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Our Week

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This has been a pretty normal week–lots of school and other real life, too.

Baby wants more kombucha!

Baby loves his daddy! These Usborne puzzle books have been very popular this week.

Part of school every day–the most popular part–is practicing math facts with a game on the computer. I forgot to include these two pictures last week! Our hedge was trimmed.

The children have been bringing in heaps of these field mushrooms. They are delicious!

The hills to the north-west of us.

We see a lot of these cows in the paddock next to the house.

Baby fell against the wood stove Sunday night. Ouch!

After trying in vain to get into this laundry basket, and squealing in frustration, he picked it up and brought it to me. I put him in–and he was delighted!We enjoyed the sight of snow blowing off the tops of the mountains north of Kaikoura as we drove to church this morning. Finally, here are some of the pictures Esther took when we stopped at the beach on the way home this afternoon.  One boy was moving so fast all the pictures of him turned out blurry!

Messy Faces!

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Baby showed up at the door this afternoon, in the tow of Big Brother who was saying, “Be prepared!”  It took awhile to figure out what he got into, but eventually we found that he had been playing with a bucket of mud, and obviously decided to paint his face!  He enjoyed the clean-up, once I quit turning him upside down to wash his hair. Tonight, he painted himself again.  This time, it was easier to clean up!

I haven’t been doing well at keeping this blog up, so I’ll just put in some more miscellaneous pictures from the past week or so.  Maybe I’ll aim to do that in the future–just go through the memory card once a week or so and put up pictures of the highlights of the week.

Our landlord put 180 dry dairy cows into the paddock next to our house over the past week. He keeps them here for the winter to allow their home farm to rest. They arrived in big double-decker stock trucks.

The paddock he put them in is planted in kale, which is 4-5 feet high! Notice how the cows are dwarfed by it!

This is the first section, after 24 hours of grazing by about 120 cows. By the next day, nothing was left except short stubs of stems.

This enormous spider was on a cupboard in the laundry room one night when I was putting laundry in the washer! It was 1 1/2 inches long.

Simon invented a stir-fry one evening, with goat meat, onions, mushrooms, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and an egg. It was delicious!

At the same time, Elijah was mixing up apricot-chocolate chip muffins, and Seth was making coconut bread, which I didn’t manage to get a picture of before it disappeared. Both were scrumptious!  The kitchen was quite the busy place that evening, as all three boys were cooking while I was trying to fix supper.  Also during that time, a friend dropped off my cell phone which had gotten left somewhere, and someone else came for milk!

Beetroot

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I have about a dozen empty jars left, of varying sizes, so I decided to start processing the beetroot.  I knew they were getting rather large, so I sent Seth out to pull four of them.  Well, “rather large” turned out to be an understatement!  This is the biggest: all 10 pounds of it!
All four together filled my 20-quart stock pot to the brim.  I think we’ll have enough beetroot this year!  How many quarts do you suppose I’ll end up with from these four beets?

Crooked Grin

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A few days ago, Baby invented the funniest crooked grin.  It cracks me up every time I see it!

This grin is also typical–especially when he’s coming for a hug!

Guess who liked the pancakes for breakfast!

Pretty pleased with himself–he found a whole roll of fruit leather that someone left on the table.

The two oldest boys were wrestling. They seemed pretty evenly matched!

Getting Back to Normal

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I arrived home Sunday afternoon with the four children who went with me to America, and it is so good to be back!  I don’t know if I’ll get around to posting any pictures of the trip or not; I haven’t even looked at them yet.  Just to let you know we’re all still alive and well, here are a few pictures from this week.  Baby got sick on the way home; as we crossed the equator, he started vomiting.  Two days later he finally got well, just in time for all the rest of us, except Gayle, to come down with it.  Now, I think we’re all well–sure hope so!  We did manage to get a week’s worth of school done this week, and Monday, before the plague hit in force, we did some harvesting.

This evening–nearly bedtime, and the boys are having fun playing games with each other.

An aunt sent these fire truck sets to the little boys. They love them! Thank you much–you know who you are.

Monday was our only sunny day since we got home. The boys got all our pumpkins harvested for the year. I had them wash them and lay them out in the sun to cure. Now it’s raining–we should have put them under cover!

The boys found this “horse mushroom” yesterday–about 10 inches in diameter! It’s edible, so we had it for supper.Today for Science, I read about magnets to the littler boys.  There were a few experiments to do, and they had fun playing with the magnets.  One of the bigger boys discovered something fun he could make the magnets do–see this quick video!  Grandma, this is especially for you.  For some reason, the arrow you usually click to watch a youTube video isn’t showing up for me, but if you click on the video it’ll start playing.

This Month

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I am not getting anything put on here, so I’ll share what Esther wrote about the past three weeks.  She has lots of pictures to share, and this will bring you up-to-date!  Maybe in a month or two I’ll have more time to write!

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Dear Friends,

We’ve been very busy lately, but I thought you all would probably appreciate a quick update! ☺ So here goes…

Grandpa’s (Dad’s parents) arrived on Saturday, the 23rd of February. They brought along with them my cousin, David (David’s father is Dad’s brother). I had found out ahead of time (like at least three weeks before) that he was coming, and in the last week Seth and Simon (the next two children after me) had found out he was coming, but all the younger ones were totally in the dark—they had NO idea that David was coming! So it was a really nice surprise for all of them.

On Sunday, we all went to church together, then in the afternoon went up to a church friend’s farm. He owns about a thousand acres of very hilly land (they’re the foothills to the K——- mountains; the farm is so rugged that he hasn’t even set foot on some of the land!), where he raises sheep and cattle. He gave us a demonstration of sheep dogs working sheep, and also sheared a sheep so we could see how that process works. It was all very interesting! I’ve seen sheep dogs working sheep before, but only two (out of our 12-person group!) of us had ever seen a sheep sheared before. So that was a very special afternoon…

To read the rest, go here and enjoy her pictures!

Sheep Shearing

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We’ve just enjoyed a three-week visit with my in-laws and a nephew from America.  I’ll try to share some of the highlights of our activities while they were here.

Their first Sunday, we took them to the aquarium in Kaikoura, then up to the overlook on the water tank on top of the Peninsula.  After that, we all went up the Blue Duck Valley to visit friends there.  The highlight was when we were given a demonstration of sheep dogs working, and sheep shearing.  Of our group, only our nephew and I had ever seen a sheep sheared.

Sorting sheep in the the wool shed.

Our friend with his dogs.

The view from the top of the water tank–Kaikoura on the right.

Why I’ve Been Absent

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I know I haven’t been doing anything here for a long time.  I have taken a few pictures, and yesterday I finally had time to look at pictures!  Maybe soon I can put up a few posts to update this.

We’ve had visitors from America for the past two and a half weeks.  Gayle’s parents and nephew arrived February 23, and they leave in two days from now, so we’ve been very busy with them.  Also, I am flying to America for a wedding in a week and a half from now, so that has added a lot of busyness.  And, the garden is pumping out food that has to be taken care of!  So, I haven’t forgotten this, just haven’t had opportunity to share any of the great pictures Esther has been taking during our time with family.

Saturday I had these 26 heads of cabbage (60 pounds) to do something with. Forty pounds of sourkraut and twenty pounds in the freezer later, we were finished.

Friday we did this.

Tired Boys!

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It looks like we’ve been hard on our boys today–at the moment, this is what the living room looks like.  The older boys (and their noise) are all outside, so these three have a chance to sleep.

These two (Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination) have been playing hard!

This one (Mr. Diligence) got up at the same time I did this morning, two hours earlier than usual, because he had a bad dream and couldn’t go back to sleep. He had most of his school done before breakfast!

Peek-a-boo!

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For about half an hour, I had only one child in the house!  Two of them were working in a local vineyard with our good friends, who manage it, and I let the rest take sandwiches and have a picnic lunch.  I stayed in the house by myself (with baby!) to keep the green bean-bottling-process going.  While I was eating my lunch and reading something online, baby crawled behind the computer desk and played peek-a-boo from behind the screen.