My Perfect Weekend: Milly Mailo

Milly Mailo owns and runs The Slow, a natural facial and beauty business homed in Whanganui centre's Treasury building. Photo / Bevan Conley

Each week a member of the Whanganui community tells us what their perfect weekend in the region would be. This week Emma Bernard talks to Milly Mailo, owner and senior therapist at The Slow, a natural facial and beauty business homed in The Treasury building.

Where do we begin? I have a two-and-a-half-year-old, so it would have to incorporate parenting.

We normally pop down to the river trader market and get some fresh bread from SourBros, or some breakfast from Bestowed Kai.

My mum lives like three streets away and she comes to the market with us too.

I also often try to pick up some fresh flowers from the market that we can have at home.

Then we often either have coffee and pastries at The Burrow or Article, depending on if I have the pram or not.

If it's nice weather we then go for a little walk down by the river or walk the bridges.

On a Saturday afternoon sometimes we go to Porridge Watson and watch the family band play, it's great family vibes and our neighbour plays in that band so we go to support him.

We live in Castlecliff so on a Sunday morning we rug up and go for a big walk down the beach. Our 2-year-old loves the beach.

Then we will come home and make nice food with our yummy bread from the markets, my favourite is avocado, chilli flakes, fresh basil and some salt and pepper. So good.

In summer on Sundays, we pack a picnic and spend the whole day at the beach.

Pretty much everything is closed on Sunday so there are not many places you can go. I like it that way though.

We used to live in Auckland and spend so much disposable income on stuff we didn't need and eating out.

It would be all that kind of stuff all weekend long.

But down here our priorities shifted. We managed to buy a house, so we put money back into the house, do renovations or just enjoy spending time in it rather than going out and about.

We've been doing lots of renovations lately at the weekend too.

If it's not a windy day we love to have a fire pit in our backyard and sit around with red wine and snacks.