Wet Wintery Weather and Frustrations.

It is cold. Very cold. OK maybe not as cold as it gets in the UK but still pretty chilly. We have had frosts, hail, bright sunshine and rainbows in the last week. Currently I am watching the rain slowly flood the valley below us and the girls are cycling and scooting round and round in the garage in an effort to expend some energy.

This week has been a somewhat frustrating one. I have been trying to get back to work. In my previous life, pre relocation down under and pre child number two, I was a Geography teacher and Head of Department. That all seems a world away now. I previously, rather naively thought that it would be fairly easy to go back into teaching in New Zealand. It is not, and as with everything else there are a huge number of hoops to jump through.

Firstly I had to obtain a work permit. This was relatively easy but I did not realise that in converting my visitors visa to a work permit I would no longer be able to leave the country without it expiring. Never mind we hopefully will get residency soon!

Then you have to get your qualifications assessed by the New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA) who will assess whether or not your qualifications are valid in this country. If they are they then issue you with a certificate. Once this is done you have to register with the Teachers Council of New Zealand. These nice people once again assess you qualifications and check your police record in all the countries in which you have lived. Eventually they will hopefully issue you with your registration which will be provisional to start with. Once you have been teaching in New Zealand for a year (under supervision) you will be granted full registration.

I have completed all the steps in order to begin teaching but I just need to find a job. Being a Mum I was under the delusion that I might be able to return to work part time. Clearly this is not going to happen as unfortunately Geography Teachers are surprisingly not that in demand! There are not even any full time positions advertised at the moment. Supply teaching is an option but do you pay for childcare in advance and hope that you have some work that week? It is a very frustrating position to be in. It was also rather depressing to be informed by the chap at the teaching agency that there was not a lot of supply work about as a lot of the civil servants had been made redundant recently and they were now flooding the supply teaching posts. Short of knocking off a few existing Geography Teachers or encouraging some into early retirement I am not sure what to do!

I am not unique in being frustrated at the difficulties people face when trying to return to work post children. I have been chatting to a lot of my friends over here who are in similar positions. Sitting around my dining room table we had a teacher, IT proffessional, accountant and HR specialist. All of them having taken a break from their careers for a few years to raise children and now facing the difficulties of returning to work. I believe that businesses and organisations should be crying out to employ Mums (and Dads!). The skills you gain as a parent are unique and valuable. The ability to juggle so many needs and wants, the ability to diffuse difficult situations and arguments and the ability to remain calm when faced with a toddler tantrum and nappy explosions in public places are so valuable!

"I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me ....."

Autumn is here. Its getting dark by 5.30 in the afternoon and we can no longer go round in just t-shirts and shorts (although a significant number of rather odd people seem to be immune to the cold and wear flip flops and shorts year round).

This week has been extremely busy. Having put in our Expression of Interest a few weeks ago, we have now been invited to apply for residency. So I have been organising medicals, police certificates and all the other information that immigration needs to check that we are who we say we are and we are not going to cost the health service loads of money.

All these things cost loads of money. If you are planning to apply for residency be warned! It will be a significant strain on your bank account. I was shocked to be quoted over $1000 for our medicals. This does not include the cost of the X-rays that are needed to check we have not caught any nasty diseases in the time we have been in the country. We had all this done only 14 months ago just before we arrived in New Zealand but apparently it all needs to be done again.

I have been repeating the mantra - "It will all be worth it in the end!"

New Zealand is a long way from anywhere else. Although I knew this when we first moved here it has been driven home this week.

Any visits home will always cost a fortune. We accepted this when we moved here and planned for it. However the unexpected always happens. I have a very important family occasion this September that we had been planning to go back to the UK for. However we need to apply for residency sooner than expected and the cost of it has been a bit of a surprise so we have had to postpone our visit.

It has been a really difficult decision and I know that we have disappointed a lot of people but it appears that these are the kind of decisions you face when you move this far from everyone you care about. It is, I guess, one of the biggest pitfalls of living in New Zealand.

We introduced the girls to the joys of Wagamama and a bit of Japanese food. They weren't very impressed with the food but they liked the chopsticks.

Residency, Visas, Permits and all the other hoops!

This week I have been mostly filling in forms!

I thought I had completed all the steps in order to teach in this country but I was sorely mistaken. Not only do you have to send off all your qualifications and proof of your work experience and get them checked by the New Zealand Qualification Council (cost $200), plus get a work permit or visa (cost $200), but you also have to pay another $200 to get registered with the Teachers Council. I understand the reasons behind it and think that all these professionals looking after children need to be thoroughly vetted but blimey - its a lot of paper work.

We have also begun to complete our residency application forms so we now have to start getting medicals, more police certificates and the rest. I just keep reminding myself it will be worth it in the end.

To remind us why we love this country so much we took the girls to Belmont Regional Park and took a walk to Korakora dam.

My girls have been obsessed with finding bugs and anything small and creepy. So my husband, who helpfully has been equally enthusiastic, found these lovely exoskeletons from (we think) cicadas. Lovely aren't they!

Jungle explorers studying bugs.

My two intrepid mountain climbers.

It was a long walk for the girls but the view at the end was well worth it.

The Hard Work Begins

Now we had made the decision the real work began. Its not easy to get into New Zealand. Even if you have a job offer you still have to get a work visa, pass medicals and have police checks. We had to sort all this out in time for DH to start work in six weeks. This is not an easy thing to do in the UK but we were living in Belgium and our French was quite frankly appalling!

The first thing I did was enlist the help of my mother. She has lived in France for about 6 years and in that time has become fluent in the language. Mum agreed to help and she started to ring around trying to get a medical booked with a doctor that could speak English. We also had to have X-rays for myself and DH. We managed to get a medical booked and all of us got on the tram on a snowy Belgian evening and headed towards the one doctor in the city qualified to do Medicals for New Zealand and that spoke English.

His english it turns out wasnt brilliant but he was great with the kids. The examination was very thorough. As well as having a chest x-ray to check for TB and other respiratory diseases they take several blood and urine tests and hieght and wieght. I dont think I was as thoroughly examined even when I was pregnant.

The girls were a bit confused when we started stripping off to begin the examination. "Why has daddy clothes on?" DD1 exclaimed and they both watched avidley as the Doctor began to tap all DHs joints and listen to his chest. They were both very keen to strip off when it was their turn. DD2 was so keen to join in she kept climbing onto the examination table in the middle of my exam.

I hated the whole thing as it didnt occur to me that we would have to strip off and I had a very old pair of knickers on and non matching bra. Very embarrising in a country with an underwear shop on every street corner.

The next thing we had to tackle was getting DH a work permit and me and the girls visitor permits. For these you need police certificates stating that you havent committed any criminal offence and passports valid for over 30 months. Now luckily the police certificates werent a problem but both my and DD1s passport had less than 2 years left on them. Anyone who has ever had any dealings with the passport office in the UK will know that getting new passports is never easy and getting them from abroad is doubly difficult. We had to send the passports back and forth to the embassy in Paris twice before we finally got them renewed and it cost us almost 20o Euros in the process.

We gave notice on our rented property in Brussels a few days after Christmas and then had to decide what to do with our house in the UK. We had brought it only 2 and a half years before. It was meant to be the house the kids would grow up in. That was before we realised what a crippling mortgage we had taken on and what a horrendous commute DH would have to do. It was a new house on a nice estate but with the falling house prices we were going to loose a lot of money if we sold - so we decided to continue to rent it out. Only problem was we were in the process of finding new tenants as our old ones moved out at Christmas. Talk about a stressy time! If you have high blood pressure or heart problems - do not move to the other side of the world. They should put a health warning on all those "Wanted Down Under" programmes on the BBC.

It got to the first week in February and we had agreed a start date with DHs new employers of the 1st March. We still did not have our work and visitor visas, we hadn't booked our flights or found anywhere to live yet. I was just a little bit stressed!