weekend with Sam and Amika

Sam and Anika came down from Auckland on Friday then back on Monday so that Sam could run the half marathon.
We watched him from our balcony and he cruised past almost effortlessly to our great applause - the route went past our house twice so we were able to cheer and embarrass lots of people! He finished in 1 hour 37 minutes so was very pleased with himself. We invited Isaac's support worker from kindy and her son to cheer with us as her husband was also running - he has run lots and lots of marathons and at the age of 54 still was a long way ahead of Sam.
Yesterday two of our church home groups had a combined session - a party to say goodbye to someone emigrating to the UK. I was asked if it would be easier for us to have the party here so we wouldn't need a babysitter and when I enthusiastically said "yes" I did believe it would be. However cooking a ham, roasting potatoes and looking after two pre-schoolers with colds who spread food over all the floor made me wonder how I could have been so silly. But in the end it was great, our house is lovely for entertaining and we dug out all the English things I could find to make a display - which included Noah's world cup pyjamas,a pot of marmite, some Ready Brek, a Noddy and Winnie the Pooh toy and some English currency!
Someone brought a Guinness (technically Irish rather than English I guess) cake made from Nigella Lawson's recipe which was fantastic and there was plenty of food left over for our tea tonight!
Today Heidi was really hot with a nasty cough so her social worker cancelled her access visit, Isaac was still a bit unwell and hardly ate anything and it poured with rain most of the day. I got to school this afternoon to find that Noah had been sent to time out twice today for punching someone and for disrupting his music group and then at four o'clock this afternoon Heidi made it an even more miserable day by vomiting a load of milk (more like cottage cheese) all over me. I decided Paul ought to be informed of all this at work and he managed to get back home soon after five and help out!!