Jack is eleven, not yet a teenager but we get an occasional glimpse of the foreign world that is soon to engulf him. Last year he wanted to be goal keeper for the Australian soccer team, this year that dream seems to be fading and his attention has turned fully to the world of tubes, cut backs and crunchers.

He spends most of his time at home trying to come up with different tactics that will get me to take him to the beach so he can go surfing. He assures me though that he doesn’t want to be a world champion surfer, “What’s the point in dying for one wave mum?”

Noah is eight and probably the quietest out of us all. He is our deep thinker who loves to read and write and draw. He is a soccer player too and loves the fact that his dad is the coach but that doesn’t stop him giving Pete a hard time “Why do we have to dribble the ball all the way to the other end of the field and back?”

He’s not interested in getting on a surfboard and going out the back, at this stage anyway. He loves to boogie board, especially when there is a shallow glass plate of water on a tide that is just changing and he can run full pelt and then jump onto his knees on his boogie board and go skimming across the water finishing in a splashing skid.

Kai is six and started grade one this year. He was packing and unpacking his crayons and pencils and scrap books for weeks leading up to the first day of school. Finally he was a big boy and would get to go to school everyday like his big brothers.

The night before school started the best present any big kid could ask for happened, his first tooth fell out, his toothless grin went from ear to ear, not only was he going to school but now the tooth fairy had to come and see him just like she had Jack and Noah. On the first day of school he came home and said to Pete, “Well dad, today I learnt how to write and tomorrow I am going to learn how to do math’s.”