Out with the old and in with the poo

I begin toilet training twins in the New Year. Goody.
Every new early childhood stage is a variation of; “Out with the old and in with the poo”.

Last year our family moved to The United States of America. The seven of us: Mom (that’s me) Dad and our five loin-fruit got on a plane in Auckland international Airport outbound to SFO. San Francisco International airport.
We traumatized the exclusive Koru lounges in both Wellington and Auckland. It was just a pity we didn”t bump into NZ politician, Chuck Chauvel who is on record as decrying screaming kids mid-flight.
We left on New Years Eve in New Zealand and touched down on New Years Eve in Northern California. 

The twins were infants when we left New Zealand. Now they walk and talk and are going to a preschool on their second birthday.There has been a lot of change in our lives and a lot of metaphorical poo to get through in the last year.

I was initially unenthusiastic about moving. My close friends and my sisters commiserated on what a hard task it would be to move five kids and our entire household across hemispheres. It wasn’t easy and it was a drawn out process.
A couple of years previously my husband had received acknowledgment of the success of his patent application. It was cute. We began receiving mail from the US patents office addressed to Mr Watson, Cortina Avenue, Johnsonville. 

Li’l ole us from the back blocks of New Zealand. My husband from Otago and myself from Taranaki.
The window panes in those patent office envelopes started the “through the looking glass” process in which we stepped into our new home in California.

We were entrenched in Wellington at that stage. We had spent 15 years in there. We grew up in the tech scene in the early 2000’s. At weekends we would drag our computers to the underground “Lan Place”, on Willis St.

Lan Place had been set up by an enigmatic businessman with the handle “Goose”, Gamers would flood in to an office floor filled with monitors; we would attach our chunky boxes (no mac books in those days of separate monitors and computers ) We would spend an entire weekend gaming. Midday on Saturday to midday Sunday. Stopping only for V, Red bull and beef Rendang from the Malaysian restaurant across the road. We gamed with others from successful tech businesses. Intergen, Datacom.  Provoke, Mindscape and Knowledge Cue. are a few that come to mind. My husband gamed with Rod Drury. A lot of us, including the Drurys were having our first babies.

I had my own projects. An over leveraged property investment business. I’d gone back to work: A combination of book-keeping and journalism. I spent  a good chunk of that last year dabbling in politics and volunteering for Santa Dunne who recently gave us small business owners a lifeline:
Legitimate tax minimization is OKAY.

I rubbed sholders with a small army of UnitedFuture volunteers and we largely failed to make inroads on the psyche of New Zealand in no small part due to the posturing of Winston “Peacock” Peters over the cuppagate canoodling between Key and Banks. UnitedFuture carries on undaunted. A buffer between the hysterical harridans on the left and the entitled misogynists on the right.

During the run up to the NZ 2011 election, It became obvious. We were leaving for the United States of America. Any hope I had that my husband’s new role might remain in New Zealand disappeared. I drew back from my volunteering and  started shutting up shop. The writing was on the wall in October. we applied for our visa’s at the US embassy in Auckland  on the 1st December 2011.
Just after Christmas 2011 we were on the international flight to our new home.
Over the last year we have got through all the poo and made a home here. A big move for a family of born and bred New Zealanders. I didn’t want to come here but now I’m here I love it.

I’ll blog more about the differences between  America and New Zealand later. The most obvious difference to me is how good Americans are at talking themselves and success up. My New years resolution is to talk myself up more. Housewives are the lynchpin of civil society, after all.

 My New Years resolution: Figjam. Or: Fuck I’m Good. Just Ask Me.