmed that yes, it's quite...

Saturday morning once again. I've been listening to Double J heaps the last couple of weeks, it's really good. I've found a few decent songs of like that I like. Makes a change from listening to the same music from the 90s over and over again. Of course the problem with listening to the radio is that you get a mix of great songs, then the odd shitter.
Speaking of a real shitter, what.cd got shutdown recently. It was a music site that I had an account on, it was "illegal" in that it allowed you to download music. But it was amazing because it really strict rules about the quality of the content on there, it had to be "perfect" audio to be allowed. And it had all sorts of b-sides, rare stuff, live stuff. Stuff that there was just no way to get anywhere else. I can't believe...

Well that was a massive Earthqauke last night. Sarah woke me up to tell me about it, I got up (not really thinking) to go and check on the kids, but couldn't really walk past the bedroom door everything was swaying around so badly. It kept getting stronger and stronger too, instead of easing off. We heard a few things hit the ground, one of them smashing. Amazingly neither child woke up, though we wonder if maybe Theo did but just didn't call out at all.
After a couple of minutes everything stopped shaking majorly so we came down to see the damage, one vase had fallen ~2m down onto the wooden floor but, amazingly, didn't break. In the lounge a picture frame had toppled off a shelf and broken.
Then Theo started to cry a lot! Mostly because I think he was feeling a bit unwell.
Oh, I've just...

We had the yearly pre Christmas party yesterday at the Chatterton household. Beth was extremely excited about it because Maddie was going to be there, Amy's daughter. Beth loves Maddie ever since we stopped by her place in Danniverke on the way to Akito a few months ago. Maddie is lovely with Beth, playing games with her and all that sort of stuff, Beth just follows her around doing whatever she says.
Anyway Beth had a lovely time, as did we all. Theo rode around on the green Truck, only one fairly major spill where I looked up and the truck had hit the step outside and Theo was flying through the air before going "clunk" on the concrete. Needless to say he wasn't super happy about this and cried quite a lot. He's got a nasty little bump/scrape on his head but appears otherwise unharmed. Beth got a dolly...

While we were swimming on Sunday I went to pickup a brick that'd fallen into the pool during Winter when I was using it to hold the pool cover in place. As I was picking it up it slipped out of my hand and fell back down. The way it landed didn't look good and when I looked at the spot where it'd landed, it looked like there was a hole. Hard to tell when you're swimming though, so I just let it go.
Until Monday morning when I got up and saw the water was already down about 5cm from where it'd been the day before. Oh dear.
I rang up the pool centre and asked them, they said "Oh yes we have a patch for that, it even works underwater" which is a bonus because I didn't fancy draining 20,000L of water somewhere. Though that being said it...

Sunday afternoon sitting on the couch. I've just finished mowing the lawn down Gordon Street. The poor lawn mower, since we hired Bo to do our normal lawns, it's seen very little use. It took me about 20 pulls to get it started yesterday, though since then it's fired up no worries the couple of times I've gone to use it. Theo helped me mow down the side, riding around on his little trike. He loves his trike so much, he goes everywhere on it now.
This morning was Isla's Birthday party, up at Taradale park. We had a lovely time, Theo even had a little power snooze before we went so he was happy, Beth was happy too though the sugar and the excitement meant that she was more than ready for bed by the time we got back. I've just put Theo down again too, he didn't want...

Back from a very long week in New Plymouth, though it wasn't that long in time it was certainly that long in mental effort and how tired I am now. It's Saturday afternoon now and I'm sitting on the couch while Theo passes me a torch over and over again saying "Ta! Ta!". I throw it, he gets it, gives it to me, some "Ta"ing occurs and then it's the same thing over and over.
Oh, well, Beth was having a sleep. The phone rang a couple of times and I was submitting bug reports for the software I'm using to type this. Typical me. Everyone's awake now and watching Youtube on the big TV in the lounge. We'd go outside but it's been raining all afternoon, annoyingly enough. I still got a bit of work done around to house this morning though, plus some weeding this afternoon.
I love...