The End of Something...

What a busy time. The school year is coming to an end, Christmas is nearly here, and we are moving house. I might have a nervous breakdown!

School ends on 11th December, and the children don't go back until the beginning of February. George will be in Year 6, which is the first year of Middle School at St Lukes. Everything will be quite different for him. He will have to be at school by 8.20am each day (more of a challenge for me, than for him, to be honest), he will be allowed to wear long trousers (wow) and he will have to deal with a timetable. But he has lots to look forward to as well. More basketball for a start. And he has been picked by the school to be part of a team on a television quiz show called 'It's Academic'! How exciting is that? I hope that this will put to bed his idea that he is not good at anything. He got a terrific score in his Basic Skills Test (like SATs) for literacy, putting him in the highest category in the State, and above the school average score. He didn't do so well in numeracy, but still had a very credible score. We are very proud of him, and especially of the way he has grown in confidence this year.

Anna goes from strength to strength, doing well at school and in all her various interests. We are seeing a lot of changes in her though - her body is changing, and with it, her attitude to us - and particularly me. She likes to spend time in her room now, listening to music and trying on all her clothes, and I have become quite the most stupid and embarrassing person on the planet. A lot of the time, she can barely bring herself to look at me, and she is increasingly rude - especially when her friends are there. However, she is still my beautiful and wonderful little girl, and I know it is all a stage she has to go through. I reckon the trick is not to take it too personally! Not always easy...

And so to moving house, I collected the keys for the new property today, signed the lease and gave them a huge bond cheque. In order to do this, I unexpectedly had to go into the city, and on the way back to the ferry I thought I would look in some of those awful souvenir places. Well, they were full of the usual old tat - chocolate koalas, flags, kangaroo skins etc. But by far the most disturbing thing I saw was a CD which was a 'uniquely Australian arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon' on DIDGERIDOO.....I was thinking of buying it for my dad for Christmas. I'm sure he would have loved it.

But I digress....we are now well into the moving process and I am knackered and bored of it. We have been moving all the bits over for 4 days and the furniture will go on Thursday. I was initially a bit worried about the new house when we got the keys - houses look so dingy with nothing in them - but now we have got some stuff in there, I can see it is going to be good. It is certainly very large, and one thing I do like about moving house is that you can get organised again.

I bought a step counter last week, and have been wearing it for the last 4 days. You are supposed to do 10,000 steps per day to lose weight. I've done 15,000, 13,000, 17,000 and yesterday 24,780. I think this must mean that for a couple of days I can remain entirely motionless in my bed without any detriment to my health, or weight. Super!

We are going to be without an internet connection for a while when we first move in, but I'll update whenever I am able.