Author: thethingsnotsaid

Be England What She Will, With All Her Faults I Love Her Still

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This will be our fourth Winter in New Zealand now.  In many ways it’s hard to believe we have been here that long but at the same time, England feels like a distant memory. I am homesick. I think it’s a number of things that have triggered it off.  Facebook posts of friends over there at the moment.  The delayed Christmassy feeling I get in June.  Jackson having another birthday with no grandparents or cousins being there. I think most of all it’s just, about time. We’re very happy here.  Christchurch is a great place to bring up a family, we have a lovely home, good jobs, we’re in a vibrant church, we’ve made some awesome friends.  My homesickness isn’t about being unhappy here.  Anyone who lives away from where they grew up will know this feeling, it’s not that you want to go back as such, you just miss all the good things you had there that you don’t have here, like for me… I miss being able to get a meal deal at …

In Four Years

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In less than a week, our little man is going to graduate from toddler to full-blown child. In celebration of this “coming of age” I thought I would share a few things I have learnt in the last four years.  ‘Lessons by Jackson’, if you will. One of my earliest revelations after Jackson arrived was that even though your little people share the same genes, womb and passage out into the world, they are really very different.  I know this is obvious but when you are barely sleeping at night, you spend your days changing nappies and feeding people that can’t work a toaster or peel a banana, you could miss a bus falling on your house, so it took a while for me to realise what worked for Minnie was going nowhere with Jackson. Minnie screamed for the first three months of her life, Jackson seemed to be stunned into silence for the first six months of his life. Food was interesting and attractive to Minnie, Jackson refused anything other than milk until he was …

Good Junk Food

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In our family we refer to the restaurant with the golden arches as “Dirty-donalds”.  I’m not proud to admit that my children have tasted a McNugget or two from there but we haven’t been through in months and I intend to keep it that way! That’s not to say that our children don’t have junk food, in fact at least once a week I throw caution to the wind and serve up a dinner for the children…pause for mum to turn away from what I am about to type… that doesn’t have any green vegetables in it!!  Six days a week I plan and cook evening meals for the family that are clean, healthy, representative of all the food groups and one day a week, generally Friday because it’s curry night for mum and dad, I provide what I like to call good junk food.  It’s junk because something on the plate came from a can or the freezer or has added sugar.  It is good because it’s the highest quality of its kind, I cooked part …

Pitched Perfectly To Come Second

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I shall warn you now, Anna Kendrick will not come off well in this review.  If you are a lover of the little songstress prepare yourself to feel defensive and most likely a little offended. The film is of course a sequel and sadly like 95% of sequels (unless they are part of a trilogy or adapted from a volume of books by the same author) it really didn’t entertain like the first.  I think it tried to.  In that, I’m pretty sure the new Director and her team sat down and said, ‘whatever was good in the first one, let’s do that again but louder’.  I think this will have been their to-do list: 1. A plot about the underdog.  The Bellas were successful at the end of the last one so let’s bring them back down to rock bottom with something super shocking.  Which leads to… 2. Fat Amy. She is by far the funniest character in the whole film so let’s make her part bigger and more outrageous, cue her flashing her …

Every day is a school day

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When you have a young family, sometimes a lesson to be learnt trumps fun times together. It’s a lovely Autumn day and we thought going to the park would be fun for all of us. That is until Jackson decided he was going to bring his cars, about 50 of them, in a box, that they didn’t fit into. At that moment I saw the opportunity for a lesson in taking responsibility for your things and kissed goodbye to fun in the park. We explained what we were planning to do – we’ll be walking a lot. Gave him clarity on the help we would give in carrying his cars – none. Suggested an alternative – don’t take the whole box, just take one or two that will be easy to carry. Reminded him that his cars were his responsibility – not ours. We went through this three times before arriving at the park and still he wanted to bring them. Within two minutes of walking Jackson had had enough carrying his cars. His arms …

Mother’s Day

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Being a mum is the great equalizer between women.  No matter how your babies came to you, now matter how ready you were for their arrival or qualified you feel to look after these precious gifts, whether you are a real disciplinarian or spoil them rotten, you are exactly the same as the next mum when it comes to how you feel about your children – literally every part of your being loves them, from the tips of your toes to the ends of every strand of hair on your head. Mother’s Day is this Sunday in New Zealand so I’m getting pretty excited about my lie in.  Today I was treated to a special assembly by Minnie’s class that included a short play on everything mum’s do for us and then also a song about how our children try to show us love but often end up making a mess and trashing the place.  I also learnt that more than $18 billion is spent each year on Mother’s Day in the States – yikes! …

The Age of Adaline

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This category of blog is the one I am hoping for the most interaction and feedback, a Movie Club if you will.  Please wade in with your thoughts, if you have seen the same film. I like to watch films.  I’m no buff, I don’t want to set my stall up as being someone who is qualified to be a critic but I enjoy “the movies”, so this is my space to share what I think of a film. Last night I went to see Age of Adaline.  I really enjoyed it. The story goes that Adaline, played by Blake Lively, was born in San Francisco at the beginning of the 20th century.  She marries and has a daughter.  Her husband dies in an accident connected with the building of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Soon after, in 1935, she is driving at night during an unusual snow storm, crashes off the road, her body freezes, gets struck by lightning and for some crazy made up scientific reason her body stops ageing. The film is set in …

Recovery

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We hit our NZ three year anniversary at the end of March and whilst the day passed with little recognition, it was in fact a significant milestone.  When we first had the crazy idea of moving our wee family over to the other side of the world to be part of Christchurch’s rebuild we said the adventure would be for three years. We’re still here. Because how long does it take for a city to recover?  The Oxford English Dictionary states that to recover means, “to return to a normal state of health, mind or strength.”  When you travel to other cities, you realise what is currently “the norm” for Christchurch is far away from normal anywhere else. Gareth came here to work as part of SCIRT (Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team) which is essentially the horizontal and underground rebuild that makes the vertical, buildings going up rebuild possible.  SCIRT has recently passed its halfway point, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrg8SnvSn0M and look out for Gareth, but that’s not even halfway to the city being rebuilt.  I think the general consensus is it …

Chocolate Orange Hearts

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I am not surprised that my first blog after over a year of radio silence would be a food one, as my interest in baking has grown stronger in the last few months.  I have actually considered creating a new blog that is called ‘My Training For The Great British Bake Off’ where I track the development of my baking skills with the sole intention of entering that blissful show.  But I don’t know that I’m there yet.  Let’s just play with the theme on this blog for a little while shall we. And where better to start than with a little recipe I’ve invented.  And when I say invented, I began with a Nigella recipe and then made several changes due to personal taste and lack of required ingredients, so that it now looks nothing like what the goddess was aiming for. They love their “free from” food over here and after three years of living here I must confess I do like the odd liberated recipe to keep me intolerance friendly.  This one has no gluten or dairy. …

So many roles, so little time

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I read this blog http://carolynee.net/a-letter-from-a-working-mother-to-a-stay-at-home-mother-and-vice-versa/ this week. And it resonated so much with me as I am quite sure it did with so many other women (and men).  I’ve been thinking since reading it about how complex it is to be a mother of two pre-schoolers that works from home.  I am so many more roles than mother and freelance event manager; I’m Daughter, Friend, Christian, Sister,  Home Owner, Housekeeper, Cook, Dietician, Accountant, Personal Trainer, living in a country that is on the other side of the world to my family and close friends.  These roles overlap, they compete, they conflict, they are relentless and at some point in most days they overwhelm. I’m going to give you a little look into what I am talking about.  It will probably read like a crazy person’s diary, but I would wager this is a typical woman’s day.  So when you see us with screaming children pulling our ill-fitting trousers down whilst we bite your head off because you won’t take back our faulty iPhone cover and …