Working abroad in Australia, Costa Rica and New Zealand

Hats Off To All Career Mums

I now feel the need to mention that I am currently striving to be a super mum. I get up at 5.30am six mornings a week to exercise. I have three kids who all need food, clean clothes, love, attention, reading practice and exercise. And a hubby whose needs overlap with the kids in several areas. Husband and wife are both busy setting up a new home and home business in a foreign country and are still jumping through hoops to do this. For example, yesterday the whole morning was taken up with a trip to Maroocydore half and hour away to get our medical cards.

But that one-off chore isn't really the problem. I find that there are always things to be sorted out because we've only just moved to Australia. There's life insurance, medical insurance, standing orders to be set up or stopped, bank accounts to be opened and closed, term deposits to be opened in the hope that we can earn some interest on our house money, gardens to be weeded and mowed, a pool to clean, teachers and kids to help at school, shopping, cooking, cleaning, car maintenance and so much more.

What I've actually never been able to understand is how mothers who work full time actually manage to fit it all in and still have any time or energy left over for their family and themselves. Some women make it look effortless too. Always in a stylish outfit with brushed hair and make-up, always talking patiently to their children, never rushing or breaking into a sweat despite the tropical climate. Heck knows how they do it, but I am striving to be more like them! One key area I am determined to save time on is cleaning. To this aim I am dropping my standards as much as possible while still maintaining minimal hygiene and some semblance of tidiness. In Costa Rica I was blessed to have the wonderful Rocio come to our home for two full days a week. Not only did she handle all cleaning, laundry and cooling with quiet efficiency but she also provided me with lovely company and acted as a great Spanish teacher. I miss her cleaning and sympathetic ear.

On the networking front I am getting on well with the kids' teachers who all seem to be lovely, professional or friendly. Several of them even manage to exude all three of those qualities. On a scale of one to ten of how happy I am with the kid''s school and childcare I would give an eight. I think that this is partly because I am so grateful, after a year in Costa Rica, that my children now have the opportunity to spend time with well-trained and highly experienced teachers in a caring environment with excellent facilities. The local state school here is a huge contrast to Luke and Medium's school in Costa Rica. There I had to buy desks and chairs for them as there weren't enough to go around. There didn't seem to be any books at the school. One time I noticed that Medium's pencil supply was constantly dwindling and he said that other children broke them. When I asked Medium's teacher about it she said "Oh yes, it's terrible" and produced a huge back of broken pencils from her desk. She went on to tell me that there was nothing she could do about it, that some of the boys were very badly behaved and there was a lot of violence in the school. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to hear from your child's teacher. Another time Medium actually had to have stitches in his head when falling over as he ran away from classmates who were throwing rocks at him. This time it was put down to the usual child's play and the protagonists were never punished as they said it wasn't them!

At the boy's new school there is a library, music, PE and Italian lessons and clean classrooms full of bright artwork, books and games. I'm looking forward to helping out with reading three times a week in Medium's year 2/3 class. One of the nipper mums recommended I volunteer to work in the school tuck shop. She reckons it's a great way to get to know the teachers, kids, school news and gossip and as a bonus your kids get a free lunch on the day you volunteer. I really want to do that. But how to fit it all in! In Costa Rica I was aiming to write for two hours a day when the kids were out. Here I would like to boost that up top four hours. Four hours isn't really enough of course and even that will be hard to fit in. I will need to be truly disciplined in terms of getting home fast after dropping them off. I won't be able to go surfing during the working day and things will get even tighter when we start cycling to school on a regular basis. I should be able to do it though so I can keep updating this blog regularly and also finish off that half-completed novel.

I can't drop the exercise though. It's pretty essential to my physical and emotional well-being now. I am attempting to train myself to run three times a week for 30 minutes each time simply because this is the fastest and most efficient way for me to get some aerobic exercise. I am already able to run for 24 minutes in three eight minute slots and have worked out that if I carry on at this rate I will have achieved my goal some time around July! Slow but steady wins the race:)

The cost of moving overseas to Australia with a family: it's both financial and emotional

In which we broach that delicate, some would even say taboo, subject of money

I thought I'd wait until I'd been down to the Centrelink office to write this one. Centrelink is the government department which deals with dolling out family tax benefit and childcare benefit, two wonderful little surprises that have been offered to us here in Australia. All very handy if you have three kids and limited cash flow. We haven't quite managed to set up our new business yet but it is in the pipeline and in the mean time we have to tighten our belts. I don't think they had these benefits for big families like us in New Zealand, or if they did, they kept very quiet about it.

What's more the Australian Government is, even as I write, rolling out stimulus packages designed to keep the economy ticking along during these times of what's being called a global recession. We're not the only ones trying to keep to a budget. While some people are being laid off left, right and center, we are boldly seeking employment. Rather untimely of course, but we remain undaunted. We'll have to wait and see but it's possible the stimulus package could give us a small cash injection which would certainly help to pay for those school uniforms, school books, karate suits, Surf Life Saving Club kit, SLSC membership, swimming lessons, drama lessons, basketball lessons, computer software and, well, maybe it won't stretch quite that far!

I know that for most people the expense is one thing that puts them off moving abroad. For us I have to say it's been much less expensive than we imagined. The main cost of moving here has been buying new furniture, kitchen wares, electrical items, outdoor toys and computer equipment. Because we were originally leaving New Zealand for Costa Rica and those two voltage systems are incompatible, we sold or gave away all electrical items. We also got rid of most of the big items of furniture to cut down on the cost of storage, which as it turned out, was for 18 months, and reduce shipping costs. That's why, when we finally did find a rental house after three weeks of searching, we all slept on mattresses on the floor for the first few weeks. With our travel track record these kind of things don't really phase us much and the kids are equally adaptable. In fact, Hubby and I are still on a mattress as we are having our bed made to order by a lovely wood craftsman who is pleasingly called Mr. Wood. It is a wonderful firm knig-size version, an upgrade on the queen-sized versions we slept on in NZ and CR. But I digress.

So, the house was pretty empty when we loved in. We bought a knackered old dining table in a Salvation Army store, mainly because it came with six pretty good modern stacking chairs and we had the mattresses of course, and a camping chair, but that was about it. This house has a big living area with a tiled floor and the kids had a lovely time running around screeching in the echoey spaces. It just about did our heads in. We moved in here on December 18^th and even now we still have no sofa so the living room looks very bare. Who'd have thought that it would take eight weeks for a sofa to arrive? I certainly didn't. At least we picked up a $200 sofa in Ikea for the kids. For a while there we were eating off plastic plates too before I got hold of some china ones. But looking back it is amazing how much we have managed to achieve in two months.

The stuff we got shipped from New Zealand was hugely delayed in getting to us, mainly because the local Waiheke Island removal company were a bit slow off the mark, so our boxes and furniture arrived in Oz right before Christmas. Before, during and after the festive season the Brisbane ports and docks people go into some type of seasonal limbo. They don't care if you are reduced to eating your Xmas lunch at a Salvation Army table. In fact, they quite possibly gain considerable pleasure from holding your beautiful recycled kauri table hostage in their warehouse for as long as possible. So reluctant were they to let us have that table that they actually broke it in the end. A quite considerable feat when you consider that this is a solid wood table with all surfaces about four centimeters thick. Well done guys. It must have been much easier, and probably more fun, for them to break our two green shelves and knock three large castor wheels right off the bottom of them. But they were kind enough to hang on to the wheels and get them back to us so all is forgiven. Of course, we had taken out insurance for our dearly beloved personal effects and best items of furniture so no harm done. Except, really by the insurance company whose brilliant excess limit of $500 was just about equal to the cost of the repairs so not worth our while putting a claim in. Hey ho.

But the time is nigh when I must do the school run and collect our dearly beloved children from school and childcare. Then I need to take one of them to the doctor for a skin scraping to find out whether we have picked up some virulent tropical parasites as a souvenir from Central America, or if it is something more pedestrian which is causing the blistering skin rash around one little Candy's hips and thighs.

Relocate to Australia with kids and get ready for a little culture shock

Down to business

After some serious procrastination I am starting work only two and a half hours after getting home from dropping the kids off at school and childcare. Plenty of room for improvement there so that's good.

Last week was a busy one for us former jungle and island dwellers. Last month I met a woman who's recently moved here from Barnsley, London who said how quiet she finds it here on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. Personally, and I think I can speak for my whole family here, we find it quite frenetic. There are people, cars, bikes and buses everywhere. Heck, they've got motorways, roundabouts and there's even a set of traffic lights in between our house and the kid's school. This is in sharp contrast to our last place or residence in Costa Rica. There I scoffed when the children did a project on road safety which included making a model of a traffic light out of an old milk box, speculating that many of the children may never have seen one before, the closest set being about 50 kilometers away. Still, I guess that's why they had to make a model of one. But in all seriousness, I think here is just the right amount of busyness.

We are thoroughly enjoying all the amenities on offer including a cinema with heaps of new movies being screened and a library with free books, dvds and workshops for the kids. Best of all, a concept I find totally revolutionary for a library, and liberating for it's users, especially me, there are no late fees! There is even a public swimming pool a few kilometers from our house with an Olympic size pool, another half Olympic sized one and a lovely kiddie pool with squirty jets and bubbles. I'm telling you we are really being spoilt here. There are clean, comfortable, regular buses, that I've never seen broken down, cruising by the bottom of our road and you can walk to Noosa National Park which isn't to be sniffed at. From our house you just head straight down to the white sand beach, turn left and walk to the end. There's a choice of tracks through the national park, either following the coastline with its sparkling blue seas, where you can often spot a turtle paddling around, or over the hill and through the shady bush where, if you're lucky you'll spot a koala and if not you'll just end up with a crick in your neck. Either way, when you come out on the other side of the park you can trot on down to Hastings Street or the main beach for refreshments to suit your taste and budget and some excellent people watching. Or, and if you don't feel like walking then you can hop on a bike and go for miles, along rivers, beaches, mangroves and lakes. I told you we're spoilt.

Anyway, what with all the excitement of starting school and swimming lessons, carrying on with the Nippers Surf Life Saving Club program three times a week, and cycling to school whenever possible some people have had a bit of a meltdown. Large, our first born, now aged ten is a lovely lad. Sensitive, studious and cerebral, he can also be quite emotional. So, after an apparently great week at school and excellent participation in his sporting activities he had a bit of a meltdown in the privacy of his own home on Saturday morning. Then his dad had a meltdown too, then I had a meltdown as well so we all ended up feeling thoroughly miserable. Very disappointing on our first weekend back at school. I dream of having a lovely mellow time at home on the weekends, but it's interesting that our children who normally get on pretty well, just snapped right into arguing with each other after school on Friday. I wonder if the cause is tiredness, stress, food-deprivation, attention-seeking or a combination of all of them. Anyway, I hope that our weekends aren't all going to be like that.

Thankfully the day improved and we all had a great afternoon down at Noosa Spit where the deep, wide Noosa River ebbs out into the sea. This is a special spot with wonderful seabirds on the far shore, the calm of the river contrasting with the chop of the sea, the orderly paths perfect for cycling or walking in the otherwise natural beauty. Sometime it can be really windy down here and the kite surfers come out in force speeding around the river mouth, swooping and vaulting like birds. But on Saturday it was perfectly calm and the low tide meant we could dive into the deep river then float along with the current for a few hundred meters before climbing out, running back to the starting point and doing it all over again. The kids loved that and also had a blast excavating tunnels into the sand walls the river had created and bashing them in again.

On Sunday morning we went along to Nippers with the organised chaos of about one hundred kids (or more) playing games, and doing running races in the sand and in the surf. The waves were too big for paddling or swimming, much to Luke's relief. There are a few friendly faces down there who I hope to spend more time with and many other people I've not yet had a chance to talk to properly or at all. I suppose that this time next year we'll be settling into a social network and a group of friends but at the moment there's definitely a feeling of being an outsider for me and I hope the kids don't feel that too.

I think it's good that they've had their boundaries pushed and been thrown in at the deep end in Costa Rica, going to an unfamiliar country and a school where they speak very little Spanish. But there comes a time when you just need the comfort of the familiar around you and the feeling of truly belonging. I am ready for that now and I'm sure the kids are too.

How to move overseas or emmigrate to Australia, Costa Rica and New Zealand

How In the Hot Spot Got Started and the Big Idea

Three years ago when I set up this blog I proclaimed:

“I'm setting myself a personal challenge to write, if not daily, then at least on a regular basis. As Joe Rogan (the host of Fear Factor) would say, I am here to stare fear in the face. I am taking on my personal fear, the fear of being read, the fear of being judged.”

Fast forward to the present and I seem to have overcome that fear without actually trying. The simple act of time passing has allayed my fear of being read and of being judged. I am enjoying a new confidence and feeling motivated to write more and write better. I guess that part of that confidence and motivation has come from writing newsletters about our family move to Panama and emailing them out to over a hundred friends and relatives around the world. Those newsletters ended up as an 18 month chronicle of our travels around Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, our 14 months living in Costa Rica and our ultimate decision to leave Central America and move to Australia! Not bad for a family of five from New Zealand. The feedback I received from those newletters was great. To secretly dream of one day writing a book is one thing, but getting emails from people who have actually read my letters and think that I should write a book is the best encouragement I could hope for.

While in Costa Rica, I also took time to read a book which a friend lent me which reconfirmed what I already knew. That writing every day is crucial. As a child I kept a diary and as an adult I continued, only stopping writing daily when, aged 23 I got a boyfriend (now my husband) whose peeping over my shoulder when I was writing in bed at the end of a day and seemingly constant demands for me to turn the light out, or otherwise indulge him, brought about the demise of my daily ramblings. But last year in Costa Rica I started writing again daily. I had continued writing during those 17 years in the wilderness, keeping a diary on and off, attending a creative writing course and composing emails to distant friends. I even wrote for a living, penning proposals and effective web copy for our clients when we ran our own Internet development and marketing company. In Costa Rica I also realized how important being surrounded by positive and like-minded people is to me. So I set up a writing group, imagining about eight fun, interesting people who gathered weekly to read their musings and provide each other with positive feedback and encouragement. Somehow it turned out to be just me and one other English woman, a like-minded free spirit with drive, determination, passion, creativity and brains. Of course, her zany sense of humor was a huge bonus and we really bonded in frenzy of smoking, wine drinking and sharing every Thursday night.

Having been through that I am now ready to write my blog regularly with one big idea:

To inspire other people to follow their dream of traveling by following my own dream to write.

This is the new introduction to In the Hot Spot which I had to shorten on the actual header:

"Have you ever wanted to move overseas?
Wondered what it'd be like to start a new life abroad?
Or shelved the idea because you're too old, with too many kids and responsibilities?
Don't give up!
I'm no spring chicken and I've recently moved to New Zealand, Costa Rica and Australia with my husband and our three young kids. So if you want to hear what it's like from someone you can relate to, read on. Any questions and comments are welcome. Thanks for reading and good luck with your travel plans!

Next time I'll write more about our move to Australia and how we are settling in.

Moving abroad to Australia via New Zealand and Costa Rica

Moving to Australia from New Zealand the long way round

Yesterday (27 Jan 2009) was one of those long-awaited happy days which was also tinged with sadness. It was then end of 18 months of carefree travel and the start of a settled suburban existence in our new homeland, Australia. It was the day when out three kids, Luke aged ten, Max, seven, and Kiara, four started back at school after two months hanging out with the family. I think saying that the last two months have been busy would be a bit of an understatement. In fact, we've been so busy that I just had to consult my passport, if not to see exactly where we've been, then at least to tell me when we left our previous home and arrived here. The visas and immigration stamps reveal that we left Costa Rica, our home for over a year, and flew to Los Angeles on the 28th of November 2008. Our trip to the USA was a short and sweet one. We stayed in Orange County with American friends we'd met in Costa Rica and visited Venice Beach and Disneyland before heading off on Thanksgiving Day to our new, and hopefully final destination, Queensland, Australia, arriving here in the 29th of November 2008.

As I looked through my passport for my exit visa from Costa Rica I did get a bit distracted. There are so many bureaucratic stamps in there and they serve as poignant reminders of our travels from New Zealand, which we left in May 2007, through Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and back to Costa Rica. Then of course there are numerous stamps from Paso Canoas on the Costa Rica-Panama border where we were regular visitors. We were living in Costa Rica on tourist visas so we had to leave Costa Rica every two to three months and re-enter to fulfill immigration requirements. Let's just say that the journey from our last permanent home in New Zealand to our new permanent home in Australia has been by a slightly circuitous route. Although actually, if you look at a globe you'll see that Queensland and Costa Rica aren't really that far apart at all. From Australia, head north east as the crow flies, over the equator, keep going for about 14,000 kilometers and you'll be there. As nature proves in this next story, if you're buoyant and designed to survive long distances at sea with no fresh water or nourishment then it's really no distance at all.

When I was in Costa Rica I loved to beach comb for seeds. The tropical rain forest produces an amazing variety of delightfully simple, stunning natural seeds of different shapes and colors. The common thread is their perfect smoothness and inherent power to one day unleash their latent energy, harness the optimum conditions of moisture and light and grow into a resplendent rain forest tree. That could be what appealed to me so much about those seeds. I tried to get other people interested but got the feeling that no one quite appreciated them as much as me. There was a small, gray, oval seed with a delicate mosaic pattern that looked like ceramic. There was a medium-sized nut-brown seed with a darker or lighter stripe girdling it's middle which fit perfectly in a closed fist. Then there was the biggest of them all, a rich brown, flat and often heart-shaped seed which could get so big it covered the palm of your hand. The Costa Ricans called it corazon, meaning heart so even the name had a definite appeal.

When I left Costa Rica I took a bag of these seeds with me to Australia. I knew that in Australia there are strict customs and quarantine laws and I would need to declare all types of food, plant material and animal products on my arrival. That way Australia can ensure that no new and unwanted pests and diseases get into the country where they could threaten its land, agriculture and livelihood. I knew that my beloved seeds would most likely be confiscated and destroyed at the airport but I thought I'd give it a go. I had no intention of actually planting the seeds, I simply wanted a bowl of them on my coffee table to serve as a kind of worry bead and remind me of the jungle and beaches of Costa Rica. But the kind customs agent broke the news to me gently that my seeds would need to be destroyed which was very sad. Since then I have been cheered to discover that those seeds are now coming back to me. One morning after a night of heavy rain and stormy seas, I was delighted to find a corazon seed on my local beach right here in Queensland . But this corazon didn't have the dull sheen of the young seeds I'd coveted in Costa Rica, this corazon was cracked and dried. It's husk was threaded with fine hairs, its rounded edges overgrown with tiny sea creatures like flat limpets and several larger shells also adorned its sides. This seed had a history, it had made an epic journey traveling over 7000 nautical miles to join me here in Australia. Although it didn't have the virgin beauty of its Costa Rican relatives who had just fallen from the tree and been carried down stream in a storm to be washed up on a local beach, this shell had traveled far and wide and stood the test of time. It had survived being bashed and battered by storms across two continents, it had crossed the equator under its own steam, taken on passengers and kept traveling south, its youthful patina had been replaced by fine lines and crustaceans. Perhaps most amazing of all it still had that power to put down roots, grow and evolve into a magnificent tree and in all likelihood it would given half a chance. This was a seed I could relate to.

Since then I have found many more corazon seeds and even some of the other smaller seeds I loved in Costa Rica. They have found a way to evade Australian quarantine regulations and join me here and for that small miracle of nature I am truly grateful. But I seem to have got off the track here. The busy two months since we arrived in Australia have been filled with house hunting and the acquisition of furniture, cooking utensils and wheels of all sizes, from a big 4WD car to bikes, scooters and skateboards. There's been paperwork too as we opened bank accounts, got local driving licenses, enrolled the kids in schools and reacquainted ourselves with all the trappings of modern life. We've also hosted two family members, Auntie J and cousin R from New Zealand and granny from England and showed them the sights including Noosa National Park, Noosa River, the hinterland of Mount Tinbeerwah and the Eumundi markets as well as Tin Can Bay and Great Sandy National Park to the north and Mooloolaba and Coolum to the south. To be honest it's hard to imagine how we would have managed without Auntie and Granny who each stayed home with the kids on numerous occasions while my husband and I forayed out to buy stuff, sign stuff or prove our identity. So to Auntie, who looked after the kids for twelve hours while we shopped in Ikea and stuffed as much as possible in and on the car before heading home, and to Granny who looked after them for a mere nine hours while we went to the Ports of Brisbane in a rental truck and took possession of our personal belongings which were shipped over from New Zealand, I am truly grateful.

For Posterity

In the Beginning, Starting a Blog for the Uninitiated

Wow, just spent the hour between 5 and 6am creating a blog. After the usual hassles with choosing a password and deciding on a memorable, meaningful and easy to spell name, I now discover my blog doesn't exist except in my imagination.

Hmm, maybe I need to publish this to get the ball rolling. So here goes, welcome to my world...

6.18am Feel that I have achieved something and am off to bed for a qld (quick lie down) before my kids rouse me around 7am.

Fast Forward a Few Years

If I do have some advice for you it's think carefully about your labels and try to use them well. Think about what information you will have in the future and create meaningful names which allow your readers to find the information they want fast. This will save you a lot of time reworking the labels later and deleting all the useless ones that you only have one post for.