Brent and I were thrilled to officially announce to our family and friends in mid-August that we are already expecting our first child, due 7 March 2001! The pregnancy has progressed very well for me so far - I have been very lucky to escape any morning sickness, and all other symptoms are there, showing that things are hopefully continuing to progress well! Our first scan (shown on right) showed our healthy "little bean" developing fast and seemingly perfectly! My next scan is at 20 weeks - around mid October 2000.
Photo on right: Our little bean (with his/her face at top right, chest and hand at top left, and spine running along the bottom).

After a year and a half of borrowing Brent's car (!) I now finally have a car of my very own! It's a Honda CR-V, with all the bells and whistles, and my very own personalised number plate (4SONIA!)
I had finally decided that a new car was absolutely necessary, to help my back injury finally mend (the seat in Brent's old merc was unfortunately not helping it at all!) - hence our decision to get me a car like this, that I don't have to stoop down to get in and out of (OK - so it's also great fun to drive, will be great to take on holidays, and a perfect future family car!).

Yep - we've just gone unconditional on it! The settlement date looks like it will be around the end of October 2000! Brent and I had only just started looking at houses (as our existing lovely villa is a little small for our impending needs!). We were not expecting to find one this soon! We first saw it on 26 August - and loved the layout and feel of it as soon as we walked in!
It's a very sunny, open-plan, northfacing, 4 bedroom house - only a few blocks from where we currently live! It has numerous sunny balconies and is very private, surrounded on two sides by native bush. The main bedroom is on the main floor (with walk-in wardrobe and ensuite), with a second smaller room directly next to it (which will be great for the nursery!) and the other two very large bedrooms are upstairs.
(Below are a few shots, so you can see what it's like - but you'll have to try and ignore the old furniture in these photos - they belong to the previous owner!)

Robert made our family very proud by winning a medal for outstanding performance in the Australian Maths Competition - which was sat by nearly half a million students from 37 countries! He's flying over to Melbourne towards the end of October to be presented with his medal. Well done bro!

His achievement made front page of the New Zealand Herald on 22 September and was even discussed with humour that day on Auckland radio stations (they were amused as no New Zealanders had yet earned any medals at the Olympics - so they suggested that we should invest more in our maths students, and forget about the athletes!)