Lots of Helpers

Our family's life in New Zealand

Boating the Ahaura

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The Sunday afternoon just before Christmas, the boys who were at church decided to boat down the Ahaura River from Jim’s Hut, just at the end of the Ahaura Gorge, to here, near the confluence of the Ahaura and the Grey Rivers. The girls decided to go along to drive the vehicle back, and do some hiking while they were in the area. So, they saw the boys off and then drove up the track a short way. They walked down another track to an old hut, and when they were coming back, some of the boys popped out of the bush! Just after launching the boat and kayaks, the barrel boat got swamped by big waves in the rapids. It sank–and the boys who were in it were glad to have life jackets on! After a brief conference, three boys decided to walk back to catch up with the girls and get a ride out to civilization, while the rest of the party continued down the river with the kayaks. (The boat has never been seen again. It had no flotation devices, and sank in a deep spot. James is unhappy that he lost his water bottle, which he had tied to the boat so he wouldn’t lose it in the river.) About five hours later, the kayakers reached Ahaura and demolished several large homemade pizzas!

Mr. Imagination ready for takeoff.

Little Miss

There is our last glimpse of the barrel boat!

Elijah

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Elijah turned 21 a few months ago, and also completed his floor-laying apprenticeship. We decided to have a party to celebrate, and Saturday night about 60 people gathered in our local park to spend the evening together. Here are the few pictures I took, mostly of where people took refuge during the brief rain. There were a number of little girls crowded into the back of Elijah’s ute, behind Simon and a couple of girls who were sitting on the tailgate.

I put together a slideshow of pictures of Elijah’s life. Enjoy!

Tramp in the Mountains

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The last two days of November and the first of December, Elijah took his two youngest brothers on a tramp in the mountains. I’m not going to add commentary because I don’t know where these pictures were taken, but I’ll add a story that Mr. Imagination wrote a few days later, at the end.

Another picture for Grandma! He thinks of you while he’s out in the wilderness.

OUR TRAMP

Last Saturday, two of my brothers, Elijah and Joe, and I went on a tramp. The first day, we started just on the Bell Hill road by Rotomanu. We tramped to the Jacko Flat hut, following the Crooked River, and then up to the Top Crooked Hut. We saw a lot of 1080 on the way. It was a fairly easy track, although since it was the first day I did get pretty sore. The river was really blue as we walked along. At the Top Crooked Hut, it was about as small as Orwell Creek usually is. We had a swim and then dinner. We had sausages and mashed potatoes. When Elijah cooked the sausages, he had a full pot of water and dropped the whole pack in. The pot was too full and water went all over the floor. We had to wipe it up with Joe’s socks. The meal was very good. Just as we were going to bed an older lady arrived, and spent the night with us there.

The next day, we climbed over the mountains up to Lake Morgan Hut. On the way there we saw a chamois and a lot of grasshoppers. Climbing up some mountain ranges, we got up to 1,400 meters. Since we were up on the tops, there weren’t any trees so the views were very good. There was lots of porcupine scrub and turpentine bush. Elijah looked at the map and decided we should start going down to the lake, but he had seen the map wrong and we accidentally went to the wrong set of valleys. After we figured out that it was the wrong one then we had to walk around to the next mountain range and there, we dropped down to Lake Morgan. After we got to the bottom of the valley by the lake we climbed down we saw a tarn with lots of tadpoles in it. We stopped by the Morgan River for lunch and then went around to Lake Morgan Hut. The hut didn’t have a fireplace, so that was quite annoying. We got there about 1:00 and had a swim. Then the rest of the afternoon we played card games and read magazines that were in the hut. We had some very nice rice risotto for dinner. We slept well that night.

On the third day, we had just walked out of the hut when a kea flew overhead and off into the distance. It was quite misty, but it cleared up pretty well. The mist was cool because we could see it blowing up past us as the wind cleared it. We followed the river and about halfway down the boulders got about as big as our guest cabin. We decided it was easier to bush bash than climb down the big rocks. I managed to destroy my pants falling down one rock, so that helped make the decision, too. When we got to the Cone Creek track we had lunch and then filtered some more water. We found a couple of dead birds going out, probably from 1080. We did not have time to stop and have a soak at the hot pools, so we decided we would do that next time. Where Cone Creek track joins up with Elizabeth Hut track Elijah let a friend know that we would be about two hours out by texting him with the InReach. We got out at 6:00 and were picked up by a friend. We got back to the car and drove home. It was a very fun tramp.

Book Review–What I Left for You

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About the Book:

Book: What I Left for You (Echoes of the Past Book Three)

Author: Liz Tolsma

Genre: Christian Fiction / Romance / Historical Fiction

Release date: December 1, 2024

A Family’s Ties Were Broken in Poland of 1939

1939
Helena Kostyszak is an oddity—an educated female ethnic minority lecturing at a university in Krakow at the outbreak of WWII. When the Germans close the university and force Jews into the ghetto, she spirits out a friend’s infant daughter and flees to her small village in the southern hills. Helena does everything in her power to protect her family, but it may not be enough. It will take all of her strength and God’s intervention for both of them to survive the war and the ethnic cleansing to come.

2023
Recently unengaged social worker McKenna Muir is dealt an awful blow when a two-year-old she’s been working with is murdered. It’s all too much to take, so her friend suggests she dive into her family’s past like she’s always wanted. Putting distance between herself and her problems might help her heal, so she and her friend head on Sabbatical to Poland. But what McKenna discovers about her family shocks everyone, including one long-lost family member.

My Thoughts:

I discovered Liz Tolsma’s writings a few years ago and quickly decided I liked her historical mysteries. Then, she started writing the Echoes of the Past series, with dual timelines—and I loved those! So, when I had the chance to read What I Left for You, I didn’t even stop to think, but requested it immediately.

Both timelines drew me in and kept my interest. Helena felt very real to me, and I loved her devotion to her closest friend and to her mother. Her journey was absolutely heartbreaking. In McKenna’s story, I was immediately drawn in by the stresses she was enduring. I loved the way her friend supported her. I also loved that this book was not a romance! There wasn’t even a hint of a new love interest till about 70% of the way through; the focus in this book was the journeys to freedom and healing that both Helena and McKenna traveled. 

My main quibble with What I Left You was the convenient coincidences that McKenna and her friend encountered during their trip to Poland. Their search flowed much more smoothly than it normally would in real life! I did love the way the story switched from one time line to the other at the perfect times to tell the story. There was one thing that confused me, relating to DNA testing, which actually turned out not to be a problem—but I had to go way back in the story to find the one line I missed on the first go through, which cleared up the mystery for me! 

I liked the spiritual journey that Helena traveled. She began the story with no idea of a personal relationship with God—and ended up learning about the possibility of that. Her faith ended up being passed along to her descendents. 

I enjoyed learning about the Lemko people of Eastern Europe. I had never heard of them before, but what an interesting group! I loved reading about the Polish countryside, as well. I would not rate What I Left You as highly as What I Promise You, my favorite in this series, but it is not far behind.

WARNINGS: Chapter 1: Someone dies. Chapter 2: Someone is forced to lie. Chapter 4: A baby is beaten to death. Chapter 5: “Dodging bloated bodies.” Chapter 7: Description of the baby’s death. Chapter 9: Woman thinks about the physical side of marriage, mention of the marriage bed. Chapter 13: “Murdering and arresting innocent men, women and children.” Chapter 14: Man eyes the bed he shares with his wife. Chapter 21: Smells of human excrement, blood and decay. Chapter 22: Man hit in the head with rifle, gunshots rang out. Chapter 26: Girl violated by prison guard. Chapter 29: Girl dies. Chapter 32: “Bloated bodies,” gee. 

I received a review copy of this book from the author, and these are my honest thoughts about it. Links may be affiliate links, which will benefit Esther’s website if purchases are made through them.

About the Author:

Liz Tolsma is the author of several WWII novels, romantic suspense novels, prairie romance novellas, and an Amish romance. She is a popular speaker and an editor and resides next to a Wisconsin farm field with her husband and their youngest daughter. Her son is a US Marine, and her oldest daughter is a college student. Liz enjoys reading, walking, working in her large perennial garden, kayaking, and camping.

More from Liz:

I stared at my computer screen in front of me. For years, I had been searching for my great-grandmother, Anna. I got no good information. Census records in the US weren’t helpful. Some listed her birthplace as Czechoslovakia, while others had it as Austria. I had heard before that she might have been born in Czechoslovakia before, but never Austria. There were no records that I had come across that listed the city or town where she was born.

Until that one day. While searching for my great-grandmother, I ran across a passport application recorded in Warsaw, Poland, for an Anna with the same last name, though spelled differently. Her birthday was listed as 1903, which matched the birth year I knew for my great-grandmother’s niece. As I read through the application, my heart was pounding. This Anna was born in the United States but went to Dubne, Poland, with her family in 1906. It was now 1923, and she wanted to return to the US, and she would be living with…

I started to cry when I saw who her sponsor was. My great-grandfather. The name and address were correct. There could be no doubt about it. It had taken me years, but I finally made the jump to Europe and discovered that my great-grandmother was not born in Czechoslovakia but in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Poland.

Of course, good little researcher that I am, I had to find out all I could about Dubne, the town they were from. That’s when I first came across the term Lemko. What on earth was that?

Lemkos are a Slavic people that settled in the Carpathian Mountains of Southern Poland, Northern Slovakia, and Western Ukraine. They are also known as Lemko Rusyns, Rusyns (especially those born in Slovakia, like my great-grandfather), and Carptho-Rusyns. The mountains kept the world at bay, and they developed their own language, customs, and form of Christianity. For the most part, they were very poor, many of them eking out a living from the rocky ground.

They lived in “black houses,” called that because the poorest people couldn’t afford to have a chimney built. The smoke from the cooking and heating fires stayed inside the house and covered the walls with black tar. If you look at the cemetery records from Dubne, you would be old if you lived into your fifties. Conditions were brutal.

The most the average Lemko could afford was one sheep or one pig. Since this was their most prized possession, they couldn’t take the chance of a wild animal or a neighbor taking it away, so it lived in the house with them.

With all of them. Up to eleven people would live in a two-room house. When I mentioned that in What I Left for You, my editor questioned if I had made a mistake. No, I didn’t. I have no idea how they fit all those people in there, but they did. As I was tracking one branch of our family tree, I kept coming up with people living in house 43. Over and over and over. They stuffed that house full. Grandparents, parents, and children all lived together. They may not have had much, but that forged the Lemkos into strong and resilient people.

I’m proud to be Lemko-Rusyn, and I’m thrilled to share this story with you. I infused Helena, the historical heroine, with as much of the Lemko spunk and spirit as I could. Last October, my daughter and I had the privilege to travel to Poland and Slovakia and see the Lemko homeland for ourselves. It helped me to write a better, richer story because I now understand where they came from and who they were. Enjoy Helena’s story and her journey during WWII and beyond. I hope you come to understand and appreciate the Lemko people as much as I have.

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Christmas 2024–Hokitka Gorge

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We had to wait a couple of days this year for our annual family Christmas excursion. Simon had to work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and it rained on Christmas Day anyway, so we waited until the 27th. We had decided to visit the Hokitika Gorge, which we had never been to. It was a bad time to go there, since it is the peak of tourist season and there were hundreds of people, but the scenery was amazing. First, here is a glimpse of what we enjoyed on our way to the gorge.

When we arrived, the first order of business was to eat lunch. Elijah grilled burgers and we enjoyed delicious sandwiches.

Then, we walked the gorge track. The water was incredibly blue! That is caused by minute bits of rock ground off the mountains by glaciers, which is suspended in the water and reflects the blue of the sky.

This little girl got carried the entire way by big brothers. She felt like a queen!

James couldn’t resist crawling through this culvert. It was a tight enough squeeze that he had to keep his arms out in front of his head.

Think she likes the service she receives?

After we finished walking around the gorge, we decided to find some water so those who wanted to could go swimming. We checked out a beach along the sea, but it was open to the sun and those of us who didn’t want to swim decided we wanted shade to sit in, so we found a way down to the Taramakau River. The bridge in the background of some of these pictures used to be a rail/road bridge (see this post), but a new bridge was built beside it about six years ago, for cars, so the original bridge is for trains only. Several of the children went swimming…

…while Simon collected logs for firewood and got his caveman fix by teaching Elijah how to break them up into the right size for a bonfire without using a hatchet. It was pretty funny to watch that process! (No one got hurt.)

They made a very satisfying fire that burned down into a nice bed of coals for roasting sausages and marshmallows. While the fire was burning down, James requested that Esther read aloud to us. She hadn’t brought the book she is reading, but found it in an online library and downloaded it so we could read the next chapter.

Our family Christmas outing was very satisfying! Simon said at the end of the day that it had been “epic”–his highest praise!

New in the Library! December 2024

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Back in January, I took advantage of Sonlight Curriculum’s annual clearance sale, and bought a number of books at 50% off. One that I considered buying but didn’t get to in time before someone else purchased the last one at that price was The Mozart Season. A few weeks later, someone here in New Zealand offered it for sale; she had accidentally bought two of them! She had just borrowed a stack of books from me, so I bought that one and she put it with my books, to send all at once when they were finished. It’s here now, and I’ve added it to my stack to read before putting it on the shelf–I have no idea what the story is like!

Just before that same person mailed our books back, she advertised a number of other books. One that caught my eye was William the Conqueror, so I asked her to send that one along, as well. Again, I have no idea what it is like, so it, too is on my TBR stack. I’m planning to do the Read Your Bookshelf Challenge again this year, and one of the prompts is “Royalty.” I hadn’t found a book yet for that prompt, so was delighted to find one I wanted to read about a king. (I decided that for this year’s challenge, I was going to try to find books for each month from my stack of ones I want to read before they go on the shelf–and I found one on that stack for each of the twelve prompts!)

One evening, a neighbor stopped Gayle and asked if we homeschool. When Gayle, wondering what this was about, answered that we do, the man said that he is the caretaker of the local area school (just behind our house). The teachers were in the process of doing a cleanout and had instructed him to burn piles of old, unwanted books, so he wondered if we wanted them. We took them, and I sorted through them. Two big boxes were old maths textbooks, multiple copies of each, which I am not interested in. Another box was other maths supplementary books, which I don’t need for the most part. There were also many reading and phonics and spelling books, but my last child is learning to read right now and I don’t need them. (I’m trying to give them away!) Then, there were stacks of dictionaries and thesauruses. We were delighted to find a thesaurus that is easier to use than our Roget’s, so we kept one of those, and a fascinating Reverse Dictionary. Esther flipped through that and found a page of French terms. She was quite amused by the definition I circled in this picture.

Another book I kept was this one full of brain teasers. I copied a page of it and, without telling anyone, taped it to the whiteboard in the kitchen. It quickly got attention, as various people sat down and worked out the problems. I plan to post more, at random times, for anyone who wants to work them out. It’s a fun family activity, as it turns out!

There were around 15 copies of each of these picture books, so I kept one of each. They are simple, but beautiful; they’ll make a good addition to our shelf of New Zealand picture books. If you live in New Zealand and want either of these, pay me the postage and I’ll send you a copy of each!

One evening, I noticed someone selling almost the complete set of the Anne of Green Gables books on a Facebook page. I knew Esther wanted them, so I showed her, and she bought them. She already had a copy of the one that was missing, the first book. It didn’t match these–but one of her brothers had one that did, so she swapped with him and now, much to her satisfaction, she has the whole set in print.

Mountain Climb

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Once a month, Simon has a three-day weekend off from work. On his weekend in November, he and some friends came up with the idea of climbing a mountain early in the morning to see the sun rise. They left here at 3:30 on the Saturday morning and drove about 20 minutes to a track that goes up into the Paparoa Mountains, a low range between us and the Tasman Sea. They were at the top in time for sunrise, but clouds came up with the sun and they didn’t see much of that. They had great fun, though, and the scenery they did get to enjoy was amazing! This is the town just below the mountain.

One of the boys found this bottle in a tree.

Elijah took this picture for Grandma, for obvious reasons.

Simon in silhouette.

The track goes to this group of cell towers, which are visible from our house if you know where to look.

They found some sort of vine that they could swing on. I enjoyed these video clips, so thought I’d share them.

November 2024 Photos

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One afternoon, Esther and Elijah walked around the block and took their little sisters, who rode their bicycles.

Esther watched this starling building a nest in the garage roof. She was amused by the size of its load! Apparently, it didn’t get much of that load to its destination.

Esther also took this picture of a sunset. We got some smoke from Australian bushfires, so that’s probably part of why the colors were so vivid.

Miss Joy is learning to read! That’s slightly bittersweet, because it means my baby is no longer a baby. I love watching her learn, though. I took this video sometime in November, when she had just started to read stories. She was delighted with her new skill and wanted Grandma to hear her.

I found the girls having a picnic in the garden one day.

Miss Joy wanted me to take a picture of her with foxgloves on her fingers and her crinkle-cutter in her hand!

The Garden in December

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We finally finished planting the garden–although, to be honest, that is a job that never really finishes, since I keep planting little bits throughout the year. The most of it is done, though, and to celebrate, and as a way of keeping a record, I took a video as I walked through. So, if you want to see what we’re doing right now, have a look!

October 2024 Photos

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Here are the rest of my pictures from October! I took this first picture one rainy day near the beginning of the month when we were in Greymouth. The annual Bookarama opened that day, and we were waiting in line when the doors opened. An hour and a half later we walked out with around 80 books between six of us, and went out to the breakwall to eat our lunch. The waves were quite impressive as they rolled in in front of us!

A picture of Miss Joy taking a picture!

This was our third lot of chicks for the year. For this hatch, I bought two dozen Barred Rock eggs, and then filled the incubator with about a dozen Black Orpington eggs from our pair of those chickens and a couple of dozen of our mongrels. During the night about three days before hatching, Gayle found the incubator unplugged! He quickly plugged it in again and within minutes it was back up to only about 5*C below what it should have been. We wondered if we would get any babies. The next day, we left for the weekend, and arrived home that Sunday afternoon to find no chicks yet, on the day they were due to hatch. We wondered…. and an hour or so later the first chick emerged! We ended up with 32 babies out of 39 or 40 that had candled fertile, and only lost 1 or 2 that died just before hatching–one of our best hatches yet! (Only one of the 13 Black Orpington eggs was fertile.)

I came into the kitchen one morning to find my monthly meal plan in tatters. It looked like a mouse had gotten it, but no mouse could have clung to the glass backsplash to nibble on that! Then, I saw a bit of snail poo behind it. A few days later, I found an enormous snail in the vicinity. The chickens enjoyed eating our culprit!

We spent several evenings in October observing the sky. We tried to find the comet that should have been visible, but couldn’t find it. There is a mountain range only a few miles to the west of us, behind which the sun sets early but the sky stays light for a long time. I took this picture of the moon one of those nights. We did get to see the International Space Station go over one night!

We did a couple of interesting demonstrations for science in October. One day, we made a scale model of the distances between the planets by marking them out on a roll of toilet paper. To see the whole distance, we took it outside so we could see the whole length at once.

Another day, we made a model of the relative sizes of the planets. Elijah was home that week, unable to work because he had bursitis in his knee, so I assigned him to help the girls make the clay balls and blow up the balloons to the proper sizes.

Sunday afternoon naps! Simon asleep on one couch, Elijah reading something…

…and James asleep on the couch on the other side of the room! This boy has two speeds: either full-steam ahead, or crashed.