A foray into Family Portraits

When one of my dear friends Sally asked if I'd come and take some family portraits of their recently expanded family, I was both honoured and slightly terrified at the thought. Having mucked around for a year or so now with my DSLR taking pictures here and there of our family and the great outdoor, I guess at some point the time was going to come when I'd have to start putting into serious practice some of the things I'd learnt. Like how to get good natural lighting, what aperture and shutter speeds mean, the rule of thirds, how to remove background distractions, and how to really enhance a photo with some cropping and post-process editing.

We'd provisionally agreed Saturday 3pm for the session, although Sally had been totally fine with me having to reschedule if I hadn't recovered enough from the reflux scare earlier in the week and the nasty cold that followed it. Anyway, being in bed for 3 days did have its upside, as it gave me the opportunity to do a little research on creative shots to create, so I felt I'd done a little groundwork before I arrived at the shoot. I found some wonderful ideas at Kelly Garvey Photography and whilst I wouldn't dare to say I came anywhere near creating anything of her standard, I do love the amazing natural light she is able to achieve, and if I am able to do more family photography in the future (i.e. can twist anyone else's arm to be my guinea pigs), then it's a style I'd love to aim for.

We chose Sally and Olly's bedroom for the majority of the shots as was the best room in the house for natural light. In mid-afternoon on a late autumn day it was pretty important to have the best light possible, and as it was also freezing cold outside with a strong southerly blowing (despite clear skies) any outside shots were definitely out of the running.

So how'd the shoot go? Well, I didn't attempt all of the shots I'd intended, and we were wise to end our photo session when we did as little Timothy (10 weeks old) was due for a sleep and a feed, whilst big brother Josh (two and a half) was finding the bed way too tempting and went straight from being photographed into a big rough and tumble session with his dad.

After taking the opportunity (since I had camera in hand) to stop on the Petone foreshore and make the most of the amazing setting sun, I then proceeded to stay up way too late on Saturday night editing my favourite shots to put together 40 for Sally and Olly to look through.

Below are my favourite shots from the day.

One of the best things about this session was that I learnt. A lot. Things like getting a two and a half year old to sit still for a photo for any length of time is pretty impossible. Although given I have one of those very same aged little people at home, I'm  not sure why I shouldn't have expected that!

It's also not quite as easy to photograph a slightly older baby as a newborn who can be posed in more elaborate positions all while still staying blissfully asleep and still!

Well practice makes perfect as they say, so now I just need some more willing participants for the next session and the next, to keep perfecting and practicing. And maybe in about ten years I can quit my day job and do what I love all the time. Well a girl can dream huh!

I'd love to hear which of these photos are your favourites, and if you have any (constructive) criticism I'll happily take that on board too!

And if you live locally and are interested in being my next subjects (at no charge of course, you can pay me in chocolate or home baking *wink*) then let me know!

Things I'm Loving: The NEW Linky!

I wholeheartedly believe that no matter what is happening in your life, there is always something you can be thankful for..no matter how simple it is.


Things I'm Loving
Can I start by saying I totally LOVE Things I'm Loving. I've been an avid Things I'm Loving participant all along, so I was sad to hear that Kristy from Paisley Jade was ending her regular weekly linky since it is one of my favourite posts to write each week. For me, it's a fantastic opportunity to share the simple things that I have loved throughout the week.

So I thought, why not keep the Loving going and so I emailed Kristy to ask if I could take over hosting the linky...and she said YES! So a warm welcome to the new Things I'm Loving hosted right here at MNM's. I can't wait for you to join in each week with all your loving!

And whilst this has been a pretty challenging week on the health front, I've been determined not to let that spoil the lovely memories of time spent with family and celebrating being a mum last weekend. And the phrase above is so apt...rather than wallow in 'woe is me' with how sick I've been, it is SO true that there is ALWAYS something you can be thankful for. So here's my thankfulness for the week:

A trip to the circus
A trip to the circus is something that all kids should experience in their lifetime. I have great memories of this as a child, and I think (all the memories are hazy) this even included a trip to the big smoke in Auckland to see the Moscow circus on ice.

Although Circus Aotearoa isn't quite in the same stratosphere, it was still a great trip out for us all including Nana and Poppa who were down for the weekend.




That was apart from breaking my tooth at the start of the show, and when Mylo's bunny fell from our spot at the top of the bleachers through to the muddy ground below and we had to retrieve him, muddy face and all. Luckily, one of the circus workers tramped around the back of the tent in her big gumboots to rescue him as I'd taken two steps in my newish boots and nearly sunk to my knees in the mud!

Logos quiz app
In a word...this game is totally addictive! I discovered this app a couple of weeks ago and am pretty close to clocking the 8 levels now. The more you get right, the more hints you get. And the levels do get progressively harder, although there are some easy ones on each level. It also helps if you can play with a friend at the same time and share answers.








Mothers Day handiwork
So...it's been a VERY long time since I made anything with a needle. Like probably about fifteen years. That is if you don't count the odd bit of darning buttons and holes here and there of course.

When I spotted some cute cross stitch cards in Spotlight, I thought I would try my hand at a little stitching for my mum for Mothers Day. Despite a slow start and panicking that I wouldn't get it done in time, putting in a huge effort over the weekend and several nights last week paid off and I even sewed up my last stitch a couple of days early. And as a big lover of cross stitch, I know how much my mum appreciated the once-in-fifteen-year effort!

Mothers Day card
I thought the card I got this year was hilarious. Quite possibly a little too close to the truth sometimes, but decidedly funny nonetheless.





Delicious mama's day treats
And if my funny mothers day card wasn't enough, I was also treated to a selection of the loveliest Bohemein chocolates from my boys. Yummo. Heaven in a small rectangle.

Here's how you can join in:

Link up below with your blog post telling us what you're loving, and grab the Things I'm Loving button below for your post too. Don't forget to share the love by visiting all the other lovelies who have joined in - the linky is open till same time next week!





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MNM's Bake: Lemon Yoghurt Cake

Lemon is one of our favourite ingredients in the kitchen. This is one of the moistest, easiest, throw-it-all-in-together in a food processor cake recipes we've found yet.

Here's the details:

Ingredients:
A 21cm ring cake tin
1 1/2 cups sugar
Rind of 2 lemons
2 large eggs
1/2 cup canola or light vegetable oil
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup plain yoghurt (we use Weight Watchers brand)
2-3 Tbsp lemon juice
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour

Turn oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

If using a food processor, add sugar and lemon peel. Run the machine until the peel is finely chopped and mixed with sugar.

Add eggs, oil and salt and process until thick and smooth. Then add the yoghurt and lemon juice and blend just enough to mix. Add the flour and process just enough to combine with the rest of the mixture.

Don't worry if it looks a little dark on top, 

it needs to brown up a wee bit to ensure the inside is fully cooked

Pour cake mixture into a non-stick sprayed and lined ring pan. Bake for 50 minutes - but check on it after about 40 minutes depending on your oven. Check that the centre springs back when pressed AND a skewer comes out clean. Each time we have cooked the cake it has taken longer than we thought to bake.

Leave to cool for about 10 minutes before turning carefully onto a rack.

Delicious on it's own or serve with ice cream or cream for a little extra zhush.

For other yummy recipes, go here.

Lessons from The Shack: The Father Heart

I have recently re-read The Shack. People tend to either love it or hate it. Me - I love it. To me it shows our God as so much bigger and better than anything our limited human expectations, knowledge or even experience could hope to dream up when we think of Him. We tend to try and put him in a box with a label God and we think we know what's inside it, but The Shack blows away any box or limitation we might try to put on Him. So let me share with you a few truths that have spoken deeply into my being in my journey to The Shack:


Lesson One - The Father Heart 

God is neither male nor female. So why do we always think of him as being exclusively male?

This is what The Shack has to say:
I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If choose to appear to you as a man or a woman, its because I love you. For me to appear to you as a big, black motherly woman and suggest that you call me Papa is to simply mix metaphors to help you from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning.


To reveal myself to you as a very large, white grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes.

How why do we tend to only hear of him as a Father? Why is he revealed most this way?

There are many reasons for that, and some of them go very deep. Let me say for now that we knew once Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don't misunderstand me, both are needed - but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence.

This got me to thinking how many hundreds of millions, if not billions of children on the planet who are alive right now have come from broken or non-existent parent relationships.

In most cases, if not all the child more naturally lives with the mother when the parents relationship (if they ever had one) falls apart.

How much more than must a Father be needed? A Heavenly, loving Father who will not leave when the going gets tough, who will not forsake, who will be the Father figure these children have never had?

Coming from a 2-parent family (and in an extended family history where there have been very few break-ups) I had never thought of how a child's heart must ache so terribly not to see both figures in their lives, to see the bond of love that exists between a mother, father and child. The triangle of love.

But God the Father, Papa, he sees it. He knows that ache. And is here to heal, to bridge that chasm, to be the Father some have never known.

What a glorious opportunity for redemption and relationship, freely available to us all.

He's there, He's always been there.

Our Papa waits for us.

Encouraged despite....

Thank you so much for the wonderful 'be well' wishes many of you left, knowing that there are people praying and thinking of me from around the world is so encouraging despite a difficult few days...here's an update for you:

The reflux that I had on Sunday night came on really badly again yesterday afternoon and evening, and 3 lots of Gaviscon didn't really help at all - I was just feeling totally blocked up and could feel acid going up and down all the time and no amount of burping to try and clear it would help. I did manage to sleep OK until I woke up to put little monkey Mylo back to bed at 4.55am and just by getting up and moving around I was nearly doubled over in pain from constricted chest and felt like my insides were burning so I decided I'd better head to A&E.

They were able to give me a liquid anesthetic and painkillers which helped ease the symptoms. After four hours there, the official diagnosis was reflux (no surprise there) so I have some medication which should ease it in a day or two, it's still pretty sore (5-6 on a scale of 1-10, 10 being childbirth!) and right on my breastbone where my ribs meet is where my esophagus feels the most constricted and blocked, but it's not as bad as early this morning when it was about 8-9. They weren't sure if the reflux is related to last week's mystery side pain or is as a result of the anti-inflammatories I took over the weekend.

In good news, I did manage to get my tooth fixed yesterday (see I'm still looking for the good here people!) which means one less thing to annoy me!

Anyway, thanks for your encouragement, your thoughts and prayers are very welcome and appreciated :-)

Meg

MNM's Make: A Paper World

Create the landscape of your wildest imagination with just a few sheets of paper, some scissor and glue!

This was so much fun to do, but it's definitely one you want to spend a wee bit of time over (I think it took me about 3 hours all up to cut, arrange, and glue/tape all the pieces together).

Go here for all the templates.



The minute I finished taping the last piece down, a multitude of animals suddenly came out to play in their new little world.

Later in the week, our LEGO caravan also came out to play in the little world.

And we even saw our little world from on high when we took a ride on MNM Air a few weeks ago too.

The possibilities for play are really only limited by your own imagination.

Idea sourced from Mr Printables via Pinterest.

Taken for granted

I wonder why we never consciously think 'oh I'm feeling so well at the moment, this is awesome'. When we are feeling well, I reckon we never give our health a second thought. We take it for granted that we will always feel this way.

And then when our health takes a nosedive, we feel as if the world is ending (well it's what it feels like anyway). And as soon as one thing goes, everything seems to.

I'd been on an exercise high, riding the wave of training for the duathlon. But only four days later, I woke up to a neck so sore and stiff I could barely turn it. It got worse throughout the day, and the following day the other side of my neck was sore too. It was pretty unbearable, so I decided to get into the physio. After a fairly hardcore session of acupuncture, I went home sore all over but hopeful that after the weekend, I'd be feeling better.

Not so.

The next week I struggled along using wheat packs at work to ease the stiffness and went to the osteopath for a couple of sessions. I could tell from the areas he worked on that I was pretty out of kilter in several places, and my neck was just where it was showing up worst.

Fast forward through another week where the pain had eased but was still 'there' and noticeable, and I came down with a nasty headcold and spent the day in bed on the Friday, and had as quiet a weekend as we could manage in our busy household dosed up on Codral and coffee to see me through.

The cold was feeling loads better by Monday morning so I headed back to work. About 10am I got a strange pain in my left side at the bottom of my ribs. I put it down to some weird kind of indigestion and battled through it, in the end taking a couple of Mylanta tablets and it seemed to ease.

The next day, the same thing at around the same time. Hard to put my finger on but it felt like a cross between a bad stitch like you'd get from running and something inflamed inside. So I took a couple of painkillers and it eventually went away. But it was strange enough and painful enough to decide to go and see the doctor late on Wednesday - and sure enough it happened again on Wednesday morning but eventually went away after a few hours. Painful enough to make it not that easy to concentrate on work while the pain was bad though.

At the appointment, the doctor was a bit puzzled, mentioning maybe kidneys or pleurisy (I was like what the heck is pleurisy!) and sent me off for a blood and urine test last thing on Wednesday. The results came back on Thursday but weren't conclusive showing up some possible inflammation or infection but not enough to get a full diagnosis. At one stage he also mentioned 'possible blood clot on the lungs' which I wasn't thrilled to hear. So he said he wanted to see me again on Friday morning. On Wednesday and Thursday night I'd also had another episode of pain around dinnertime, managed by heat packs and Panadol.

On Friday morning, even driving in to work I could feel another episode coming on but deliberately didn't take anything to help with it so the doctor could see it at its worst. At the appointment we did another urine sample, which he thought looked more positive for 'something' and sent it off to the lab. He also thought I should do an ultrasound and x-ray to rule out some other things he was considering like kidney stones.

He gave me a prescription for strong antiflammatories and antibiotics (in case it was infection) to take in the meantime, and I duly drove out to Lower Hutt to get the scans done there and then since that was the only free appointment for several days and with the weekend in between I didn't fancy taking my chances that the antibiotics and anti-inflammatories didn't help ease or solve the problem.

As well as feeling pretty uncomfortable from the side pain I also had to fast from food/drink, then scull a litre of water before the ultrasound. So I wasn't able to have any anti-inflammatories or antibiotics until later in the afternoon, by which time I was pretty over the day in general.

But the anti-inflammatories definitely helped and I had an almost normal day on Saturday. Which was a good thing as we had my mum and dad down for the weekend and a trip to the circus planned with the boys.

I say 'almost normal' as I managed to chip one of my front teeth pretty badly on some popcorn at the circus, and I now face a trip to the dentist to try and see if he can repair it, as it is very rough and my tongue can't stop touching it. I think years of opening my drink bottle with my teeth have probably been the cause of this and I am kicking myself now. Mark's been calling me a pirate and saying 'oo arr' since, in between reminding me that my new nickname should be 'fall apart Freda' and joking that he's very tempted to trade me in for a newer, younger, fitter model.

But then to top it off on Sunday night, the symptoms shifted to terrible heartburn and reflux that even a trip out to after hours pharmacy to get the strongest Gaviscon I could find hasn't really helped.

I feel a bit like I might need to call House (you know the crazy, genius doctor on TV) and get him to figure out what the heck is going on.

So the upshot of all this is...I'm not sure. It's not meant to be a pity Meg party, but I'm just being real here people. I'm not a patient patient, and I know (despite how much I take it for granted) how fab it feels when you are well and on top of your game, so that being really sub-par is pretty sucky. Although I know I have nothing to complain about in the scheme of things, I'm not living with a terminal illness or a lifelong debilitating medical condition like some people have to deal with, and for that I am truly grateful.

I do try to ensure that for the most part blog is about the positive - exploring the beauty in life, the things I'm loving, and turning our hand to crafting and making amongst the mayhem of life with 2 beautiful young boys. But it'd be a very one-sided affair if we never let you in to the other side of life. The side of life that does sometimes suck big fat kumaras and you just have to suck it up and get on with it.

Anyway, I hope to have some better news or feel better this week. And if you made it this far...thanks for listening!

All about my Mum: By Noah

As a bit of fun and since its Mothers Day, I thought I'd share Noah's take on his mum that we used for some extra writing homework this week.

And a very Happy Mothers Day to all you lovely ladies out there, I hope you can celebrate the great mums that you are!

Things I'm Loving 11.5.12

Muppets meets Angry Birds
This tickled me big time! You need to have played the game to really appreciate this though!

Te Papa Terrific
I love how every time we go to Te Papa, we find new things to do and see.

Remember these old school milk powder tins...I do..showing my age I know! My mum used these for storage for years after using the actual milk powder!

iPad meets Arcade
How dang cool is this! One of my workmates just bought this iCade accessory for his iPad. That is the original Pacman he is playing arcade style on the iPad. I would be HOPELESS at but he makes it look goooooood!

Jet and Cord McCoy
Love these guys. Love em. It's OK, it's nothing Mark doesn't know already, as I've said I'd marry either of these brothers...seriously. They came in a close second on The Amazing Race Season 16 and raced again on the All Stars season 18 going out in sixth place this time...boo hoo. I was so gunning for them to win.

Honestly from the way they were portrayed they seemed like two of the nicest guys you could ever meet in your life. They never had a bad word to say to each other, and compared to so many of the other teams who were constantly bitching and moaning at each other it was a real breath of fresh air. I've since been doing some reading up (thanks Google!) and discovered not surprisingly that they are Christian boys...which makes total sense to me! They raced with honour and integrity throughout, even when in the final leg of Season 16, the eventual winners played dirty and cut in front of them at the airport. I think I will find myself saying 'oh my gravy' (one of their favourite sayings) for some time to come.

Welly you're still the one
As much as I moan about you and your weather Welly, when you can put a show like this on for me, you're still the one!

What awesomeness have you found to love in your week this week?