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She’s Here!

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Yes, we have a girl! After six boys in a row, it’s pretty special to have another girl. She arrived last Wednesday evening after a long hard labor. We’ve been thoroughly enjoying having another baby in the house. Everyone wants to hold her as much as possible; she’s hardly been laid down by herself yet for more than a few minutes at a time. I have to make the decision, multiple times a day, as to who gets to hold her. We’re also enjoying having pink clothes in the house; Gayle commented the other day, after hanging out the laundry, how fun it is to hang little girl things! So far, she hasn’t worn very many pink things, because we didn’t have them, but yesterday and today we were given quite a few so she’ll be looking even more girly now.

We don’t have very many pictures yet; we’re enjoying her too much, I guess, to take them. Here are the best of what we do have, though, and I suspect there will be many more coming later!

She’s spending a lot of time sleeping still, although it seems like in the morning she’ll spend a few hours awake and happy. She’s sleeping well at night; last night she slept five hours straight! What a blessing she is.

December Pictures

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Yes, I’m a bit late, but here are some more pictures from December. And, by the way, we are still waiting for baby to arrive. It’s due in a couple more days, but I won’t be surprised if it’s late—we’ll see! We’re pretty anxious to meet this little one and see who he/she is!

The day after Grandma left, the two littlest boys decided to lay in her bed and study a leaflet we got at Willowbank.

We cleaned the garage out one day. I finally gave the permission the boys had been waiting for since we moved: I let them haul out and burn a lot of boxes! First they loaded ALL of them onto the wheelbarrow Simon got free at the dump (he just had to buy a new tube for the tire and had a good tool!).

Seth’s birthday landed on Sunday this year, and he wanted to walk over the Kaikoura Peninsula. Gayle took all the children across, while I drove around to the other side. Two of the boys ran the whole way, so had to wait a long time, and one of them was so bored that I handed him my camera and told him to take some pictures.

We had three little turkeys in the house for a few weeks. They were rather fun to watch! Some nights, their owner, Simon, would go around catching moths for them to eat. That was pretty hilarious to watch, as at the time, the moths were bigger than the turkey’s heads! After awhile, it was time to put them outside. They are thriving in a small pen now. We let them free-range until they ate all the leaves off my pepper plants one day.

One sunny warm day I got all the newborn clothes washed and hung out. So fun!

Just for fun, a couple of random shots of some of our critters—the steers and the ducks.

On Christmas Eve, the local Anglican church always has a special service for the children. They are supposed to dress in Nativity-scene costumes and sort of act out the story as it is read. Our boys were asked to be Joseph and the wise men, and one ended up being Herod when the boy who had that role backed out. We still had enough wise men, as the two littlest boys decided at the last minute they wanted to be kings, too! Esther created the costumes, and each boy designed and made his own crown, except the two littlest.

This has been a common scene this summer. I have had the boys spend half an hour a day in the garden pulling weeds, and they are doing well at keeping the weeds under control. One of the days Gayle had off work over Christmas he joined them; they were doing the job before breakfast, before the day got hot. I’ll do another post soon to show the garden. It is gorgeous this year!

One afternoon, Nathan wanted to take a picture of a spider in his room. He couldn’t quite get a picture of it, but played with the camera for awhile anyway!

New Year’s Day Harvest

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First, I want to wish all of you a wonderful 2015! We’ve had a lovely New Year’s Day today. It’s a lot cooler than yesterday, which I appreciate, but sunny and beautiful. I went out to the garden this morning and found a lot of things ready to pick. We are eating well these days!This afternoon, I went to the garage to get something, and made a side trip to check on the barrel of apple cider vinegar I’ve been brewing since last March. One of the boys had gotten a small cup of it this morning, and it tasted just slightly weaker than the double-strength vinegar we usually buy from a stockfeeds store. He thought there was a scoby in it (like kombucha). I looked, and sure enough there was a huge “mother” floating  on top!

That was exciting. There were also a lot of fruit flies in it, so I decided it was time to strain and bottle all of it. We ended up with 21 liters, just over 5 gallons, for the price of a rubbish bin (maybe $15). The apples were free from the roadside, and the only other ingredient was water. To buy that much vinegar at the stockfeeds shop costs about $80. I’m pleased with this experiment!

I put the “mother” in a jar to save till I start the next batch, so hopefully it will work even faster than this batch. Sure looks ugly! It’s kind of rubbery, a lot like a kombucha scoby.

Esther wanted to see what the cows would do with the vinegary apples, so she dumped them out in the paddock. They wanted to eat them, but the acid was apparently kind of hard for them to handle. They keep coming back for more, though!

Motel Etiquette

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Our daughter works at a motel around the corner from us, cleaning for a few hours a day, two to four days a week. One evening this week, she commented that one room, occupied by one man, was a lot messier than another room, which had been occupied by a couple and their 10-month-old baby. That prompted a question from me as to how you should leave a motel room in order to make it easiest for the cleaners. I’ve stayed so few times in a motel in my life that I really have no clue! She had several tips, and I found the conversation so interesting I decided to write them down.

One pretty obvious thing you should do is to strip the beds of all bedding you’ve used. If you make the bed, it is hard for them to know what has been used and what hasn’t; if you take off the sheets and pillowcases you used, they know exactly what needs to be washed and it saves a lot of time.

If you stay in a room with a kitchen, which all motel rooms in New Zealand seem to have, wash the dishes you used—but leave them on the counter. Otherwise, the cleaner has to sort through the cupboard and determine what needs washed and what is all right. If you leave them on the counter, it’s obvious.

Of course, put your trash in the trash can—and it helps the cleaner if you knot the bag so all they have to do is pull it out. Check through the room for any personal belongings you might be missing, and don’t forget the fridge! One day recently, they found a refrigerator full of food that someone forgot to take along.

And one final tip—make a pile of all the towels and washcloths you used. If there are some you didn’t use, put them in a neat pile on the bed you didn’t use, or somewhere else clean—not on the floor! I don’t know about other motels, but of the three in Cheviot, the other two allow only 30 minutes to completely clean a room. Anything that you can do to help the cleaners is good! I guess this would fall under the category of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

November Pictures

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Here are the last few pictures from November that haven’t made it into other posts.

My wonderful mother, several days after she arrived here. We sure enjoyed her time here, and everyone was sad when she left.

I think this is the same nest that I had a picture of recently, with the eggs in it. How ugly those babies are!

These babies are a bit cuter! The ducklings are all Indian Runners. The picture in the middle is a turkey. Our second son has the ducks and a pair of turkeys. He put some of each kind of egg under a hen, so the turkey hatched with the ducklings. For several days, until two more turkeys hatched, he thought he was a duckling—see how he’s wading in his water! The ducklings love water from day one; they take baths frequently. It is quite a challenge to keep their water dish full, and their bedding halfway dry. We were all glad when they could be moved out to the chicken coop.

We went to Gore Bay the last week Mom was here. I think it had been a year or so since we had gone out there. The boys loved playing in the water!

Near the end of Mom’s stay, we celebrated American Thanksgiving Day. We made a Thanksgiving dinner for our evening meal, and invited some local friends to enjoy it with us. We roasted a large chicken, made mashed potatoes and gravy, and stuffing, corn, and a big salad (fresh from the garden—not exactly normal in America this time of year!) and some cranberry sauce with a package of frozen cranberries I had been able to find awhile back. For dessert I made a pumpkin custard, and Mom and one of the boys made lemon meringue pies.  I intended to get a few more pictures, but I guess I’m not a real good blogger—this is the only one I remembered to take!

 

Last Day With Grandma

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No one wanted to go to Christchurch the last day of November. Going to Christchurch meant dropping Grandma off at the airport, and we just weren’t ready for that! The tickets said we had to take her there that day, though, so we did it. We went to church in Waikari that morning, since it is on the way to town. Going between Waikari and the highway, we crossed Weka Pass, which is a low pass through a range of hills. There are some spectacular rock formations in that pass! The last one is called Frog Rock.

Since we had about three hours in town before having to be at the airport, we went to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, a small zoo. Before entering, we were taking a picture of the children in front of this small building, and a bus driver who was waiting nearly came up and offered to take a picture of all of us! We greatly appreciated it; he said he does it all the time.

There are some beautiful spots along the trail that winds through the park.

See the black swan under the branches?

One special extra we had at Willowbank was when we happened upon a group of keepers releasing three emus into an enclosure. They had just gotten them and were opening the crate when we arrived on the scene. It was pretty funny to see those heads popping up over the edge of the crate, then hiding again. Once the door was open and the keepers were all out of the enclosure, it took a long time for the emus to get up the courage to actually leave the crate that had been their home for three days! We stayed to see one bounce out, but after 10 minutes or so moved on and left the 10 or so keepers to keep watch! This was obviously the event of the day at Willowbank!

New Clothes!

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When Mom came, she brought with her a shirt for each of the boys and a dress for Esther, all of which one of my sisters had sewed. She has talent, I would say! Everyone was thrilled with their new clothing, and it has been so wonderful to have NICE shirts for the boys each Sunday since then. And just to have new clothes, not secondhand or even hand-me-downs—this is probably the first time in their lives for some of these boys. Here are the pictures I took to send my sister, so she could see the fruits of her labors. The children are in order of age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, one of the whole group.

Tonight’s Field Trip

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We had an impromptu field trip this evening. We had just finished supper when we heard a helicopter quite close. A couple of children who were outside came in shouting that the Westpac Helicopter, the medical transport helicopter, was circling us, and then it obviously landed across the road in the rugby field. There is a thick hedge between us and the field, so everyone immediately took off running to see what they could see. I followed more slowly a little later, and found a gate to go through to where I could see. Gayle and the children stayed, beside the road, to watch until the helicopter took off; I just stayed a few minutes then came back. We don’t know what was wrong, but they said it looked like someone was injured. They were being transported to Christchurch.

Late October Pictures

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Yes, I’m behind. I should make a list of things that ought to be caught up before the baby arrives. Anyway, here are a few last pictures from October that I liked, that never got posted.

Several of the boys have been finding bird’s nests this year. This was one of the first to be discovered.

 

When you want to re-hang a gate that got crushed by a tree, you have to straighten it out first. Gayle and the boys spent an hour or two, using both vehicles, to try to get it straight. They still have to do a bit of welding, but it should be usable when they are finished.

 

Esther did a little photo-shoot with the two youngest one day. I love the expressions on their faces!

Shantytown and Arthur’s Pass

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The final day of our trip to the West Coast, we stopped at Shantytown, a historic village, for several hours. I didn’t take many pictures there, because I had gotten to the point where I mainly needed to sit. Here are a few, though. One of the first things we did was to ride the steam train. They take you on about a 20-minute ride, back into the bush, then back. Most people got off on the way back at the restored sawmill, then toured the gold-mining area. I opted to go back to the village where I could sit and wait.

 

This enormous stump was at the end of the line—apparently a sample of what they logged out of the area 100 years or more ago.

Esther got this shot of our youngest at the sawmill.

While I was waiting, I amused myself watching Oriental (probably Japanese) tourists taking picture after picture of each other and themselves, and watching this weka go in and out of building after building.

We also did the touristy kind of things—posing the boys in a stagecoach and playing around at the jail. The boys shoved their daddy into the jail—but a couple of them got locked in with him! Right to left, this is Seth, James, Nathan, Simon, Elijah, and Joseph.

This is Seth, Nathan, and Elijah, with Joseph just visible inside the jail to the left.The two youngest enjoyed this play fire engine!And then, we were on the road again! We had originally planned to camp in the mountains that night and arrive home the next day, but the weather was cold and damp and we decided to push on for home. Towing a camper up Arthur’s Pass is a slightly risky proposition, with a 16% grade for several miles, but we made it. The van did heat up (we have some kind of radiator problem at the moment), so we stopped at an overlook at the top to cool off. That afforded quite a view of the Otira Viaduct, which we had just crossed.

This structure allows a waterfall to cross the road, just below the Viaduct.

This is the road we were to take next, going east across the Pass.

There were a lot of keas at the overlook. They are a wild mountain parrot, but not afraid of anything—and they love to eat rubber and plastic! We had to ward them off the open windows of the van so they wouldn’t eat the weatherstripping, but they did manage to eat part of the skylight of the camper. Naughty birds!

And then, we were over the Pass and on the dry side of the island. The scenery on this side is much different! This top picture is Castle Hill. We had hoped to stop there, but it was getting too late.

And, one more picture from the West Coast that I didn’t get stuck in anywhere else. As we drove the highway along the coast south of Hokitika, I was amazed at the trees. It was so obvious that the prevailing wind is from the sea!

And speaking of wind, we arrived home to find damage from strong winds while we were gone. The chimney above the kitchen had fallen on the roof, and broken the light directly below it, and a row of willow trees lost their tops. One tree fell on this shed. The fellows spent the day after we got home fixing broken things and cutting wood.