Our family's life in New Zealand
The last morning I walked down to the bottom paddock to milk the cow before we brought them up here for grazing for a few weeks, I noticed a pair of Paradise ducks with a new brood of ducklings. They were swimming out of our small creek into the big one. A few days later, when the boys went down to play, Mr. Imagination soon came up to get his camera because they were back in the small creek. He got these pictures. Aren’t they cute!
Yesterday was my birthday. It was a perfect day–a normal day! I did school with the children in the morning, and that went well. We’re winding down our school year already, finishing a few of the subjects for the year, so we don’t have as much to do. In the afternoon, I got to play in the garden for awhile, and got some more things planted. Then, I cooked one of my favorite meals in the evening (steaks from a steer we raised, roasted kumara/sweet potatoes, and Silverbeet/Swiss Chard, with a delicious dessert I hadn’t made since I did Home Ec in high school). I was amazed at the gifts my family gave me. Mr. Sweetie gave me that beautiful bouquet, Elijah gave me a bay tree, and James gave me a lavender plant. Then, Gayle brought in a gift, which I didn’t expect: he replaced the touch lamps on our nightstands, which came with the house and were much the worse for wear since they were loved by a toddler, with new ones! I feel very spoiled.
It’s time to catch up with the pictures I have from August and September. When our blogs went down, I quit posting on the weekends like I had been, because I couldn’t for a week and then had to redo two months worth of posts. Then, because we changed hosts, we had to pay hundreds of dollars for the new hosting service. There was no way we were staying with a company that frequently had downtime and then completely lost everything for a week, and didn’t have it all backed up when they got it back! We realized that my blog is taking up most of the space we need, because I have so many pictures. Esther found a program that compresses them to a much smaller format, so I’m working my way through the archives, finding all the pictures I used in old posts and compressing them, removing them from the blog and uploading them again. It’s fun to see all those old pictures from when my now-10-year-old was tiny, but it’s a lot of work! I have made it through almost the first year of blogging so far. As you can imagine, that takes a lot of time, which means I haven’t been thinking so much about putting up new posts. At the same time, seeing what I did with my blog back then in 2011 and 2012 has inspired me to put up more frequent, shorter posts. What do you think? Would you rather that, or longer, more infrequent catch-up posts? Comment and let me know what you like.
One evening I went into Esther’s room to talk to her about something and looked out her window. The clouds were incredible! I tried taking pictures with a camera and my iPad, and this is the best one I got. The clouds were even more spectacular than that!
We did this craft when we studied Uganda. It’s supposed to be a lion with a mane! I didn’t have the right colors of paper, so we made do with what we had.
Poppy had her calf on the first of August–another cute, tiny heifer. We named the new baby Rosie.
This is Mr. Imagination, Miss Joy, and Little Miss going across the road to visit the new calf.
The magnolia tree bloomed. That’s always beautiful! Half the tree seems to have died, though, which we can’t figure out.
Miss Joy loved her puzzles! She has three or four that she knows how to do, and some days she has put them together half a dozen times in a row. I think she’s gotten bored with them, though, because she hasn’t asked for them for awhile.
A few weeks ago, a friend called us to say that someone had a lot of wild pigs that had been killed in a competition, and they were available for anyone who came to get them. Elijah drove the 15 minutes to pick up three for us and two for another friend. We won’t turn down free meat! We got ours skinned that night.
The next day, Esther and I spent the morning boning them out. Wild pork has a rather gamy flavor, so I wanted to make most of the meat into sausage. We saved two legs for ham, and threw away one entire pig because it smelled so strong we couldn’t stand it. We ended up with 70 pounds of meat to make into sausage! She put it through the mincer, and then we weighed the meat and mixed in the seasonings. Then, she put it through the mincer again.
After Gayle and Elijah got home, we stuffed the sausage into casings.
Miss Joy had a great time helping to package the sausages!
Now, we’re enjoying (only slightly gamy) delicious pork sausages!
It’s that time of year when we start all the tomato plants we need for the upcoming summer! This year, Esther wanted to help, so she could learn how I do it; most years, I do all of this project by myself. Late in August, we put the seeds into the soil.
We put the tray of seeds in the greenhouse under a second layer of plastic until they germinated. Esther cleaned out that corner of the greenhouse. There are several tomato plants there that she transplanted in there from the garden, where they started growing late in the summer. We had kept an extra layer of plastic over them all winter, and they lived, although, with low light levels for a few months, they didn’t thrive. One has a green tomato on it, though!
About a week or a week and a half later, the tiny seedlings were ready to prick out and transplant into individual punnets. It was a beautiful day, so we sat at the picnic table to do this job.
I took this picture on the 25th of September, about a month after we initially planted the seeds. The plants had been in our hothouse, a frame covered with greenhouse plastic on our back step, which faces the sun.
Today, the 29th of September, five weeks after starting the seeds, I decided it was time to transplant the little tomatoes into bigger pots. Little Miss helped with this job; she loves writing the labels! We didn’t get the entire job done, but did about a fourth of them, choosing the largest plants to start with. Now, they get to live and grow in the big greenhouse until time to plant them in the garden.
We decided to set up our milking machine down in the paddock where the cows live, at least for now. We’re only milking one cow at the moment, and she walks so slowly that it’s hardly worthwhile to bring her up here to milk with the machine–but my arms can’t hold up to handmilking. So, right now, I’m walking down there twice a day. It’s a lovely walk most of the time (except when it rains). I took my camera along yesterday morning when I went down at 7:00 for the morning milking.
This cherry tree is in bloom along the roadside. I have been thoroughly enjoying the beautiful flowers and the fragrant aroma!
This is the view from the gate into the paddock. I love seeing the range of mountains to the west of us–the Paparoa Range.
There’s Poppy, waiting for me. Behind her are the young stock. The one in the middle is Bluebell, who will have her first calf in the next few weeks, and the two yearling steers are on either side of her. Bluebell is Poppy’s daughter. Notice the nice roof James built for the hay, to keep it from spoiling so fast?
We moved the old milking shed up from the low spot where we had first placed it, to this place on the stopbank, where it never gets mucky. James built a shed up against it to house the milking machine.
Meanwhile, the calves wait for their bottles. The brown one is Rosie, Poppy’s latest calf, and the other is a beefy that Simon brought home from the farm he works on. They are best friends, and Rosie gives the bull calf a good scrubbing with her tongue every day.
In case you are wondering why so many posts are coming through this week that look familiar… there is a reason. And a good one.
Last week, the day after I posted the second of the two reviews I had due for the week, my blog went down. So did Esther’s website and blog. After a couple of days, we learned that the problem was with our hosting service. A hacker had gotten in to their website and completely wiped all 12 of their servers. They immediately started restoring websites from their backup, but it took until today to get our blog back up. Most of it came back; I need to redo two months’ worth of posts. That means that you will be getting more emails than normal. I apologize for that; just delete them.
We will be switching to another hosting service as soon as possible. However, Esther can’t get into the back end of the back end of all three websites. Her username and password didn’t transfer over. She is trying hard to get that back, but we don’t know when we’ll be able to get that. Until then, we can still post as normal, but we can’t move to a different host that is (hopefully) more reliable–this one has had problems in the last few months–and we can’t back up the blogs. Esther is wishing she had been able to back them up, but until a couple of months ago, we didn’t have enough data to be able to do it, and then she didn’t think about it when we changed internet providers. Lesson learned–we’ll be backing up frequently after this! It’s not a nice feeling to wonder whether the blog is gone for good.
A little over a year ago, we started working through a Project Passport study from Home School in the Woods, about Ancient Egypt. We worked on it off and on until about April, when we finally finished it (we were alternating one of these stops with a science lesson, a geography lesson, and a few writing lessons–one “extra” a day). I’ve been intending ever since we finished to share some photos of the final products, and finally got them taken today.
This was one of our biggest projects. We all worked together to build this temple. It was quite interesting to see the different parts of it!
Each of the children made their own model of the step pyramid, and wrote a paragraph about it. Interestingly, there is a theory that Imhotep was actually Joseph! (This was Little Miss’s model.)
After we finished the study, we assembled lap books with all the mini books we had been making through the entire study. These lap books are made from a file folder with card stock taped inside to make more pages. Can you guess whose this book is? Clue: the boys don’t like the color pink!
These are the mini books we put inside–aren’t they creative! I love using the things that Home School in the Woods comes up with.
We also wrote a newspaper. We added a couple of articles or pictures to it with each lesson. This was a good way to review what we had learned.
We also did other projects that didn’t go into the lap book. We stored these in 2- or 3-ring binders.
We didn’t end up doing most of these projects. We just cut out the cards and put them in our books. One was to make a reed boat; someone did get around to doing that, but I forgot to get a picture of it.
We added to a timeline all the way through the study, too. It was quite easy to see where to put the figures, and quite interesting to look at how historical events fit together.
We added a postcard to our rack for each lesson. Some had funny stories–the most memorable was the one about the pharoah being annoyed by the hippos roaring hundreds of miles away!
We also added places to our map as we went. We put glue on the Nile River, and added black pepper to represent the silt that overflowed from the Nile each year during the Inundation.
We thoroughly enjoyed doing this project, so much so that, even though we didn’t get a project from Home School in the Woods for review this year (instead, we got the timeline set I reviewed a few weeks ago), the school children wanted to do something and I bought a lap book set about the Wonders of the World. We’re enjoying working through that, and I’ll post pictures when we finish it.
For some reason, I often end up with only a few photos in July. It’s the middle of winter, so maybe there just isn’t that much that’s inspiring to take pictures of? Here are the few I found in my picture folder.
This is Mr. Sweetie, with Mr. Imagination’s cockatiel, Jo-Jo, on his shoulder. Jo-Jo prefers to sit on the organizers on top of my desk, or on a high cupboard, and watch what happens in the house, but sometimes Mr. Sweetie can coax him onto his shoulder like this.
Mr. Sweetie borrowed a book from a friend. He read it, and then Mr. Imagination picked it up and read the whole book. When they were going to return it, Little Miss found it in the van, and she read the whole book, too! If you know anything about the struggles I had teaching a couple of our older boys to read, you’ll know how much this picture means to me.
One day, the girls were playing on our street with the go-cart. First, Little Miss pushed Miss Joy around–and then they reversed! I tried to get a picture when I could see both their faces, but wasn’t fast enough.
Last Sunday after we came home from church, Miss Joy laid down on the floor and went to sleep. It was late enough that we had decided not to have her go down for a nap, but she obviously needed one!
This was about a month ago. She was so tickled to be able to “read” me this book! She had done a better job a day or two before, “reading” it to me, and wasn’t real thrilled about reading it again, but I coaxed her to and she obliged. I held the iPad above her head to get this clip, so she wouldn’t know what I was doing.
We had quite a storm yesterday. In less than 24 hours, we got at least 4, possibly as much as 6, inches of rain. Late in the afternoon, as the rain started slacking off, the boys discovered that the creeks were overflowing into the paddock our cows, chickens and turkeys live in. The cows were locked onto higher ground in one corner, and the chickens are on high enough ground to be safe; the turkeys free-range, and they were all fine. Mr. Imagination came running home as soon as they saw the water, to get his camera, and when Elijah went down, he took some pictures with his camera. Several locals said they had never seen the water this high. Part of the problem was that gravel had washed under the bridge, backing up the water into the paddock on the other side of the highway from us. There were also several log jams downstream, which also backed up the water.
The water in this picture is usually several meters away from where the cows are standing. This is a small creek that comes from a culvert that goes under the highway just to the right of the picture. It’s usually a wide, flowing pool of beautiful, clear, shallow water.
The cows are on the high ground at the right of this picture. Normally, there is no water flowing across there! You can see, about in the middle of the picture, where our little creek flows into Orwell Creek. There was a log jam across the mouth of our little creek, which diverted some of the water from Orwell Creek and directed it into our paddock, as well as the little creek having a lot of water of its own. The other two times we’ve seen that overflow, both within the last year, all the water has gone into a drainage ditch that starts just there, near the left side of this picture.
To the right is the normal channel of the creek. The drainage ditch is just left of the middle of this picture. This time, the water went right across the paddock to the left!
Look at all that water! The drainage ditch to the far right normally flows with a couple of inches of water at the bottom of a 2-meter ditch. The other drainage ditch, on the left, is normally just a swampy strip of water that might flow a little but not much. It got a good clean-out this time, though!
The turkeys are unimpressed with the weather. See what looks like a small lake in the distance? Some of our neighbors have fences set up there and have been grazing three ponies there this winter. We were glad to see they got the ponies out and up here to their house before that area was flooded too badly.
This is just across the highway from the gate to “our” paddock. Because of the gravel built up under the bridge, Orwell Creek was backed up into the paddock and around the neighbor’s house.
The boys were pretty impressed with this whirlpool. It goes down into the culvert that goes through into our paddock. They said the mouth of the culvert was about a meter, maybe three feet, below the surface of the water.
After checking out our paddock, the boys went around the block to where Orwell Creek crosses a road at the bottom of the hill on which Ahaura is built. The railroad parallels the road at this point, and this is what they saw at the two bridges:
Two hours later, this is what they saw:
By this time, the water was over the road bridge, and level with the train bridge–and a spot downstream just a little ways was washing out. There is normally no gap under the track here, but the water that went over the road washed it out pretty badly. Simon called Kiwirail to report the washout, and they sent a crew out this morning to fix it. We went past on our way home from church this afternoon and the track was safe again!
Several of the boys took video clips of what they saw, so I’ve put them together here. The power of moving water is amazing! There’s a little bit of fun here, too, at the end; Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination rode their bikes at top speed past James, through puddles.