Settling In

So far, so good. Emma and Daniel have fitted really easily into their new school. According to the principal, they stick together quite a bit, with Emma only really playing with Daniel and their friend from down the road, Andrew. Daniel, on the other hand, has been a little more outgoing and played with a few other children. A pretty seamless change.

Daniel has reduced his pants wetting but has the odd off day still. Latest BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) for him is that he needs to stay dry for five consecutive days for Dad to hire a Jumping Castle for their exclusive use in their garden for a day. OK, we might invite Andrew to play along too. We are still on day zero!

We're trying to get Emma to reduce her whinning and screaming if she does not get her way by reminding her to negotiate rationally. Is working quite well as Daniel usually allows her a limited time with whatever she wanted from Daniel. So slowly but surely, hopefully the screaming will stop and the talking will begin.

Otherwise, it is the rainy season and our neighbours drain has done the usual January thing and got blocked up by all the leaves etc. that they have failed to clean up. As a result, there is a pool of sewerage laden water building-up on their side of the concrete fence that is beginning to seep through onto our driveway. I came home early tonight to build a temporary earth mound along the fence to stop the water coming any further into our garden. Luckily our compost heap has turned into a lot of nice soil. They've undertaken to sort it out (two messages to the "madam" yesterday were seemingly not delivered as she denied knowing anything when I spoke to her) tomorrow. So we'll see.
Good news is that there are "For Sale" notices at the entrance to their house, and we're told that all the residents were served with eviction notices today so hopefully we'll see some positive changes. The risk is of course is that the 40 plus people living in the house have damaged it so badly with their modifications for additional rooms that nobody in their right mind will buy it. We then could get another "slumlord" buying it with the resultant chaos. We'll have just wait and see.
Next week is the inaugural meeting of the Blairgowrie Residents Association which has arisen due to situations like our one with our neighbours. Lets hope that we'll see some pressure on the Council to regulate all the practices that are not fitting for a suburb.

Tomorrow is Friday which is great after the first week at work. We are all tired! Fiona and I are hoping to have a movie and dinner night this weekend as there are so many good movies out at the moment - at least three: Invictus (we have to see it as it is about something that we actually experienced), Avatar, and Julie and Julia. We worked out that we last went to movies about a year ago!