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.