Today is the end of our Brisbane Adventures, and seeing as I haven't really written anything yet, I'd better make sure that I write everything down while it's still fresh in my mind!

Wednesday: We slept LIKE LOGS the night before.  As I think in my previous entry, Theo slept for about 13-14 hours.  He was stuffed.  Once everyone finally booted up, we walked up to the train station, a longer walk than I'd realised, and caught the train to Southbank.  In perfect timing, when the train pulled into Norman Park, Jeremy, Nicole and Flecther got on the same carriage as us!  It was very cool.  We all got off at Southbank, where Pa was waiting for us.  Perfect!  We spent a nice afternoon walking around Southbank, took a ride on the Giant Ferris Wheel of Brisbane, before heading up to have a Pizza lunch.  Yummo.  After that we went...

We made it to Brisbane! I must say that was a rough trip from Thailand to Brissy, it seemed to take 48 hours.  It started off badly for me anyway, on the Sunday night for whatever reason my stupid body had, I got ~3 hours sleep.  No matter how hard I tried after about 1:30am I could not get back to sleep.  So by 6:30am when I got up I was already knackered from the start!  We finished packing up and said goodbye to the Brits, then too Jin and Poi, and got our own taxi to the Airport.

Once we checked in (very easy, we were so early because we'd shared a Taxi with Peter, Mary and Maggie) we went and sat in a cafe for an hour, mostly because it had aircon.  Certainly not because of the Wifi it offered, which was slower than dialup.  Once it was...

We had a great day yesterday for Theo's Birthday.  Theo was awake at 7am knocking on the door to our room to get in "It's my 4th birthday today Daddy, I'm just wondering what might be in my presents".  Presents, as you can imagine, featured heavily. 

Once all his presents had been unwrapped (A hand-crank electric train, extra carriages for the train, an all blacks t-shirt & shorts, a lego plane, a book from Granny+Bilby) we all got ready and packed up for the big adventure of the day, a Speed Boat & Snorkeling Trip!

The Taxis arrived and we set off, back down to close to where the horrid Tiger park was.  It was a bit further than that, I think everyone was starting to wonder what we'd booked.  Finally we made it though and there was a nice speedboat waiting for us.  We set off and Theo had...

Well it's Friday the 12th of July today, which means I think there's been about 5 days since my last update.  I'm not going to remember everything we've done probably, but I'll try and list everything I can recall so that we can remember it later.

First of all my laptop seems to be working alright now - not sure what its problem was, certainly some sort of hardware error, so why it works now I'm not 100% sure.  I expect that in the next month or two it'll just give up the ghost and not work at all.  But it's working now so I might as well make the most of it by writing!

So things that we've done:

We went down to the Fisherman's Village on one day, had a look around.  I'd be lying if I said the kids enjoyed it though, they were mostly hot and...

We made it to Thailand!  3 plane flights and about 12 hours of flying and we're here.  We have an amazing villa with a view looking out over Koh Phi Phi Island.  The weather has been great so far, often a bit of cloud cover but it's still been 25-30c most days.

So we left Napier on Thursday morning, thank you to Grandma for taking us to the airport.  I'd dropped Biscuit off at his doggy holiday village Pet2Us.The drive to the airport was crazy, so much rain coming down it was hard to believe.  Pouring and pouring, it was a very terrible bad.

We checked in our 3 bags (one which was super heavy) and waited for our flight.  Once we were on, Theo was very excited and couldn't wait to take off.  Eventually when we did he was loving it, then not loving it (because of the terrible...

Beth got her first school report on Friday!  Us being the great parents we are, didn't realise until Holly asked us on Saturday night "How'd Beth's report go?" and we had to ask what she was talking about.  Anyway here it is, she's done very well for her first year at school!

What's been happening the last few weeks... Well last weekend Sarah was supposed to fly up to Auckland on Friday night, but the weather was terrible and AirNZ cancelled a few flights, so she flew up on Saturday morning instead to go to "MeasureCamp" which was a conference relating to her work.  We all got up bright an early on Saturday morning to take her to the airport, then after we dropped her off we went to McDonalds to get a bludge breakfast and to have a play on the playground.  Then we went home, and then...

I just realised that the HarmanWorld story has storyID of 3000!  So that means I've written (approx) 3000 stories on this website.  That's quite nuts, it's only going to be another year before I can say that I've been writing in Tim's Diary for 20 damn years!  Mental!

So I forgot in my last update to talk about the flu vaccinations we had a family two weeks ago.  It went fine, just fine.  At least it went fine for Sarah, Theo and I.  Theo cried a little bit when he got his injection, but was OK after a minute or two and a bit of "You're super brave little buddy" (Because he was).

Then it was Beth's turn.

Beth screamed.  And I don't mean just a little bit of scream.  BETH SCREAMED THE PLACE DOWN.  Other parents got up from the waiting room and moved.  A nurse walked past...

Beth rode her bike to school this morning!  Yup! All the way.  So proud.  We took her and Theo to Anderson Park yesterday, and she did a great job of riding all the way around it.  She even figured out with a bit of effort how to get started by herself, last weekend we had to keep giving her a push to get her going but this weekend she figured out how to get a little run up going and then put her feet on the pedals.

Anyway a very proud morning for everyone!  She was so happy to be riding on her bike, no training wheels, to school.  We had one near miss near this driveway I hate, cars always come out of it fast not expecting pedestrians etc, and sure enough this morning a car came out.  Thankfully the driver wasn't going fast, I'd pre-warned Beth to slow...

Beth learnt how to ride her bike without training wheels this weekend!  We were so impressed with her.  We took her down to the Bike Park into the soft padded area and started out really slowly, first a metre by herself, then two, then from one end to the other.  Within 10 minutes she was doing what you can see in the video, riding around by herself!  After such success we took her outside the soft padded area into the regular bike park bit and off she went!  Every now and then she'd need help, she can't get started by herself and braking is still a major hurdle for her.  But she can steer pretty well (I had to leap in to avoid a few crashes with smaller children on their scooters/bikes) and seems to do a great job controlling herself.  The biggest and best thing of all though was even though she crashed a few times, fell off, tipped over, hurt her knee etc, every time she got back on her bike and kept going!  It's a real achievement for her, she used to give up and not want to keep trying after the smallest issues before, but she just kept trying and trying and she got better and better at it.  It was so great to see, and she's so happy with herself that she can ride her bike without the training wheels anymore.

Today we woke up (I was knackered after a terrible night's sleep) and went to see Peter, Mary, Tom and Paulette at the local Palmers cafe.  Had a nice sit down chat to everyone, everyone had a chuckle at me as I limped around like a cripple.  Because right at the moment I am.  The kids played on the playground at the cafe the whole time.  When it was time to leave, Beth threw a huge wobbly.  Didn't want to leave, wanted to stay and play.  "I don't want to go home" she kept repeating.  So Sarah said "Look where we're going, they've got a huge trampoline!".  Straight away Beth was interested, and I wasn't sure where Sarah meant.