Hello

Sorry about the lack of communication once again, it has been an amazingly busy and exciting time.In the past 2 and a half weeks, we have seen and fallen in love with the perfect house, been invited to apply for New Zealand residency, viewed the house again (plus a few others for comparison purposes), fallen completely head over heels for it, found a mortgage broker (through my sister Sara), been told we can get a mortgage without residency (hurrah!), found a lawyer, been to Christchurch for the first stage of our medicals including yukky blood tests and chest x-rays, made an offer for the house and signed the sale and purchase agreement on it, engaged the lawyer, been back to Christchurch once again for the second stage of the medical, tried to sell our UK house, seen the immigration lawyer there to hand over the paperwork for the residency application, and also started to look at furniture!!!

Oh, and work.

We never intended for all of this to happen at once, but having seen the house it was silly to let it go. We now have to wait until Fri 7th September for the sale and purchase agreement, the contract, to become unconditional and we have agreed a move in date of 14th December. We'll put some photos on the blog once we've passed this date. The current owners are emigrating to Vancouver and the timing is just perfect for us as our tenancy on this house runs until 22 December, so we have a week to move and clear this one up!! And Ali arrives on 23rd!

The medicals all went fine, Rich got queasy having his blood taken and my blood pressure was very low. Other than that we are healthy specimens!

We took advantage of being up in chch to go and visit Sara and Ish and meet the 3 lambs, now named Cerys (same as our car - complete coincidence!) , Squiggle and Freya. We also bottlefed them as they're all orphans and even at 2 weeks old they are strong little beasts, very noisy and hugely cute. Our blog says that the lambfest photos have been viewed 83 times so I guess you lot agree!

Richard's work is coming to an end this Friday and with the now known date of our house move, we are seriously thinking that he will return to the UK in the next couple of weeks to sell up and organise everything at the Norwich end. So, if anyone wants or knows someone who wants a Norwich 3 bed terrace please let us know asap. We would prefer to sell privately and quickly but if this isn't possible then we will have to put it in the hands of an estate agent. We have a full spec drawn up already and there will be some furniture for sale too, so please just email us if you're interested and we'll give you the details.Plus the pound against the dollar is very much in our favour and UK prices have stabilised so the sooner we sell our house, the better.

Rich is planning on a full scale tour of catching up with friends and family, so once we know his flight date we'll be in touch so he can get phone numbers and arrange to meet up. Likely come home date at the moment is around 12-14 September and he is planning on being in the UK for 4-6 weeks. How will I cope? Does anyone want to do an exchange visit?

We are now taking bookings for April onwards! My Mum and Dad are coming our in Oct/Nov, Ali and Paul are coming out for Christmas and Richard's Mum and Dad are coming out mid-Jan-mid March. So we shall certainly be busy. 

I'll call it a day for now as I'm going to take advantage of having an evening off from shuffling papers and form filling!!Keep in touch, it's really good to hear from you all.

Love Deb and Rich