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.