It was the end-of-year school Cushion Concert at Arthur Miller School last night.  It was supposed to be outside at the school itself, but it was moved pretty much at the last minute to the Pettigrew Green Arena because of the rain that was forecast, and hit the building, while the event was on.  We all took our cushions along, Beth went to sit with her classmates while we all watched from the parents side.  There was some real singing with gusto and some prize giving, it was a good night overall and didn't go for too long.  Which was good because Theo was starting to get a bit ERRRRR towards the end of it.

Both he and I spent the day at home yesterday, I'd woken up feeling pretty terrible after a long night.  Theo had woken up 5-6 times during the night, waking up at 5am or so ...

Well the big news of course is that we are now a family of 5, having picked up Biscuit the dog on Saturday afternoon.  There were 3 names in contention, Biscuit, Hubble (Scrubble) and Dougal.  But Beth really liked Biscuit, Joseph suggested it too so it was the winner in the end.

Saturday morning we drove down to Dannevirke, stopping in at Wendy and Rex's house before heading off to the Dannevirke Santa Parade.  Beth and Theo seemed to enjoy it, though Theo was feeling a little bit under the weather having had a couple of rough nights sleeping with a mild cold.  Thursday night he woke in the night to tell me that ladybirds were crawling up his wall, Friday night he woke up to tell me that plants were growing up under his bed.  Pamol fixed that both times.

After the Santa Parade we went back to Wendy...

I'm sitting on the couch when I should really be out jogging.  But my right knee was very sore yesterday, not really sure why as it didn't hurt much on Sunday and the last day I went jogging was Saturday.  Anyway I thought I'd better take it easy, not trying to blow up a knee or anything here.  All my alarms still go off at 5:30am though, so I'm still getting up bright and early.  If I had to catch a 6:30am plane these days it would be no problem at all.

We had a nice weekend, though it was a bit miserable weather wise.  Saturday I went for a 5km run in the morning (after making the kids the Saturday morning pancakes) and then took Theo to swimming.  Then spent the morning playing with the new doorlock to see how I could integrate it into things.  Once we'd had...

Saturday morning I got up nice and early, go the kids fed and then explained I'd be going for a run, which I did.  I did 11km this time, I didn't really mean to do more than 10 but I didn't plot the course out as well as I thought I had and it turned out to be 11km instead of 10.  Oh well.  I went quite well, though the heat really started to kick in about 8:30am or so for the last 15 minutes and I started to struggle a bit.  I started out with a pace of 5:30s per km and ended about 6:40s per km.  Still it's good practise for long distance of 42km so that's why I do it.  If I had to run a half marathon tomorrow I think I could do it, not that I'd want to.

Once the run was over it was...

Ran 10km on Saturday morning.  My training plan only called for 5km, but I felt like I could 10km easily and I really wanted to see if how I felt reflected how I would actually go!  And I did it.  I reckon if I'd had to, I could have run another 10km and not been too sore either.  I wasn't too tired, or too sore afterwards, something that was a nice change from how I used to feel (back when we lived in Auckland) and I did runs of that distance.  I think dropping some weight has certainly helped, I am still calorie counting and all that sort of jazz to try and get down to my 75kg Marathon goal.  Even if I just get to 80kg I'll be happy, that'll still be ~14kg lighter than when I started and much easier on my knees!

It was Isla's 4th birthday...

I've stuck with my running, getting up most mornings at 5:45am to go jogging.  Jordan from work has come with me a couple of times which is good, he's young, has long legs and runs fast.  Though he's been sticking to my pace, but I looked at his Strava times and it shows when he jogs from his place to mine, he does 1km in under 5 mins.  My average pace is 1km per 6 minutes.  So I need to start letting him set the pace and seeing if I can keep up, if I can do 5m per km instead of 6, well I'll be out on the track for ~42 minutes less.  Not sure that'll actually happen though, more of a pipe dream than anything.  Anyway I'm down from the 90kgs into the very top of the 80kgs.  Slowly but surely.

Redundancies were announced at work this week. ...

We got back last night from 3 days camping at Mount Maunganui.  We had a great time, though there was a lot of grizzling about various things while we were there, which put a bit of a sour note on the whole thing for me.  But anyway, we drove up on Friday morning (Hawke's Bay Anniversary day), stopping in Taupo for a quick bite to eat and to fill up, before trucking on all the way to the Mount and finding our camping site.  We had a really good camping site, right at the very foot of the mountain.  We put up the tent, got everything sorted out, Sarah went into town to get a few bits and pieces (mostly hammers to put the tent pegs in properly) then we went out to get some dinner.  We had pizza from the local pizzeria which was amazing, then went to...