Tuesday 9 February 2010

so down

Well it's not looking good for NZ, James is now unsure of how far away it is, the lack of support network and being able to get jobs out there, he's convinced if we go we'll never be able to come back and isn't talking about things. I think he is right about all of this, but we could go and make it a working holiday as such, either sell the house to fund it, making sure we buy one out there so we will make a bit of money on that too to help us back, make sure we put enough money into an account that we don't touch so that we have enough money for flights, or we could rent the house out, we have a low mortgage on it so the money we'd get for rent would cover the mortgage and leave us with a bit extra each month, we'd have to make sure that we kept extra money aside that way incase things needed doing on the house and then the money we got from jobs out there would have to be enough to rent/but somewhere out there too, aaaaaaaaaagh it's all too much for me to work out in my head. Another thing we were thinking instead was just making a move in this country, down south somewhere, Devon, Cornwall or Dorset as we love it down there, I think there's more of a holiday atmosphere down there, I'd love to live close to the coast, there's still surfing etc for the kids, but the houses aren't cheap and I'm not sure we can afford the extra on the mortgage, plus I'm pretty sure we'd have to get jobs down there before we could get a mortgage anyway, and with things the way they are now in this recession (I know we're comming out of it slowly but even so!) we'd still have no support network and no-where to put people up if they came to visit as there's no way we could afford a big enough house to have a spare room. Do we stay here and not move at all (or just into a nicer house once I'm working) one of the senior schools here isn't quite as bad as I thought, although still not good, and they wouldn't have to leave friends behind, and make new ones, we could hunt for houses nearer to nicer schools around here, but would have to downsize (don't really want to do that, we have no room for anything here and are all ontop of each other all of the time)It's really getting to me, I feel like I've fallen into a deep dark whole and the more I try to work things out in my head the deeper and darker it gets, I feel like I'm trudging through sludge and really can't be bothered to do anything or see anyone really, I got really drunk on Sat night as it was all just getting to me and I don't think anyone really knows how I feel, I'm really annoyed that J just doesn't seem to care what we do (as long as it's not NZ well without a trip there first which we just cannot afford ever!!!) he doesn't seem to have an opinion on the schools, as far as I know he's never looked into them, if he has he's certainly never spoken about it or what he feels is best for them, he didn't even have an opinion on whether we should get Reilly immunised against swine flu, as long as he has his airsoft and x-box he is quite happy to bumble along hating his job, but doing nothing about it just moaning aaaaaaaaaaaaagh I've never felt this down before, well not since Reilly was nearly one and had given up breast feeding and I was down as my last baby was growning up, but he'll be 3 in a fortnight and I can't even look forward to that it feels like to much effort, I just wanna run away for a bit and come back when it's all been sorted out :(

Wednesday 11 November 2009

The begining of a dream

Well, where to begin?

For a few years on and off J and I have dreamt of immigrating to New Zealand. When we first thought about it and looked into it we didn't think we'd have enough points and so it went out of our thoughts. As our family completed, and they all started school, nursery I decided that I didn't want to do childminding forever, but I still wanted to do something that I could fit in around family life, and so enroled on a hairdressing NVQ2 at college. I'm now in my second year and have a few assessments under my belt. We (well more me I think) aren't happy with the Senior schools in our area (our eldest will move up in 2011) and so started to look around for better schools, not easy to find good senior schools with good primary schools in the same area for some reason!! Whilst looking around I started to dream my dream again of living in NZ near the beach with the kids running a-muck, learning to surf :) and Googled immigration sites, I found to my delight that hairdressers are wanted out in NZ and mentioned to J that I thought that once I was qualified we'd have enough points to do it!! I looked into the schools out there and found that on the whole the schools are good. Then I started to look into areas, I knew we wanted the North Island (the South, although very pretty is very like Scotland and so was ruled out by me for being too cold) I wanted somewhere not too rural (unlike J who would happily live in a shack in the middle of no-where, as long as it had broadband lol) close to the beach, good schools but not too built up. I found that even the cities out there weren't cities as we would class them, more like our towns, I wanted somewhere quite warm (who doesn't??) and came across the Bay of Plenty, it looks amazing, it's the 4th biggest city in NZ and is where alot of New Zealander's take their holidays, the schools looked good too. So that's where we are at at the moment, I'm trying to finish my course early so we can apply for Visa's earlier rather than later as I think it'll take a lot of luck to get in without a job offer, I'd love to go out first and have a look about, go into a few hairdressers and see if I can get anything secured first to speed things up, but I don't think that's going to be an option, it's going to cost far too much to do for all 6 of us, and it feels to far to go without the children, so I think it'll be a case of just do it if we do decide to go ahead (I'm happier with this than J, he's not one for change really, and that is a BIG change!) I've just read that back and it does read as I'm all up for this and J is kind of just humouring me, I wasn't sure either until a few months ago, when out of the blue he said to me "I can't wait until we can apply for those Visa's and get the hell out of this country" I was a bit surprised as I thought he'd got cold feet about the whole thing and hadn't even mentioned it to him for ages. So now I can't wait, I just want to get my course done, and start applying, I think we're going to use an agency, somewhere like New Life New Zealand as I've read to many stories of people applying wrongly and not getting in, my only concern is money as we have none spare at the moment and immigrating isn't cheap, well most probably sell up to do it, in which case we'll have enough, but won't have the option of comming back, in a way I think that'll be good as we'll have to make it work, we won't be thinking "oh if it doesn't work out we can alway's go back in a year or two", but it's very scary to think we'll be moving to the other side of the world with no way of moving back if we do hate it (or one of the kids does) I guess if it's that bad we can always sell up out there and move back and start from scratch again over here. It's all very confusing at the moment, I want to do an online assessment for points but again I'm not sure whether it's best to do it now, or to wait until I've finished my course? If only I had someone I could ask. I did speak to someone from an agency and they said to do it now, online as she couldn't discuss it over the phone as it'd take too long, but then you have to pay now too (you do get your money back if you don't qualify for any visa's) aaaaagh what to do??????

Right, I'm going to leave it there for now, not sure how often I'll update as there may not be anymore to add to this for a while.