Activities at Home

Budgie vs Chicken

March 16, 2025 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning, our chicken coop caught fire because the chicks inside knocked down the top of the brooder, and the light burned the sawdust inside. We lost 35 of the 65 chicks, some two weeks old, some six. Amazingly, 5 of the 25 youngest ones, who were inside the brooder box, survived. They are now living inside the house for a few days until they can handle outside temperatures. I decided to see what would happen this evening if I put their box beside the cage in which our two budgies, Reepicheep and Jewel, live. It was pretty funny!

Jewel hardly paid any attention, but Reep, who is extremely curious and energetic, studied the chicks thoroughly, then started trying to get closer. I opened the cage and held it over the box–watch what happened! Especially watch closely during the last five seconds or so.

Garden–February 2025

February 23, 2025 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Just over a week ago I took a video of a walk through the garden. We hadn’t had rain, at that point, for about a month and a half, but a few days later, we got 2 1/2 inches over the course of 2-3 days, and everything is a lot happier! We’re bringing in bushels of food; yesterday Esther picked 46 kg (2 banana boxes) of tomatoes. Yum!

December 2024 Photos

January 26, 2025 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of our pictures from December! One Sunday afternoon, Gayle took the girls on a walk down to the river. They found a field of wildflowers.

Elijah found this interesting moth somewhere.

James has been working diligently on his sleepout. Here was the first of three coats of paint to go on. His little sisters were delighted to help!

Little Miss took this picture to illustrate a story she wrote about her chores, which include feeding a bottle to the calf.

After our budgie died in July or August, the cockatiel got very depressed. We finally got him a friend, hoping to cheer him up, but it was too late and he died a few days later. So, we got another budgie to keep the new one company, and we have two birds again! The blue one is a very young male. Some friends had a pair and hatched this one; we got it when it was old enough to leave them. The green one is a female. They get along very well. We named the blue one Reepicheep and the green one Jewel, since Esther had just finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia aloud.

The hollyhocks are blooming, so many dolls get made!

One afternoon I walked down the hill to have a look at the chickens, and took this picture up the valley from there.

Daddy was taking a nap, and when Miss Joy noticed the cat sleeping with him, she joined them.

It rained on Christmas Day. A lot of the day was spent playing games, but for awhile some of the fellows worked on denailing some timber that James had salvaged.

As always, we enjoyed seeing the tuis and bellbirds drinking nectar from the flax blossoms.

The big project during the Christmas holidays was building a new garage at Simon’s house to replace the one they tore down over a year ago when it threatened to fall down.

November 2024 Photos

December 22, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

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

December 15, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

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

December 8, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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.

Flood!

November 24, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

The last Saturday in October, we had four inches of rain in 24 hours–and there was a lot more upstream in the hills and mountains. That afternoon, I had to go down to the paddock where our cows live to work with them, and we discovered that the creek had flooded! We had to lead a cow through about eight inches of fast-flowing, muddy water; I discovered that I quickly get dizzy and disoriented with those conditions. I was thankful for a son who steadied me as we went through!

Water was backing up the small creek from the large one that is going through the center of this photo.

James is walking toward the water we had to lead the cow through. It was overflowing the banks of the small creek and going into the drainage ditch that runs through the length of the paddock.

This is the drainage ditch. It normally has a little trickle in the bottom!

This is a close-up of the flooding. The boys picked up the fence at this point, so it wouldn’t wash away.

This was the big creek, just upstream from our paddock, where it goes under the highway. There was a large log caught under the bridge, which is partly why we had a problem; you can see water being diverted to the right, where it went into the small creek and under the highway into our paddock.

I decided to walk down to the river at that point to see what it looked like. Quite impressive! By the next morning, though, the floodwaters had gone down.

Repiling the House

November 17, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Elijah got started renovating the boys’ bedroom this winter. The project is moving slowly because he works five days a week, but he’s making progress. About the time he started putting the new closet together in a corner of the room, James decided that the piles under that side of the house should be replaced before Elijah went any farther, so that the house would be level! So, the boys devoted a Saturday to replacing nine or ten of them.

The first order of business was to put a jack beside each original pile, and then adjust it until the house was level with whatever point was highest. James borrowed his boss’s jacks and laser level for this part of the job (sure is handy that his boss lives right across the street and is happy to let James use the tools!). Then, they cut off the old piles some of which were supported by the house instead of the other way around, and jiggled them loose. When they had the old piles out of the ground, they dug the holes out a little bit. You can see here how much headspace there was. Rather challenging! I did not go under the house.

To get the dirt out, they used a square 5-gallon oil jug cut in half, with a rope tied to each end. One person stayed outside, pulled the full tubs out, and dumped them, and then they were pulled back under.

When all the holes were dug, they put the new piles in the holes and fastened them to the underside of the house. Then, they borrowed James’s boss’s cement mixer and poured concrete around the new piles. They got the concrete under the house the same way they got the dirt out, with those little tubs. The grass beside the house got torn up pretty badly, especially since it started raining halfway through the afternoon, but that side of the house is now level!

September 2024 Photos

November 10, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of the pictures we took in September! This was the one picture I took when I went to the HEART retreat for homeschool moms near Christchurch. The view over Lyttleton Harbour is so beautiful!

Bluebell had her calf while I was away that weekend–a little bull. He’s very healthy, unlike her calf last year.

When Gayle and I went to Christchurch, we had a little extra time, so we stopped to walk through a park. The flowers were beautiful!

Esther often reads aloud in the evenings. One evening I noticed how enthralled these boys were. They were both listening intently!

The older boys went hunting and got more venison for us.

The youngest three love playing and taking pictures of each other and what they are doing.

I always enjoy seeing and hearing the tuis when they come in the spring. One morning while I was hanging laundry I got to see these two.

Around the Garden in Early Spring

November 3, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Mr. Sweetie took my camera outside one morning in September to take pictures of the snow-topped mountains to the west of us across the Grey River. While he was out there, he took a lot of pictures around the garden and the house. I picked out my favorites to share here. Goofball likes attention, although she doesn’t demand it like her sister does. The chickens are Little Miss’s pets.