Lots of Helpers

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NZ Filbruns

November

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Here I am again–no new posts for awhile!  So, you can enjoy a random sampling of photos from the past couple of weeks.

How do you like this for a place to do your math lesson?

Look at that tail wagging! We are enjoying salad every day.

Baby in the woodbox!

Playing with a birthday gift.

New Zealand road block–these two people sat here talking on the road by us for at least 15 minutes! Not much traffic on our road.

First you empty the cupboard…then you climb in!

Starting the moving process by sorting books–baby wants in on it, too.

Building a birthday gift: a model cathedral.

Ah hah! Now I can get Esther’s door open!See the trail of rose petals he left behind? He loves picking huge roses and bringing them in for us to smell.Camelia–the rest are just a sampling of the roses around our house.

Milking Time

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Every morning and evening, I go out and milk the cow.  It’s a great time to be outside (most of the time), and very peaceful.  Most of the time, I get to be by myself out there!  Right now, I’m milking along the roadside, because we have her grazing there. Here are a few little glimpses of milking time.

I get to enjoy these roses along the house as I walk out to milk.

Here she comes! My obedient cow comes when I call her.

I often get to see this duck and her 12 ducklings when I’m out to milk.

I get to watch these sheep and lambs across the road.

I can see these hills just past Cheviot from where I milk; the one with the road up it is the Camel’s Hump.

Ready to milk.

This beggar practically always joins me, rubbing around and asking for attention, waiting for his milk.

These two came out to see me, too.And the news of the week?  We have to move.  Our landlord’s son wants this house, so within 2-3 months we have to find somewhere else to live.

Kaikoura Peninsula

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We went to South Bay, the south side of the Kaikoura Peninsula, after leaving church yesterday.  We walked up the steep path to the top of the peninsula, and then Gayle offered to go back and drive around to the other end to pick us up if we wanted to walk across the top.  Sounded like fun to me, so we did that!  I had never been across the entire top; we’ve walked around at sea level twice.  It was a gorgeous day!  The sun shone part of the time, and part of the time clouds came over.  The colors were so vivid.  A sailboat left South Bay about the same time we did, and we watched it tacking around to the north side of the peninsula.  It arrived about the same time we did.

The sailboat leaving South Bay.Right after the carpark, we crossed this bridge along the edge of the bay.

Cabbage trees are in bloom!

New Zealand Flax is blooming, too.

Starting up the path up the cliff. These two went back for the van.See the sailboat?

Near the end–they came back to meet those of us who lagged behind. The sailboat entering the bay on the north side of the peninsula.

Haircut Night

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Saturday night I finally got around to doing haircuts–long overdue, for some of our fellows! Even with a fast, efficient set of clippers (bought when I was in America several months ago–we haven’t found a good set here yet), it takes awhile to cut seven heads of hair!  Yes, seven.  I got tired of hearing comments about putting ponytails in Baby’s hair, and having people make it into Mohawks with water, and people fussing at me about how messy his hair was.  So, I cut it.  I don’t like that first haircut.  He’s not a baby so much anymore!

This is why they thought he needed trimmed! After the big trim–he was severely traumatized for awhile by that experience–poor thing!

Seth didn’t mind; he’s used to it!

The pile we swept up at the end!

Butter

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It’s too windy to work outside this afternoon.  I tried to plant garden, but kept loosing my balance because the wind was blowing so hard!  So, I ended up in the house, not knowing what to do because my plans weren’t working out.  I know, that’s a weird situation for a mother of several to be in.  Yes, there are lots of things I should be doing, but when you have your mind fixed in one direction, and that direction changes, it takes awhile to redirect.  Anyway, I finally remembered that I needed to make butter.  Then, when I was most of the way through the process, I decided this might make a half-decent topic for a blog post, so you get pictures starting partway through.  I love that cow of ours–she gives us so much!

I started with all these jars full of cream. Sometime this morning or early afternoon I pulled them out of the fridge and put some yogurt in them, then left them on the table to warm up.

Step 1: Pour 4 cups of cream in the blender jar.

With our cream and my blender, I run it at 1 till the cream whips.

The cream whips so thickly that I have to break the airlock.

Whipped cream!

Then, I pulse it on and off for several minutes, till the butter starts forming. Otherwise, it will just airlock again.

Once the butter is separating, it won’t airlock anymore, so I run it on 3 for another minute or so, till the butter and buttermilk are separated.

I press the butter to one side and pour off the buttermilk, then scoop the butter out. Time elapsed since putting cream in the blender? About 2-3 minutes!

Time to wash the butter. If I have a smaller batch, I can use the butter paddle; with this size batch it’s easier to use my hands.

First, I press out all the buttermilk I can.

Then, run water in and work it around and through the butter (remember, oil and water don’t mix) to get the rest of the buttermilk rinsed out.

Good enough–this is the fourth rinse.

Add salt; I think I used about 2 Tablespoons here.

Work the salt through.

Put it in a container! The final results–a quart and a half of buttermilk to make into biscuits, scones, pancakes, etc, and about 5 pounds of delicious, cultured, Jersey butter!

And, one more reason to love the cow–the cheese! As you can see, it’s popular for snacks.

Conversations

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As a mother of seven, ranging in age from 1-15, I end up with quite an interesting range of conversations throughout a typical day.  I was working in the kitchen a few minutes ago, and burst out laughing as I thought about the last three conversations I had with my children, over the past 15-20 minutes.  First, I was sitting at the table, reading a lesson in a sourdough course I’m working through with Esther.  I am quite interested in using sourdough, so I decided it would be a good Home Ec project for her.  We are having fun reading it together, a lesson every few weeks, and trying out the recipes.  While we were doing that, the 4-year-old came in, holding something in his hand, saying, “It can stretch out!”  Turned out he had an earthworm, and was intrigued by how it stretched out longer.  He laid it on the table, and we watched it hitch itself along, and discussed it for a few minutes, and then I was able to persuade him to take it back outside to the dirt where it wanted to be.  Esther and I went on to discuss the sourdough artisan bread we were reading about, and then she went to work on a blog post and I went to work on straining broth off of beef bones.

The next thing I knew, she was telling me, “I need to hack into our printer!”
“What!??!” I said!  Well, she had written a post for her blog several days ago, and set it to publish tomorrow.  Today, she discovered that it had disappeared!  The only way she can get it back is if she hacks into the printer, because she printed a copy for her dad and I to proofread.  That’s what really struck me funny–earthworms to hacking a printer, in a few minutes!  Whether she can accomplish it or not, is another story–we’ll see.

And now, the two littlest boys just came through again, saying hi, and the 4-year-old says, “The sky is straight lines, like stripes!  Isn’t that neat?”  The only reason I haven’t had conversations, simultaneously, about cows and sheep and ride-on mowers and motorbikes and chain saws and Laura Ingalls Wilder and you name it is that the other boys are away with Daddy right now!  Sometimes I feel like my head is about to explode from having to carry on (intelligently) three or four wildly different conversations at once–but at the same time I really wouldn’t change anything.  This time of life is anything but boring!

Half Penny

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Our fourth boy, James, was walking across a muddy paddock one day last week when he looked down and saw a coin on top of the ground.  He brought it in the house to show me.  It was so corroded we couldn’t see what it was, so he dropped it in a cup of kombucha to try cleaning it up.  He’s changed the kombucha every day, and every day it has gotten a little cleaner.  This morning, he was looking at it and realized he could see words!  I looked closely, and after studying it awhile figured out that it was a half penny from 1915!  It has a picture of George V on one side, and a Greek god on the other.  The lettering around George V’s picture is Latin.  He was pretty tickled to have found something so old.  I thought it was fun to finally see a half penny–something I’ve heard of but never seen before.  It’s about the diameter of an American quarter, but half as thick.

To see a good picture of it, look here and here.

Family Photos

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Probably the last time we get a picture of the children in order of age and height, at the same time.It’s challenging, to say the least, to get a decent family photo.  We did accomplish it, though, a week ago–at least fairly decent!  We got individual pictures done a couple of weeks ago, too–see them in the side bar.

Orana Park

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Friday we needed to pick up 100 day-old chicks in Christchurch, from a hatchery farther south.  Since it was a birthday in our family, we decided to make it a family day and go to the zoo on the outskirts of Christchurch, Orana Wildlife Park.  We had never gone, because it is very expensive, but decided to splurge this once.  It turns out to be a very fun zoo to visit!  It isn’t very big; nothing compared to some zoos we’ve been in in America as far as number of animals; but the experience was special.  They have feedings scheduled through the afternoon, and organized quite well so you go from one species to another, around the zoo.  For an extra $35 per person, we could have ridden in the truck from which they feed the lions!  We did get to feed the giraffes; that was free, and quite fun.  An older man, a volunteer, went around the route, and he seemed to really enjoy telling us more about the animals and the feeding.  One really good thing about this is how active the animals are, compared to most zoos.  For example, the lions–practically every zoo I’ve been to before, the lions just laid around, but here, they were running, and jumping.

I love otters!

The playground was a big hit. Would you like to be that close to lions?

Anyone who wanted to could feed the giraffes. We couldn’t get up close to the rhinos, because the male was charging even the keepers who were feeding them.

Checking out the next stop!

September

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Whew!  Another month has gone by, in a hurry!  It’s already been two weeks since I posted.  Here are a few pictures, just to give you a tiny glimpse into our lives.

Nearly the last of the old harvest–beets, carrots, and a few leeks.

I finished harvesting everything except the leeks from last year’s garden, and this boy helped me bring the harvest in.Busy, busy around here!

This little boy had a birthday! He was showered with gifts, and of course loved the attention!

Off they go on a bike ride! The four-year-old just learned to ride with training wheels.

A few of the 28 chicks we’ve hatched out over the past week or so.