Birthdays, rain and school

It's my youngest daughters tenth birthday this weekend. We had planned on going camping and inviting a group of her friends to come along. Unfortunately there has been some horrendous weather sweeping across the North Island this week and it has decided to hit Wellington at the weekend.

Everything in our garden (including our lovely stone kingfishers) is absolutely sodden.

So rather than going camping we are having a birthday sleepover at ours for Alice and four of her mates. Since its been steadily pouring since about 3am this morning her birthday will now involve copious amounts of fizz, pizza and playing on the X-box. Not as much fun in my opinion as camping but Alice seems thrilled with the whole thing.

Her friends have brought her some wonderful presents and the lovely notice board came with description of Alex's bottom already added!

The flowers at the beginning of this post were giving to me by the Board of Trustees at my daughters school. They were a thank you for being on the board for the past year. The Board of Trustees manage the school in much the same way as Governors do in the UK. They are responsible for hiring and firing staff, managing the budget and the policies behind the organisation. Its an awful lot of responsibility and work for volunteers and I am in awe of all the people who work so hard in these positions. I recently resigned from my Board as I couldn't do the job justice whilst working full time.

It's an odd situation where people who volunteer and are voted into these posts, then have the responsibility of managing huge budgets and making decisions that affect the future of so many children. Often these volunteers have no prior experience in education, running businesses or writing policies. I know its a struggle for a lot of schools to find any Board members, never mind ones that are actually capable of doing the job!

I certainly don't think I was particularly good at the job and only really put myself forward because I was interested in how the school was run and why certain decisions were made. I do question the wisdom of running schools in this way as you are dependent on the right people being voted in, and it not being a popularity contest. I guess its rather like any election - you're relying on the public making the right decision. And as recent events prove, the public doesn't always do that!

Birthdays and Mindless Violence.

We awoke late today as we always tend to do on a Sunday. Well my husband and I do. J and A tend to awake as soon as the first rays of sun peak over the hills. They spent the first hours playing in their bedrooms. This enables us to gradually come too against the background noise of various stuffed animals talking in high pitch voices. Its a perfect and leisurely start to a Sunday morning.

Unfortunately this Sunday morning was spoilt when we opened the curtains in my daughters bedroom and glanced across the road to our neighbours house and saw that their post box had been smashed off the stand and was now lying on its side in the middle of the pavement. We then rushed down to check our post box was still there. But no, ours had also been knocked off its post and was now smashed up and lying forlornly on its side.

A friend of mine volunteers for the local community watch and I have sat and listened with great amusement to her various tales about what bored local youth will get up to. She has told me several times about how they like to drive around the estate at night hanging out of the window with a baseball bat to see how many post boxes they can knock down. Well I imagine this is what they got up to last night as a quick trip to the shops revealed that quite a few houses in our street were obviously visited by these deranged moonlight vandals with a fetish for knocking down post boxes.

I suppose I shouldn't really complain as this is the only crime we have come across in our 18 months in New Zealand and its not exactly a major crime. In the UK I had to make sure all the doors of my car where locked as I drove home. Two men had opened the back door of my car as I stopped at a junction and grabbed my laptop bag from the back seat. That was very frightening and resulted in a tug of war between me and one of the men as I vainly tried to cling onto the bag. The police didn't even bother turning up for a statement.

It has been J's 6th Birthday this weekend and I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who sent presents and good wishes. We brought her a camera and she has spent most of the weekend taking pictures so here are a selection of her photos.

Her little sister.

Some fruit and veg.

Our local cafe in the rain.

The meat counter in our local supermarket.