We had a very exciting weekend last weekend!  Saturday was meant to be Theo's swimming but it's been rescheduled for a few weeks out.  So on Saturday instead we had a big clean up in the morning because Beth's friend Liam was coming over on Saturday afternoon.  In between cleaning up Theo and Beth helped collect up lots of Feijoa's to put out for sale.  They sold so quickly, I put out bags after bags after bags and they'd get sold as quickly as I we could stock them.

About 1:30 Liam came over to play with Beth, they had a good time running around out the back, playing on the trampoline and having a little disco in Beth's room.  We went and found some pumpkins in the garden and cut one open to check that it was good to go, and they were.

Then while I was out putting...

Long week last week, with Sarah on Jury duty I was on kiddy duty, dropping them off and picking them up and also cooking dinner.  Thankfully dinner is the Foodbag thing so it's a little bit harder for me than usual to cock up.  I worked from home for the week too so I could get some stuff done without too many other interruptions from work, that pretty much worked too I got a fair amount of stuff done.

Saturday morning first thing while the kids "ate" their breakfast I went out and piled up the first bunch of Feijoas for the season.  Once all collected up the kids helped me bag them and carry out the Pink Umbrella and other bits so that we could sell them.,

Then I took Theo to swimming and he was really good, he's finally starting to enjoy putting his head under the water...

It was Ben and Di's Deck Warming Party on Saturday night!  So Saturday morning I got up and got the kids fed and then took Theo to swimming at Jillyfish.  Sarah and Beth came along too so we could head straight from there to Holly and Adrian's.  The kids had been looking foward to "the sleepover at Auntie Holly's" all week, so they were very glad the day had arrived.  And Sarah and I were nervous because the last two times Beth's tried to sleep over at Holly's the excitement got all too much for her and she had to be dropped home about 10:30pm!

Theo did a pretty good job at swimming, really wasn't all that into it until right at the end where he suddenly would happily duck his head under the water for a few seconds.  So that was good, he is making some progress.

Once swimming...

8 Years Today!

Happy Anniversary to my lovely wife and now mother of our two lovely children!

Love you! Happy Anniversary!

Tim

With Granny and Bilby leaving on Friday, we decided that actually we should get out the lovely big (well, huge) Tent that Dad bought for us for Christmas and go for a couple of nights camping in Taupo.  The first being with Granny and Bilby too!

So Friday afternoon I got off work early (thanks, work!), came home and loaded up the final bits and pieces into the car.  Mum and Bill had already gone ahead with the tent.  We got to just past the airport when we realised we'd forgotten the pumps for the kids blow up mattresses, so we turned around, grabbed those and were off again.  We arrived in Taupo about 5pm to the campground, to find that the tent was already up.  We were a bit aghast at how long they said it took to put up, but then again we realised out estimate was without...

Been a busy few weeks here at our house.  Last Tuesday night, on the night the Cyclone was supposed to be hitting us, Jeremy and Nicole arrived in their little car.  I'd actually left work early because I had to fly to Auckland really early the next morning for a customer meeting, so I came home about 3pm.  I wasn't sure what time Jeremy was arriving and wanted to make sure I had the "most" time with him.  I went and picked the kids up from Kindy, they were excited that Uncle Jeremy was arriving though I'm not 100% sure that Theo knew exactly who that was.

About 5:30 or so Jeremy and Nicole arrived in their little car!  Lovely to meet Nicole, and great to see Jeremy again.  The kids enjoyed their company too.  Uncle Jeremy was even made to read some books at bedtime which they loved, though...

So a while I replaced the home network.  Threw out lots of old cruddy gear which had been super reliable, with brand new super fast gear.  It's also been reliable, no issues so far.  Well except for two.  On the second day of using the new gear, the Internet connection (PPPoE) dropped out (only for 30 seconds) 5 times.  So I was sure I'd done something wrong and didn't have a clue what it might be.   Turns out on the first of the Month our ISP NowNZ drops PPPoE a few times for billing purposes, it's so quick most people don't notice.  But of course I did.  So that wasn't my fault, it was just perfect timing to make me think I'd stuffed something up.  Great.

Then a couple of weeks ago Sarah mentioned "Do you think some things are a bit slower since you upgraded the network?"  This is of...

Far out, I'm getting worse and worse with my diary updates.  But the last few weeks most of my spare time I have been working on the home network, which has seen the old Cisco router been packed up and replaced with a new Mini PC that lives under the stairs.  I have dragged myself kicking and screaming into modern times too, this PC is running a program called ProxMox which lets me run Virtual Machines!  So the home firewall is now virtualised.  The old server that lived under the stairs too has been virtualised.  Everything runs from the one little black box.  Which is great, except of course if it fails it means everything fails.  But we'll just hope that doesn't happen.

So last weekend Sarah and I drove up to Taupo on Saturday for the Summer Concert Tour.  Once we'd driven up we parked our car outside the...

Sarah bought a new trampoline for the kids last week.  It arrived yesterday, ready to assemble, on a pallet.  A pallet with 7 individual boxes.  Once we'd gotten the kids to bed, we went and read the instructions.  "Takes 2 people 1 hour to assemble" the instructions said.  Looking at the number of bits, I wasn't convinced.

I'd actually told people at work about the trampoline just before leaving work and they all gave me a "Oh good luck I hope you don't get divorced like we nearly did" speech about putting up their trampolines.

We started putting it up, it only had 48 individual springs.  We were doing about the 6th once when the tool they gave us to bend the springs had a minor malfunction and the spring SNAPPED back, hitting Sarah's thumb really, really hard.  I haven't seen it this morning, but last night it was so...

The last few mornings, every time I've sat down on the couch with my laptop to write a diary entry, some form of child meltdown has occurred.  I'm just trying to ignore it this morning, Beth's just rushed out screaming "No don't tell, don't tell", obviously she's done something bad to Theo and is sure he's going to report it to me and get her in trouble.  Theo seems happy enough though so whatever it is it can't have been too major.

It was super hot yesterday, Holly, Joseph and Isla came over for a swim.  The pool was fine, a little cloudy though so I went to the pool centre to get some clarifier for it.  They were out of heaps of products, said it was a mental day for people coming in trying to get their pool ready for a swim.  I think if you're leaving it to...