WHERE'S BEST TO LIVE IN NZ AND WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW: PART 5!

[AngryBeaver]

Look at us Chatty Cathy's!
Justa oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
(I'm not sure )

SNORT at 'just rattle your chains' AB that cheered me up on THE grimmest, dreariest, most wrist-slitting February day there has ever been (though, TBH, this is kind of how the UK weather IS, all the blimmin' time, these days, February or not!). Lovely to get all your news, girls. Can't wait to visit you on day on your flax-weaving piece of paradise

AB - you sound v positive and gung-ho about your island plan, good on you! Bet it is lovely over there. I am discarding all previous concerns since you are - hurray! Go for it. BTW I could not possibly live with a poo-brown bathroom like your very relaxed pal.

I am slightly dreading the whole rental scene again, for such reasons, if we do come over - especially we love our nice new modern pleasantly-bathroom'ed home here! However I do NOT love the doomy-gloomy weather in this bleeding country, nor the constant negativity in the media about every aspect of modern-day UK life, in particular the NHS!! (Rant over).

justa - are you the most intelligent woman ever to walk this planet, or wot???!! WHY haven't they snapped you up

frik - good luck with your grand NZ entree upon touching down any day now - hope it all goes swimmingly!!

xMinerva lolly vvviola fanjolina and everyone else hello, hello! Been catching up with everyone's news in a big flurry this morning!

We have now joined two NZ recruitment agencies and completely abandoned all Oz plans - too difficult to get in these days, and too expensive once you get there to live semi-sensibly, from everything we gather. So we are fully focussed on North Island NZ now, fingers crossed something finally turns up

Must get back to my fascinating audit project write-up back soon xx

COME to us meerkate! You know you want to!
What the fuck is flax, anyway??

I DO want to AB! I want to have my turn in that basement of yours too

okay, so, flax - I remember endlessly dragging DS and DD to the Dunedin museum and forcing them to admire the flax Maori cloaks of the slightly sinister wax models they had in there. So I know it CAN be woven, AB, and I feel in my bones that you are the woman to revive the flax cloak trend, which I do feel has been flagging somewhat of late! DO IT

BTW I have totally got a job lined up - forgot to tell you - I keep threatening to force DH to come over as my house-husband domestic slave (revenge is mine )

only the thought of having to work full-time (EEK) puts me off - that and having to eat pasta every night for the rest of my working life

this job is a part-time hospice job in North Auckland - basically my perfect position - they are looking for someone full-time from June and part-time from January. i just have to secure some sort of semi-decent employment for DH and we'll be on that plane

er - not that they know that i am their perfect candidate, of course - but that's a MINOR DETAIL

You know, I've had totally opposite bathroom experiences here - both houses here have had flash new bathrooms recently put in them but could have done with work in other obvious places - like big holes in walls, or broken oven.

In other random ramblings, one of DD1's old toys that hasn't worked in years is now randomly turning itself on and off, singing little ditties. It's very creepy.

Totally off-topic (am I ever on-topic, I hear you ask).... the Pope is resigning. The politics/international relations nerd in me is fascinated by the potential ramifications. I'm half tempted to get out of bed & turn the news on....

Hey everyone, since DH has screwed up the computer and I cant edit the stuff I need to I'm going to say hullo to you lot before having cheesy beans and toast for lunch... its fricken freezing with this sad wet sloppy snow falling all morning but barely covering the grass, FFS if its going to be so cold and wet and rubbish could it not at least be PROPER snow to have fun in for a few mins... to much to ask apparently... but I do like cheesy beans

Also inspired to pipe up cos we celebrated our wedding anniversary in Cambridge this weekend (live in Reading), what a lovely town, best people watching ever... is he super amazingly clever... does she study fancy stuff or does she work in Tesco... is he a professor or just a bank manager... etc etc Super wow at brainbox Justa you are a seriously clever woman!

And agreed at 'suddenly' finding yourself in a very tenuous position of having no job and no money of your own, if DH left me I'd be effing screwed for a little while before being able to get on my feet... which of course I would but being out of the job market for the past five years is seriously going to limit my earning capacity, I don't have a proper career just worked my way up to a management position within a company. Makes me feel a bit ill really, how did things get turned upside down so quickly, when we first arrived I was out-earning DH by about 10K but I stayed home with babies and his career has taken off and now I'm practically unemployable while he is billing £450 a day

This basement is mine! And the chains are too so hands off.

Great news about job offer Meerkat now if only I could get me one of those. Great weather here at the moment if you don't mind me saying.

Wow justa clearly you're only qualified for picking litter off the streets.

AB I have a "fruit & veg growing for dummies" book here if you want to come and down to the basement and get it for your new self-sufficient journey. I managed to kill a plant out landlady bought us so even I can't use it

Meerkate meerkate not kat. Simples.

What a complete strike out fail.

Can't grow veg or spell or do strikeouts. Leave those unqualified positions for me justa

...but you CAN entertain xMinerva, which is worth a lot in these stricken times ...
I have just booked DS in for craniosacral therapy to 'cure' his nightmares soon I shall qualify for living with you AB in your new age island paradise...especially now that the dark dank nights have driven me to take up knitting. flax weaving has to be next on the list...if only flax could be procured over here...does that swinger-y pampas grass stuff count, i ponder?

I do try.

Only gone and got me an interview.

Now, and I know I'm getting ahead of myself, but where do I start looking for childminders/nannies?

Congratulations! Porse are one option for child minders (also Barnados have child minders but anecdotally I hear Porse are better). Nanny agencies should be on yellow.co.nz, I think there is at least one that is North Shore-based.

Oh, www.homegrownkids.co.nz/ are another one you may want to look at.

Barnardos seemed a bit flaky to me. Porse were really on the ball & I liked their system. However I didn't have much luck finding someone through them (2 didn't return calls, 1 was ok but didn't suit 100%, and one was plain freaky). We then decided on the crèche - which I think was a better call in our circumstances. I certainly am not ruling them out for the future.

See I need someone who can do a Kindy pick up. Hours Tues/Thurs/sat 10-4pm so whoever it is needs to have both dc on a Tuesday, ds2 on a Thursday morning, pick ds1 up from Kindy at 1pm then have them both until 5pm ish.

(Dp will do Saturday, obviously)

Someone through Porse might just work then - I know one of the Mums at DD1's school does various pick ups & had kids at the house with her too, I think she works through Porse.

(There were a few in B Bay that the coordinator spoke v highly about when I was looking for DD2, but they didn't have the right days available so I didn't even contact them)

Or a part-time nanny?

Porse all the way. Get your ECE hours thru then which means they are 52 weeks a year (not 40 kindy weeks) and they add about 50c to you hour making it $4.64. Can't rate them highly enough. They visit my nanny monthly and give me little reports and they offer free things like music sessions etc if your nanny could drive.

Well yes, that's what I thought too justa he's actually only doing 9hrs at Kindy at the moment. (He'll go up to 15hrs at around 4.3yrs)

How does the ECE work like this then? Can I claim those extra 11hrs through Porse and just pay the rest?

Oh and thanks wss vvv and lolly

Yep you can spread the twenty free hours over different providers (though apparently some centres will tell you you can't). Some info and links here.

www.cab.org.nz/vat/el/cc/Pages/Payingforearlychildhoodec.aspx