Working...

From the Saturday to Wednesday I was working each day marking QCS short response papers. I did this last year and enjoyed having a change of pace for a few days, that I decided to do it again - plus the money I earn doing it pays for the airfares.
I was fortunate again to be given my first preference for the unit I wanted to mark. It was a question about Fire Service Medals - maths based question. It was a nice fast unit to mark, only taking 15-20 mintues per folder (24 papers per folder). Hence all the marking for the unit was finished by 5pm Wednesday (each paper gets marked twice and then gets a 3rd/referee marking if the first 2 marking disagree too much).
The food again was also really nice - morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea. Over the 5 days I ate dishes including: vegetarian lasagnea, thai curry, chinese, cupcakes, cookies, fruit, and rocky road.

While I was off working each day, Peter's parents looked after the kids. They did things like catching the train to Roma St Parklands; visiting Linda and cousins; and going to the Colin Buchanan concert with Kathryn, Rohan and Xavier.

Now I wouldn't choose to work full-time all the time - especially if I had to do all the other day-to-day house keeping tasks (cooking, washing cleaning), that Peter's parents were also doing for me. But it is nice for a short change of pace and does allow for us to see grandparents etc.

Since marking finished early (it could have kept going until the Friday), it meant I got to have a couple of extra days holidays. So these were filled making another visit to Rocks Riverside Park with Peter's mum and Linda and her kids on the Thursday - and the water was on this time, so we got to have our play in the water play stuff after all. And on the Friday we caught the train to Indooroopilly (the kids really enjoyed the train ride the other day, so I thought I'd do it again, seeing as it isn't something we can do in Hamilton), and had morning tea at Breathing Space cafe - which was unusually very quite for a school holiday morning.

Saturday was spent visiting the Rocklea markets, where the kids got to ride on the mini Ferris wheel and doing other logistical organisation for flying back to NZ the next day. In the afternoon/evening we had a Birthday party for Peter's mum (a bit of deja vu from previous saturday), so the cousins got their final chance to play together (and Joanna got her final chance to dote on baby Amy).

The flight home went well - well except for the 1.5 hr departure delay in Brisbane - the kids spent the 2.5hr flight watching stuff on the in-flight entertainment and eating. And we were all very happy to see Dad again at the airport.