Whilst I have been lazing at work (), Colin has been very busy and has Emily in pre-school - she goes 12 hours a week - Tuesday, Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning. Adam is going to Moorabbin Primary School - it is quite a lot bigger than Orange Grove (although that couldn't be hard) but it does still offer Italian lessons.

Whilst we have secured our new house, we still needed to arrange for our furniture to be delivered from Sydney and then on to our new address. We asked if we could get it delivered this Friday but were told unlikely but Tuesday is an option but they would get back to us. At 8 this morning they got back to us saying 2nd Feb was the only option as apparently everyone is moving house!! Between then and late lunchtime today, we have gone through the following options:

Move on the 2nd and be done with it
Move this Friday and rent furniture, etc until our stuff arrived - too expensive and the minimum rental term is normally a month
Move on 30th and our lovely new landlord volunteered to leave us some furniture, sheets, towels, plates, etc (we love him now)
Try to get our containers from the current removal company and get it delivered by another company

It was, to be honest, not a very pleasant Wednesday morning.

Thankfully it has all been sorted and the (original) removal company are delivering our furniture on Tuesday.

(FYI: The first day of the school term is the 2nd so we didn't want to move house and have Adam start school on the same day)

After much too-ing and fro-ing, we have a house in Melbourne.

It wasn't our first choice but the landlords of our first choice (in Brighton) were messing about with how long they wanted the lease to be - we wanted 15 months, they wanted 12 and then said no, they only wanted a six month lease, which is totally annoying as if we had known that, we would never have looked at the place.

Our new house is pretty perfect - about 500 metres from a train station - it is a little bit out of the city so is about 40 minutes on the train (I will be reading a book a week!) but is 10 minutes to the beach, 10 minutes to Brighton (nice "cafe culture" suburb) and 10 minutes to the largest shopping centre in Melbourne. It has a good sized garden for Adam to play football and a garage for us to hide all our "stuff".

We are hoping to move on Friday but we need the removal company to confirm that they can do it - our containers are being loaded onto a train tonight to go overnight to Melbourne - as it is a holiday Monday next week (Australia Day) we would really like to get in for then.

Now that we know where we are living we can arrange school, kindegarten (really confusingly, in Melbourne kindy refers to pre-school, and prep is what we called kindy in Sydney!!!), dentist, doctor, football club, athletics, swimming, etc, etc.