Home sweet home

The girls scooting on our quiet street.

Good news folks. We've made the move and our family has settled into a rental property in Mt Eden, Auckland.

My amazing sister-in-law, Mandy, and I flew down to Wellington a couple of weekends ago to organise the moving company and clean the house. We worked like troopers sorting and cleaning, and were blessed with the help of lots of lovely church friends who transported us around, had us over for meals, carted rubbish to the dump for us and helped us clean the empty house.

After it was all done, we treated ourselves to a night in a hotel where we ate room service meals and spent two and half hours in a day spa getting facials and massages. Bliss!

I'm back in Auckland now - the city where I was born and raised. It has been lovely catching up with old friends and family on an almost daily basis.

We chose the house we're in because Paul's work is an easy five minute walk away, so he pops home for lunch most days. I can't tell you how nice that has been for me and the girls after all the time we've spent apart from him this year.

We're hoping the money saved on transport and lunches will help compensate for the extra money we're spending on rent. Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to have all the extra time with Paul in the day. Especially with our baby boy due to arrive next month.

It's also been handy having Paul working so close to home since I damaged my hip joint shifting house and have been basically on bed rest since I got to Auckland. Paul has been able to do little jobs in his lunch hour for me, and rescue me on the occasion where my hip meant I couldn't move at all.

The hip emergency motivated us to get the girls enrolled in our local daycare, which is a lovely Christian one on the way to Paul's work. The girls go for six hours a day - S once a week and L twice.

They are both loving it so far, and I've been really impressed with the staff and range of activities. It felt meant-to-be when we first visited the centre and discovered the head teacher is the mother of some of my oldest friends.

Morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea is provided for the girls by the centre, so I don't even have to pack a lunchbox. What a novelty! And Paul takes the girls on his way to work so that has made it as stress-free an arrangement as I can imagine.

Back in Wellington, our house is almost sold. All going well, we will hand over keys to the new owners in two weeks.

We are missing our dear Wellington friends and I'm missing my lovely Island Bay, but this is obviously where God wants us now so we will embrace this next phase of our story.