We Have Arrived!

WOW! It is hard to believe it is finally over. We are in Wellington in our hotel where we will live for the next two weeks while we try to find a place to live. We got to the San Francisco airport Friday at 4:30pm SF time. We hugged our CA grandparents goodbye and checked in. While checking in they said there was a problem with 3 of our 5 visa's and I almost panicked, but the man behind the counter assured me it was OK. They asked us to take a seat and wait while they called the NZ consulate in Los Angeles. We waited for 5 minutes and then we were on our way to security since everything checked out OK. The airport was dead (being the day after Thanksgiving) and security went rather smooth considering the 3 kids, stroller, car seat, 5 large cary-on bags, 6 personal items (we were lucky that went under the radar), camera equipment, computer equipment, ipad, laptop etc. . . They searched two of our carry on bags-one because they thought it had cheese in it-haha (it turned out to be baby wipes in a zip-lock bag. And the other because it has the Drobo in it which looks like it could be a bomb :) Not really. Oh and we realized later then never asked us to pay for the 250$ of extra luggage we checked. Not sure what to do about that.

We had a lot of time to kill when we got to the gate and I took the time to strike up a conversation with a mom of two boys who, as it turns out, did the reverse of what we are doing 6 months ago. She moved from Wellington to Cupertino for her husbands job with Apple. I pulled out the ipad and took notes-yes for real--I am a dork! The lady I met is named Ellie and she is here in Wellington on Holiday for 6 weeks. We plan to get together and her mother, whom I met when we got to our final destination, offered to help me with anything after her daughter had gone. FUN!! Ellie has two boys Charlie (almost 4) and I can't remember the baby's name but he is 9months. Cute kids. Ellie's sister lives near Weta and she was Peter Jackson's nanny and she has 3 kids around my kids ages. I plan to give her a ring on the telly and see if she would like to put the kids in the pram and go get a biscuit or something sometime :)

So the flight was awesome! The kids stayed up late to watch a movie (they all 3 watched something different on their personal screens. Enoch watched "The Rescuers" Ezra watched "Winne the Pooh" and Ethne watched (but didn't listen to) a little of Toy Story 3 until she fell asleep. The boys then ate their dinner and then went right to sleep and slept through the night. They were perfect angels-yes really! Ethne was having a rough time going poo due to the high volume of cheese that passes through her system over the last few days. She woke up at about 3am and was wide awake but very happy. She just talked and played with me and ate some food and then eventually went back to sleep. The kids all slept in until after all the lights had gone on and their trays of food were already waiting for them. Ethne slept even longer. The kids were still being angels at this time but they were starting to get a little grumpy. I got a little grumpy myself when we tried to get through customs and had to sit and wait again while they figured out why Ethne's visa is the only one of the 5 that is only good for 3 months--how did that happen? Anyway we eventually got threw and then got all 10 checked bags and took them through bio-security and got them re-checked and made it on time to our flight from Auckland to Wellington. It went so well that I really couldn't have asked for more-except for maybe a bed and a full nights sleep :)

Well- more tomorrow :)