Just thought I'd say..

I hope that if anyone is reading this, that you find these blog posts helpful, especially if you're going through a similar situation with a long distance relationship or if this even helps with situations in your relationships in general. I'm going through this completely naive, I have not done any of this before and this is my first long term relationship of over 1 year, so I am not an expert in relationship advice, but I hope that through my experiences, I can help someone. 

I'm not trying to be an expert at all either and give out advice that people have to follow. I don't know that what I say on here is even right. But this is a place where I can express my thoughts and feelings and share my experiences and learnings with anyone who comes across my blog.. I am most likely going to make mistakes and write things that I may one day read back on and think.. Well that wasn't right. But, in the moment, it works and it's how I feel, so I'm going to do what I know best and put pen to paper.. Or fingers to a keyboard.. And express myself. I don't want this to just be a sappy blog all about my boyfriend being away, I do want to write about other things, however, at the moment this is what I feel passionate about expressing.

Aside from all of that, the best piece of advice I can give in which I have learnt so far is to learn to be open, trusting and look for the good things in the relationship and the person you're dating. If you continually look for the bad things that aren't going your way, that's all you'll ever see and you'll miss all of the great things that can be so small, yet so significant.

Each day is new day, don't hold grudges and remember that we are all different, no one will be the same as you and see things the way you do. But that can be so great, in opening your eyes to a whole new world and a whole new perspective. Embrace it and enjoy it. :)

Long distance relationship | Life is a rollercoaster.

I've come up again on the rollercoaster and through conversation with my dearest mum - my bestie, I've come to realise that although this is a really difficult thing, it could also be something really good. I have known all through our realtionship that this is something Alex has desired to do and he wants to fulfill that dream before settling down. I would never stop him, despite my best efforts to try and get him to stay - as any girlfriend would I'm sure.. - I know this is something he hasn't just thought of lightly and he's not just up and leaving me out of the blue. I have to trust and go with the flow, it could make us even stronger and show our true love for each other, or it could show us something that may not have worked out in the future anyway. I need to make sure I'm prepared and ready to handle whatever happens. But for now, I just need to stick to being open hearted, open minded, trusting and strong. I am a mature adult and I know that we can make this work, despite my perfectly normal worries. I also need to make sure that as much as I want Alex to keep me in the loop with everything, I need him to know how important it is that he knows how I'm feeling at times, when I have my ups and downs and that he needs to be supportive to me as well.

A friend passed this scripture onto me;

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5, 6 NIV)

"Lord, I give this situation to you, you take control of it and let your will be done, I choose to trust in you. In Jesus name, Amen."

Long distance relationship | My Boyfriend wants to live overseas

My bf wants to live overseas for a year. I can't go, due to my own commitments with work and life.

He hasn't even left yet and this is already the hardest thing. I am on a roller coaster, I want to be happy for him and proud of him and support him, but on the other hand I don't want him to go at all, most of the time I don't want to hear about his plans but at the same time I do. So I sit, listen, grin and bare it. I have my own desires to go overseas, but only ever for holidays, not to live. Being a Christian means I can't live with my boyfriend until we are married and I have a job which if I left I wouldn't be able to get back or anything similar as it is such a rare yet sought after thing. I want to try and move up in my job and earn money before settling down. I can visit him maybe once? With the expense of travel and timings of holidays off. 

He had a job interview via skype last night and ofcourse I wanted to hear all about it, but hearing it made everything sink in and made me cry a little at the reality of the person I love leaving. Constantly I have thoughts and worries running through my head, wondering if he doesn't love me and that's why he can so easily leave, or what if he meets another girl over there and falls in love, leaving me broken hearted. My thoughts then go onto thinking, no we can do this, we can keep in contact easily, he seems brave enough to do it, I'm sure it will be fine. My Christian thoughts come out and say God is bigger than all of this, he is in complete control and has my best interests at heart and so I am constantly praying over the whole situation.

I wonder if the reason why I'm so strung up about this is because I'm not in control of  anything when I like to be, I just have to sit back and let everything happen right in front of me not being able to say or do anything to change the circumstances. Maybe this is a learning curve for me to trust. To trust in The Lord and know that everything will be alright and I don't need to carry these burdens. Or maybe these are normal emotions that everyone feels when they have to face this sort of situation. Writing all of his down certainly helps, so I may be spilling my heart out on my blog quite a bit over the year he is gone. It feels selfish for me to pray that he doesn't go, so I don't, but I continually pray that the Lords Will be upon this whole situation and that we both have help and guidance in being ok with whatever situation happens.

I just wish I could have answers or some knowing that everything is going to be fine, a knowing of what's ahead so I can be prepared. Unfortunately, life isn't like that..

About me ~ Vicki Bennett~

So I thought I'd write a little about me. I wasn't quite sure how to do this, whether I write it paragraph style or just answer questions. I had a little read through of other blogs and found that reading a whole block about someone you don't really know, can be rather  tedious.. Plus I find answering random questions a lot more fun. So, that said, I thought I'd do a basic little intro of myself and then get onto answering some questions. :) enjoy!

As you know, my name is Vicki, I am 25 and a qualified New Zealand Sign Language Interpreter.

I have grown up in little ol New Zealand and have lived in Auckland all my life.

The things I love most are my amazing family - my parents and my brothers, my encouraging and supportive friends, my boyfriend Alex and my 2 little dogs. 

I love quad bike riding, hanging out at the beach, travelling and much much more, which I'm sure you'll find out soon enough ;)

Questions:

1. What’s your favourite drink? I would definitely have to say tea! I am a massive tea addict.. Oops.

2. What would you name your children? I have loved the name Zoe for a very long time, I recently heard the name Zoella and thought that was such a gorgeous variation to the name, so possibly Zoe/Zoella for a girl.

For a boy, this is tough.. I love the name Noah at the moment..I change my mind so often though, so I have no idea what my children's names will end up being!

3. Do you participate in any sports? Currently I do figure skating (on ice) I love it! I feel so free and adventurous. Throughout my life I have been involved in a lot of various sports and activities, such as gymnastics (my ultimate fav!!) and all kinds of difference dance styles, ballet, hip hop, salsa. I have so much fun.

4. Favourite Animal? Rabbits! I am absolutely crazy about them!! I have had 2 bunnies which I absolutely adored. I will post a photo of them. I am a huuuge animal lover, especially anything cute and little and teacup sized ;) (one of our dogs is a miniature daschund)

This is my rabbit Peter. The sweetest pet ever. <3

5. Favourite perfume?i am a perfume fanatic, I try to change it every day, but currently I am loving Taylor Swift Wonderstruck and Brittany spears Midnight fantasy. I may do a review of my perfumes in another blog post.

6. Have you graduated High School? Yep, I left school in 2006! Feels so long ago. Although it had it's ups and downs, I really do miss it now and would love to go back and do it all again, possibly changing.. Or shall we say, improving.. a few things. ;)

7. Have you been out of the Country? I sure have! I love traveling! I have been to many different parts of Australia, Thailand and Singapore. This year I hope to visit the U.K and the US

8. Do you speak any other Languages? I do! I know Sign Language - only the New Zealand one, it is different in each country, but England and Australia a fairly similar to NZ. This year I would like to try and learn French or German.

9. Favourite Movie? I loooove the old classics such as Dirty Dancing (my absolute all time fav!) The Notebook, Pretty Woman. The Holiday. Probably the most recent movie I can think of that I really liked was The Vow, but there are so many I enjoy watching it is hard to choose. So I will stick to the old ones that I could just watch over and over.

10. Favourite Tv show? I'm not a huuuge tv viewer, I'm one of those that gets the whole series and then watches them. Ever since I was little though, I have been a devoted viewer of Home and Away (an Australian soap), I also love Friends, Suits and Switched and Birth.

11. How tall are you? I'm a teeny little thing of 5'1! I like to THINK I taller though and take on anyone who try's to be cheeky about it :P

So there you go! Just a little (ok kind of looks like a lot..) about me! Feel free to ask me any other questions and I will be glad to answer :)

Bye for now! xx

Blogging *ahem...*

I'm really terrible at this blogging business aren't I.. I think I'm going to need to come up with some pre planned ideas to get myself really into it and possibly start making more of an effort to document  and upload my more interesting outings! The more I think about them, the more I realised I could have blogged. Oh well, maybe from now I will start to make more of an effort.. Or atleast try! :)

Celebrating the New Year.

(I have to apologise for this post being soo so late, I had some issues getting the photos onto it and finally found the iPad app which made everything a lot easier.. So here you go! Enjoy!)

This year for New Years I got to go on a trip to Wellington with my boyfriend. It was decided to be just a nice relaxed low key New Years, I'm not into drinking or partying much and Alex just wanted to enjoy his time off work and be together, as we had to spend christmas apart. So we decided to go on a mini road trip. We couldn't find anywhere we liked to go camping, so Alex came up with the idea of going to Wellington and then catching the kiwi rail train home. The weekend turned out to be so amazing. Just the 2 of us, no plans, no stress, it was great. 

Wellington doesn't have a great deal to offer tourism wise so we didn't have the pressure of using up all of our time to see and do everything and the bad weather we had forced us to stay in doors and just enjoy each other's company which I think was the greatest part of the weekend. Alex and I get along so well and I never feel bored around him even if we are in complete silence, it's comfortable and that's one thing I love about him.


Our first day in wellington was the day where did most of the sight seeing, we couldn't check in to our hotel until 2pm but we had a very early flight, so once we landed in Welli we dropped of our bags at the hotel and went off exploring. 

First off, we got breakfast. I think we had hunted through just about every cafe on the street before finally settling for this one. The pancakes are what sells Alex to any breakfast place. I decided to get the pancakes aswell.

That's them in the picture below..

Needless to say.. It was like eating an entire cake. It was huge! Neither of us even made it to half way through!

After the pancake-cake we went and hunted around Wellington. 

Wellington is known as the city of art, so scattered all around the city are all sorts of sculptures and pieces of art. Alex and I took quite a liking to these and used them to do all sorts of silly poses, it was really quite fun and I highly recommend it ;)

Next we had a look around Te Papa Museum. To be honest I didn't find it to be all that interesting, unless I was in the wrong place.. there wasn't much at all to look at..

With this being New Years Eve, we stayed up late to celebrate, when it got closer to the countdown we went out down the Main Street of Wellington, Courtenay place, we walked the entire street before settling on a club that we liked the look of and we went in, had a drink (non alcoholic for me ofcourse!), had a dance together and did the big ol countdown and had the traditional New Years kiss (my first might I add hehe ) with it being summer in NZ it was rather hot in the club, so we headed back to the hotel not long after midnight.

We didn't do too much over the next couple of days, as the weather wasn't very inviting! :(
So we hung out at the hotel together and went out to watch a movie. 

When the weather did clear up we went on the cable car up to the botanical gardens..

Where we took more photos with lots more silly poses. :) we also had a quick look at the parliament buildings before doing some shopping and then headed back to the hotel for a much needed rest.

The next day was the day this whole trip had been planned for. The KiwiRail train!

This took us from Wellington back home to Auckland and was a glorious 11 hour trip.
New Zealand truly is a beautiful place, I loved every minute of it. All the green hillsides, farms, farm animals. 

There were some stunning viaducts along the way with beautiful rivers, bridges, cliff edges. 

Onboard the train there is a cafe and an open carriage which I think made the whole experience a lot more pleasant. It was great being able to get up and move around as much as we wanted and get some fresh air on the open carriage, we also took our own food on the train and made our own lunches right at our seats. Bliss.

So to wrap it all up, this was an amazing weekend. I loved every minute of it and would gladly do it again. I highly recommend the train trip to everyone, keeping in mind the length if time you will be on the train, if you can handle that you will certainly have an amazing time.

Well that was a rather lengthy blog post!... And a late one considering New Years was like..a month ago.. But hey better late than never right!...right?

Ok ta ta for now! xx

2014

Hi! Welcome! :)

So this is my very first blog. I'm not quite sure if it's going to have a true theme and be about anything specific yet.. I don't even know if anyone else will even read this blog! But I pretty much just wanted to take the plunge and get my first post up. If you are reading this, thanks for stopping by! I hope you find something somewhere along my journey that you will enjoy. My main purpose for starting a blog is so that I have somewhere to publish things. Whether that is photos or little snippets of my day/week/month that I would like to remember and look back on.

This year I want to get more into my interests, whether that is actually learning them or to just generally do more of it.
So far on my list is to learn more about photography..
My mum is - among many many other things - a really great photographer, so I hope to learn from her expertise this year and learn how to properly use my camera and all it's settings. I have a canon S100.

Next on my list is to learn another language. I already know New Zealand Sign Language fluently so adding a spoken language might also be useful and interesting. My boyfriend is learning German, as he plans to stay in Germany for a year, so I figured it would be cool to learn it along side him.
So far I have started by using the app duolingo and find it quite fun.

Another on my list is to start a blog..as you can see I am doing fairly well with my list! The real challenge will be to keep it all going!

I guess that's all for now. I will be back later with more posts possibly an about me post. We shall see!

Bye for now! xx