We've made it, we're back!  But first, time to rewind a bit...

So, that day in Stigletz that was super hazy, we drove down into town and had breakfast at Banjo's.  Not very exciting, but the food was good.  During that time I was trying to organise a dinner with Rob, Denny and Simone, but I muppeted it up a fair bit.  Anyway, we eventually got something organised, so then we headed off to Bay of Fires to see how much things have changed.  The short answer is, quite a lot.  Cozy Corner was packed with campers and RVs, which I think is pretty shit.  When we used to go it was tents, tents and more tents.  Now it's just lots of shitty RVs that park up everywhere, get out their Satellite TV and sit in the bush watching TV and going "Wow this is amazing" before driving off to...

Hello from St Helens, or more specifically, Stigletz.  We've just woken up to this view, that's right, you can't even see the sea even though it's just behind the trees there.  It's very smokey and hazy this morning, our drive yesterday from Sister's Beach was met with a very smokey hazy view when when turned off the Midlands Highway towards St Helens.  When we got to Fingal we could see lots of smoke (and maybe fires) burning in the hills either side of the road.  The Fingal fire-station was packed with people, vehicles and was an obvious hive of activity as we drove past it.

So a quick recap of everything since my last diary entry, we've been so busy with doing stuff that I've never sat down to write it all up!

After our night in Penguin we got up, packed up and went down to the Penguin market. ...

We managed to get into Launceston last night about 8:30pm.  It took an hour of stuffing around at the Eurocar desk to get our car, first of all they'd stuffed up the car seat booking and given us two baby seats.  This is despite me ringing up a week ago to expressly confirm we didn't want baby seats.  Nevermind, we eventually got to our accommodation at the Penny Royal Leisure Inn.  It's an interesting room, every floorboard creaks and groans, the aircon spits water at you.  But it's comfortable.

The kids took a while to get to sleep, then an hour after Beth was asleep she woke up crying for no reason that she could explain.  And then lots of coughing and howling.  Ugh.  Eventually she got to sleep again though.  Theo meantime was just fast asleep.  By the time we'd gotten to our hotel though it was "midnight" for...

Hello from Melbourne Airport.

Here we sit, tired after two flights, but we've still got one more to go.  We had a slight panic there a few minutes ago when we realised Sarah had left her blue bag with her iPhone and all that sort of stuff back at security.  Thankfully it was easy to go back, prove who she want and get it back.  Phew!  It's just hard because it's so hard for the kids, they're bored, they ask one bajaillion questions.  It's so frustrating when you're stressed out having lost something and they pipe up with "Daddy, what have you lost?"

Arrrrgh.  ANYWAY.  We've made it this far, let's wind back a few days for all the things that've happened that I haven't been bothered to write about.

Last Tuesday night was Beth's cushion concert at Pettigrew Green Arena.  All the kids sat up the front, all the...

Another two weeks roll by.  It's the last week of school, Kindy and work!  At least until Christmas is over, done and dusted, and a new year begins.

Theo came to find me last night and tell me he was having a bad dream, wanted me to hop into bed with him.  So I jumped in next to him and gave him a cuddle and he said "Ow Daddy my shoulder still hurts really bad" and then told me a story about how at Kindy someone at thrown something at him and they'd tried to find and ice pack but they couldn't so they got a bag of frozen peas etc.  Such a random story to tell me at 5am in the morning instead of Friday after it'd happened, or any other time over the weekend!  Anyway he seems fine, just a big nasty bruise on his shoulder.  He told...

I did my ParkRun on Saturday I was quite chuffed with my official time, it was 2 minutes faster than before.  I'll keep doing some training and see if I can't shave it down to under 25 minutes, that's my goal.  I mean it was really hard to get the time I did, so I won't be doing sub 25m anytime soon, but it's good to have goals.

Saturday night Nicola, Steve and their 3 children (well they've got 4 but one didn't come) came over for a BBQ and to discuss backyard options.  Had a nice night, kids didn't end up going to bed until just after 10pm!  So they were pretty knackered the next day, Theo didn't wake up until 9am and even then I had to wake him.

Then it was Frozen 2 time! Beth got into her Frozen dress (here's the on-sale Lamby modelling it for...

Another week passes by!  Had a good weekend last weekend, got a lot of gardening done, did a 10km run on Saturday morning.  By the time the kids had got out of bed and I'd fed them breakfast, it was about 9am, so I didn't get out running until about 9:30am or so.  Far out it was super hot and sunny.  Still I managed to do 10km without stopping which was a nice achievement. Then we took them to their swimming lessons, where they're both doing well.  It's great we've managed to get them both swimming at the same times, it's only 30 minutes out of the Saturday.

Then I had to take Biscuit back to the vet.  I guess I need to back up a bit here, sometime last week, I think Wednesday night, we noticed one of his claws was all munted and bloody.  So we took him...

Ooops.  Another two weeks have slipped away and I haven't written in my diary.  Damnit.  Oh well here goes everything that's been happening in the last couple of weeks, if I can remember it all!

Last Saturday Theo and I took part in the SPCA Great NZ Paws walk, raising money for the SPCA.  I signed up at the last minute, only because they sent through an email saying "Oh please please sign up, we've had way less sign ups than we wanted and we're not going to met our fundraising goal" which made me feel sad for them, so I signed up.  Anyway after a bit of fund raising I managed to raise $500 for them, so thank you to everyone that donated!  Really appreciate it.

The walk itself was supposed to be 4km, but after 1km down the path (it started at the Aquarium) everyone stopped, because all...

Sitting at work, working on stuff.  I'm having a mini power-break at the moment, mind you.  Got back from 3 days in Wellington yesterday, went down to see my customer and just to say hi to the gang and make sure everything is running super shipshape.

Last night was Halloween and of course the kids wanted to get involved.  You can't avoid it, the school has a disco that everyone wants to get involved in.  So Sarah ordered last week some costumes, one was a Mummy costume for Beth because that's what she wanted to go as, and the second was a Dino costume for Theo.  Last weekend we went to pickup the Dino costume and put it on, man he loves it!  So he was sorted.  But all week we've been waiting for the Mummy costume to arrive in the mail, which damnit it never did. 

So while I...