Author: thethingsnotsaid

This is you my friend.

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A friend of mine is going through a REALLY tough time at the moment and she was telling me how someone had said to her that she had to see herself as her loved ones and friends see her. I’ve been thinking about that ever since, and it struck me that maybe she doesn’t know how her friends see her because we don’t always say what we think about our friends do we? I mean we might occasionally say something encouraging, empathise in a situation or pay a compliment but do we tell our friends all the reasons why we love them? So this is for you my friend, so you can see what I see. You light up the room when you are in it. You always look good in the outfits you wear, you put yourself together perfectly and you smell delicious. You obviously pay attention to the way that you look but it doesn’t consume you, you are natural, not vain or obsessed. You have lovely skin, pretty eyes and a dainty …

There is light at the end of the tunnel.

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I haven’t written here in nearly four months. I know that breaks so many rules about blog writing and believe me, I’ve been beating myself up about it for a few weeks now.  I’ve been busy and I should have blogged about all the things that have been keeping me busy but instead they distracted me, so just to mention them and to justify my silence.  In the last four months… I got a full time job in a very special design agency that is like a family that I really love being a part of, see Publica.   As it happens, half of my role is to be a copy writer so let’s just set the record straight right now, I have been pursuing my dream, just not here. My son turned five and started school, funnily enough the same week I started working full time hours.  If you are a mum with children in school you will know how this will have gone down.  Oh and also he got a sickness bug that lasted a week after four …

Purpose #3

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Just in case anyone was wondering, I’m still pondering my purpose.  I haven’t had a ‘this is the way you should go’ moment as yet, but I have been thinking about the concept of purpose a lot lately. I’ve discovered the search for purpose is not like it is when you are young or in a film with Robin Williams, where you stand on your desk, shouting ‘Carpe Diam’.  You can’t dream a dream and step into it the next day.  No, it’s more of a slow, steady, talk about it with your spouse for weeks and weeks, cautiously debating all the many intricate ripples that will come from a decision you might make in the near future that may or may not have a positive or negative effect on your career, your children’s lives, your bank account, your marriage, the happiness of your parents, your sanity!! For instance, finding work for me feels like a complicated maze of possibilities that could lead to the dream job but I have to test out twenty routes before I find the one that …

An English Woman in New Zealand

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Recently The Telegraph voted New Zealand the best place to live.  And it’s not for the first time.  We moved here from the UK in 2012 and on a regular basis my husband and I say to each other that we feel like it’s a privilege that we get to live here.  If I were to vote on where is the best place to bring up children, I think I’d be hard pushed to find somewhere better than New Zealand. As we have just passed our 4th NZ anniversary, and the country did just get a major accolade, I thought I would write a list of all the things that remind me I am an English woman in New Zealand.  Not quite as sexy sounding as Sting but hopefully just as interesting. People are super friendly. Right from the minute we arrived in Christchurch airport and a lovely lady scooped up our tired selves and helped us stand after a 32 hour long trip, I have always been warmed by how friendly Kiwis are.  They love to …

The Hundreds and Thousands Biscuit

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My children’s favourite biscuit is probably the Cookie Bear Hundreds and Thousands biscuits. I can’t remember what brand makes them over in the UK but these are the ones we prefer here in NZ.  They are a pretty simple biscuit and therefore just asking to be made at home. If I make them myself then I know what is in them and the children still get to eat gaudy coloured biscuits.  Everyone’s happy.  Except maybe not the Cookie Bear because he doesn’t make any profit this way. I did a test and these work just as well with Gluten Free flour so you can do a GF version if you need to.  Even more people are happy!  Well, still not the bear… This is taken from The Primrose Bakery Book by Martha Swift and Lisa Thomas. Ingredients: 85g unsalted butter, at room temperature 100g golden caster sugar 1 large egg 1 tsp vanilla extract 200g plain flour (can use 200g Gluten Free flour) 1 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp salt For the icing: 150g icing sugar 2-3 tbsp boiling …

To the Moon and Back Doesn’t Come Close

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I don’t think I am going to be alone when I say that without a doubt, my most favourite part of every day is the couple of minutes I spend tiptoeing into my children’s bedrooms, just before I go to bed.  The house is silent, there is nothing left for me to do and my children are fast asleep in their beds.  I walk in and feel the same rush of joy I felt when I clapped eyes on them in the delivery room.  Bending down to adjust their duvet cover so they are fully wrapped up or lifting their heads back onto their pillows, I can smell their skin and place the tip of my nose onto their super soft cheeks so I can practically drink in their deliciousness. Then I whisper that I love them and creep back out.  Sometimes I will get on the bed and snuggle alongside them for a couple of minutes, sometimes I am so overwhelmed with how much I love them I can get tearful, sometimes they look so gorgeous I …

Purpose #2

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I love the seasons.  For me, I see the wisdom of God every time there is a change of season.  Like it says in Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens. It’s one of the things that attracted me to New Zealand when we were considering where we could move to.  This country has seasons, sometimes all four in one day. We’re coming out of Summer and into Autumn over here and when you live in the “Garden City” this becomes a true celebration of colour.  Our road is tree lined so it’s lovely walking underneath a canopy of reds and oranges for a month or so. I don’t have a favourite season.  Gareth gets practically euphoric when Spring comes with the long days and the promise of Summer soon approaching and my friend Jan named her business after her favourite season, Autumn.  I appreciate both of these and I also love the warmth and holiday feeling of Summer and the crispness of a frosty Winter …

Bad Ass (DF) Chocolate Chip Cookies

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If you like your biscuits or cookies crunchy and crisp then look away now because these aren’t those.  These are soft, doughy, melt in the mouth cookies and they are fabulous!  Their origins are found in ‘the hummingbird bakery’ cookbook, but I have altered them over time to become dairy free so I can eat as many as I like. It’s Sunday today and these are great to bake now because you can have them as a yummy  afternoon treat and then the rest will keep as packed lunch treasures for the children and the just-got-in-from-work-and-I-can’t-wait-the-five-minutes-it-takes-for-you-to-get-my-dinner-on-the-table hubby snack.  Oh and they are super good for the just-got-back-from-dropping-off-the-children-and-need-a-cup-of-tea-before-I-start-being-productive nibble. Ingredients 200g coconut oil (room temperature, soft) 300g brown sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon coconut extract (I figure if I’m using coconut oil I may as well go all-in on the flavour) 400 g plain flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda 225g dark chocolate, roughly chopped (obviously needs to be dairy free to keep this recipe DF) Recipe Preheat the oven to 170C and …

Purpose #1 *

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I have been feeling quite unsettled recently.  I say recently because there is a good chance I have been feeling this way for years now, it’s just that having children, emigrating to the other side of the world and being a working mum can really distract you from anything that is going on below the surface. Of course I can’t say for sure, but I would like to think I am somewhere close (maybe a little further to go) to the middle of my life.  Therefore I am middle aged.  This is something that I have been pondering for a few months now as I get closer and closer to my 40th birthday.  What can I say, I don’t like getting old. I consider my peers, those that I know and those that I just observe at a distance, say on the Graham Norton couch or in a blog or a Facebook feed.  All grappling with their middle-aged status.  There seems to be a scale on how we all deal with it.  At one end we have those that arrive and find peace and …

Grimsby

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Gareth and I don’t get many dates these days, so when we have them they are precious and not to be wasted.  To say the last one was wasted on Grimsby would be harsh but if I had my time over I would probably do it differently. The choice of film came down to Grimsby or Deadpool. We looked at what was on and these two were the films most likely to hit the middle ground between what we both enjoy. Action comedy is our safe zone.  Sometimes on a Friday night we can spend an agonising hour watching trailers of films on iTunes in the hopes of finding one we are both willing to try.  I think there has been a couple of times when after all that it’s got so late we give up and just watch James Corden in cars with famous people on YouTube.  It’s like searching for the Holy Grail finding a film we’re both going to equally enjoy. We watched trailers for both Grimsby and Deadpool and essentially Grimsby won …