cold school holidays

We're into the second week of school holidays and have just spent a weekend of not leaving the house where only Noah and I were here for meals.
I think that is a record for the smallest family size - just me Noah and Isaac (with Isaac only eating weetbix and ice-cream cones!) Paul is at a conference in Japan (and has bought me an Ipad 2 duty free as my late birthday present - this has made both me and Noah very excited - Noah as he will be able to use the current ipad much more and we will use it for home school stories for Isaac) and lily and Hannah were at various parties and sleep-overs.
It may snow in Auckland today - first time since 1939 and certainly felt extremely cold as I walked along the river to massey with 4 layers, jumper, cardigan, leather jacket and cagoule plus scarf tied round my ears and gloves - brings back strong memories of UK!
It's working quite well having babysitters for the three days I'm at Massey because they tend to play with the kids More than me so the kids love it and I like it as it stops us getting on top of each other too much.
Isaac is developing still , he can jump now with both feet off the ground and chooses to do this to a CD of Susan Boyle, he even signed music and pointed to the CD player while singing to get me to understand what he wanted!

Lily cataract surgery, Isaac eating

This is my week of holiday from uni, as exams and even my between semesters contact course have finished. Hopefully I will feel more relaxed about study next semester as I have even more papers then. I'm taking "bicultural perspectives on psychology" which hopefully will give me some idea of Maori culture, also "forensic Psychology" and "individual differences" plus finishing the second half of the brain and behaviour paper
Anyway this holiday week I get to have three visits to the hospital with children.
Today's visit has come and gone, with Lily having cataract surgery. We got there at 7am Lily had her general anaesthetic (they said they were happy to operate under local as is usual for cataracts but she said no) charmed the staff, so that a pharmacist considered dressing as Gregory "House" and coming to visit her, and we were out by 11.30.
She is sleeping it off now but can then play on the new playstation 2 games we bought her - she is very pleased with the pirates of the Caribbean one as she thinks with her eye patch she looks like Jack Sparrow!
Tomorrow we go back to the hospital for the patch to be taken off and then we've told Lily her vision will have improved by Midnight on Wednesday when she is going with Joe and Hannah to watch the premier of Harry Potter.

Joe has a job interview in Auckland today for a computer programmer job, he had a preliminary interview on Thurs and they wanted him back, so that must be good news.

Isaac is doing really well, for the first time ever on Saturday we bought him his own happy meal at McDonalds and he managed to eat more than half the burger most of the chips and about half the chocolate milkshake. This would have been unbelievable to us when he was tube fed and shows what progress he has made.
He was seen at clinic and had managed to put on some weight too. He now weighs 12.85kg, this is still well short of his highest weight of 13.8 kg in August 2009 (so nearly 2 years ago) which just shows how overfed he was - no wonder he was in constant pain.

On Thursday this week he has ENT clinic and I think we may push for hearing aids as he is really trying to speak now copying intonation but not words. it is very cute how he does "round and round the garden"