the dinner time battle is OVER

I am chucking the towel in so to speak!
Mikko can only sit down to eat dinner for 5-10 minutes and is very very fussy. Actually he likes really basic easy dinners which is one plus. Favourites are fish fingers, lamb chip thingies, broccoli (yes broccoli!), baked potatoes, rice, roast chicken, sausages etc. But when he's done, he's done and no amount of negotiation will convince him to keep going let alone keep sitting with us.
The other evening he left the table and snuck off  to play outside. Big brother snuck off after him and then little brother wailed to join them. I gave in and we ended up having fish fingers outside. It was a bit cold but boys don't really feel the cold do they!

a smile while eating!!!!

Kasper just loves waving this flag

always the poser ;)

Squirrel!

Glue eye

Finn was playing outside with Kasper yesterday afternoon and managed to smack his head into our outdoor bench. I was vacuuming and didn't look up till I saw Colin rushing outside to him as he was doing the huuuuuuuge inhale before the mighty scream.
I rushed him down to the doctors and it was decided that gluing the wound would be less traumatic than stitching it. Bad decision. The nurse who was gluing him accidentally dropped glue into one of his eyes. Poor boy totally freaked out when he realised his eye was glue shut - there was a lot of screaming and a lot of tear (some were mine).

Today the patch is off and tonight I even managed to pry his eyelashes apart so his eye can open again - hooray!!!

Cycling Sunday

Today we went for our first family bike ride. It was such fun and the boys all loved it.
We've been working on a way to go cycling altogether for a couple of months. We ruled out a bike trailer as we wanted to be able to transport the bikes on the car enabling us to cycle different tracks around Auckland. I really REALLY wanted a Scandinavian style cargo bike (okay I still do want one) but we would still have had the problem of transporting it.
So after many hours of trawling webshops and trademe we finally came up with the following solution.
Colin's bike plus weeride on the front for Kasper and a tandem attachment on the back for Finn. My bike plus a seat on the back for Mikko.

And voila! It worked.

You can just see the shadow of Mikko and I in the bottom of the picture. Like millions of mothers worldwide I am always behind the camera!


And I felt guilty yesterday saying that Friday had been a complete write-off as actually something super awesome happened. Finn got a Principal's award for perseverance in learning. He didn't know he was getting it (though I did luckily so had a camera) and he looked so surprised and pleased with himself!

shaking the Principal's hand

I had to get a teacher to hold Kasper and I had Mikko crying on my back but I made it and got the picture - yay me and yay Finn! You make me proud every single day!