Endings and new beginnings

It's been a while since I last blogged and this may be a bit photo heavy (which is going to take me forever as I'm on dial up speed at the moment, sigh!), so bear with me.

2010 was a year of milestones as it was the year my last baby stopped being a baby, sob, gulp, and my biggest baby turned into a teen, sob, gulp.

Tessa graduated from a cot to a bed,



farewelled daytime nappies (I've just packaged up the last of my cloth nappies to rehome) and started kindy.

 Fin finished his last year of intermediate school and turned 13 - yikes! Fin played soccer last year and had a great year, being the best goalie in his team, and played consistently well, despite some pretty challenging conditions at times!

 Of course, many other things happened in 2010 too - Oliver played for the top soccer team in the year above his age grade and they did really well. Here's him at a tournament in Taupo where his team won the Shield final:

He also played Futsal (a type of indoor soccer) and his team won the championship for the year, and he played indoor soccer and his team came 3rd in the end of season finals. Can you recognise a theme in his activities?!

And Izzy had a great year, both at school and doing the many extracurricular activities she loves, namely netball, soccer, jazz, and ballet as well as participating in the school choir and gardening club. Here's a couple of pics of her at her dance recital on the 18th of December, where she was awarded the ballet trophy for her grade and also received a scholarship for a term's free jazz lessons for this year.

And of course, 2010 was the year of the kittens for us. We lost our precious Charlie Brown in 2009 just before Christmas, so when we had the opportunity to adopt two beautiful wee ginger ninja brothers from the SPCA mid 2010, we jumped at the chance. We named them Eddie (cameo in colour) and Jasper (ginger and slightly fluffier) and they're both beautiful and affectionate wee sweeties. Here's a few pics:

The early days

Curiosity drowned the cat!

That's Jasper and Eddie did the exact same thing about 5 minutes later!!

More recent pics:

Jasper loves cuddles

and Eddie loves baskets!

It's in the bag (well, Eddie is!)

yep, basket again!

while Jasper's just hanging out at home with the family!

Kim's been busy at work this year, with the recession meaning fewer staff but just as much work, so he's been spread pretty thin but survived the year and is now enjoying a break before the onslaught of the new year.

I've also been pretty busy, with constant knitting orders and preparing for Coco Kids first Craft 2.0 in October, which was major for us. We knitted crazily for it and it was very successful and lots of fun. Tessa was worked pretty hard as my number one model for all the test knits and orders I did that were in her size (with Izzy helping out from time to time as well).



This has just been a tiny snippet of our year past, but gives a wee taste of what the year contained for us. 2010 was a good year for us, packed with activity of all kinds. Hopefully 2011 will be just as good - and looks to be twice as busy!