Sorry to have been out of touch for a while, but here’s a little catch up. So the next day after picking up the pets Kelly started work. The house we’re staying in is about a 10′ bus ride from her office, so immediately she was loving that. Wellington is generally surrounded by steep hills and our house on the bottom part of a road that twists up one of them. It’s right next to a small dog park and it has a nice view out over the middle of the harbor, but because the road is narrow and twisty and there is no sidewalk or shoulder on the part near our house, it means you can’t walk or run anywhere.
We’ve now settled into a routine where Kelly heads off to work on the bus around 8:10 or 8:25 and I stay home with Hopscotch. We’ve been exploring playgrounds, going tramping (hiking), hitting up the local library (where Hop has discovered the Peppa Pig and Bananas in Pyjamas DVDs) and other kid attractions such as a really cool trampoline place called Jumperama. We’ve also had our first real wind storm here. For about 3 days straight the wind was a steady 40 km/hr with stronger gusts peaking around 110 km/hr. Kelly’s friends at work rated it an average storm. But there’s also been some beautiful days where we got to explore the city some.
So two big things I’ll touch on and then talk about in later posts. The first is our house search. Our temporary stay place is nice, but expensive and with the time crunch of knowing that our container will be arriving in early October the pressure is on to find a permanent place to live. Wellington at the moment is experiencing a pretty hot housing market. Not as hot as Auckland or Denver, but housing prices have been trending upward pretty steeply lately. We decided it might be easier to just start looking for a house to buy, but after meeting with the bank we found that we’re not going to be able to get a mortgage until both of us have jobs. So that means we’ll have to find a place to rent, but unfortunately it’s been really difficult to find a place that will allow Greta. So our search continues.
The other big thing I’ll touch on is Hopscotch. When we started looking for preschools for her we focused on Montessori schools, since she had been doing so well at the one in Colorado. Unfortunately their hours are different here so it wasn’t going to be feasible. We ended up getting her into a place recommended by Kelly’s supervisor (it’s where her kids go) where they grow their own food, and help out on the farm next door. It’s going to be different from what Clara’s had so far, but we’re happy to be able to get her into a place we both like. She starts her transition next Monday, so we’re excited about it.
Like I said, I’ll touch more on the housing and daycare searches later on, but I wanted to get in an update. Stay tuned!
PS – Our missing suitcase actually showed up! I was convinced we’d never see it again and was wondering how long we should wait before we make a claim but three weeks later we got a call that they’d found it and sure enough, the next day it was delivered to our door. My faith in the airline industry has been restored!
Kiwi Bound 