Activities at Home

I feel like I’m getting very behind with posting photos of our life. Let’s see what I can do today! Gayle took several of the children to the sea one Sunday evening to go fishing with a friend who has a long-line. This was the only fish they caught. Several of the rest of us stayed home and watched The King’s Speech, which is a movie with a wonderful story, but too much profanity for a family movie.

People around here often think of Grandma when they see interesting things in nature. Not sure if you like pictures of big spiders, but here’s one!

Mr. Imagination found this moth at Elijah’s house. I’ve never seen a green moth!

Our chicken coop burned down one early morning. That is a terrible way to be awakened, in case you didn’t know. We lost most of the chicks that were in it (a heat lamp fell down on the bedding), but a few lived. We took the little ones into the house to keep them warm, and the children enjoyed playing with them for a few days.

Gayle took the girls down to the river one day and they had fun there.

This part of the garden was beautiful all summer! I’ve started planting flowers in this bed, beside the driveway. It quickly turns into an overgrown riot of color.

We also had humor in the garden. I have so much trouble getting carrots to germinate that last year, in desperation, I started some in punnets and then set them out. They grew extremely twisted. Esther refuses to use them if she can help it, but they are rather funny!

One of the boys bought himself a set of tools, and they all loved investigating them.

Miss Joy and Little Miss must have taken pictures of each other goofing around in Elijah’s room while they were moving their things from that room back to their own.

The girls showed me this picture, and I thought these were large-scale weapons. Then, they showed me the real thing–they were about 3 inches long, made of dried grass and twigs!

James went to the first auction of his life and got some good deals. He bought these enormous steel beams for only $20! Then, he had to figure out how to get them home. He enlisted several brothers, a sister and a friend, and they spent an hour or so man-handling them onto the trailer. He brought them home overnight, and then got help to unload them at Simon’s house. He mentioned them to some dairy-farmer friends, and they needed beams to build a bridge, so he sold them for many times what he paid, and passed the money along to those who helped him.

We were eating dinner one evening when a pilot vehicle came past slowly. Then another… and then we saw this house pull up and stop at the end of our street! It stayed there for over half an hour while the truck unhooked and went to the trucking yard across from us to refuel.

I went with the boys to work at Elijah’s house one day, and they found an advertisement from Pizza Hut in the letter box. That made Simon hungry for pizza, so they bought enough for the family for dinner.

I got started writing this post last week. I had the first paragraph halfway written when the notice popped up that I was offline and the post could not be saved. I waited five minutes, because our internet randomly flicks off, and then comes back a little later. Then, we realized that there were only two websites that were not coming up–my blog and Internet Archive, from which Esther was trying to read a book. I restarted both modems, and got the same results. I gave up. Three hours later, both websites were loading again! So, I didn’t give you a post last week. Today, I actually have some time to think!

This summer has been even more jam-packed than usual. Not only do we have the normal garden work and preserving of the harvest to work on, but add in three renovation projects as well, and you can imagine what life has been like here! One project is finished, one is close enough to put it on hold for a little while. Elijah’s house is still a main focus. I have spent most of my Saturdays for the past six or seven weeks there, helping to paint. We can see the end in sight now, though! I should be able to share pictures of a finished project soon.

Meanwhile, here are the pictures I have left from the first two months of the year.

Over the Christmas break, the boys built a garage at Simon’s house. I only went over there once, but a friend sent me a couple of pictures he took of the boys working, and I grabbed a picture near the end of the project. I just realized I don’t have a picture of the finished building!

Mr. Imagination built several live traps. He tested them with the cats, and they worked for that–but no possums have been caught. He gave up on that project. (The cats were quite happy to be trapped, as long as it meant they got extra cat food!)

I was in the garden one day, and Miss Joy wanted me to take a picture of her with her hollyhock dolls.

I’m not sure what this was about–but it’s a shot of Elijah, taken by a friend who sent it to me.

Miss Joy is quite a writer! She frequently dictates stories, and one day she dictated this original poem, and the explanation for it.

Little Miss took a picture of Miss Joy inside these tubs. See her eyes peeking out?

After I harvested the first lot of onions in mid-January, I asked the children to braid them for me. They were happy to do that job, as long as they could listen to an audiobook while they did it!

This was the onions before braiding, when we laid them out to cure for a day or two in the sun.

James got his sleepout finished in early January. He used recycled rimu boards for the walls, and oiled them with linseed oil he was given. The ceiling is white-painted plywood, and Elijah laid secondhand carpet for him. This room is quite a comfortable place for James, Joe, and Simon when he’s here.

Elijah’s room has had a complete face-lift in the past six months. I don’t have any recent pictures, but this was Simon oiling the lower part of the wall in January. Those boards were originally on the walls, in that position. They were painted with a thick coat of yellow paint. Elijah was able to remove them carefully enough that he could line the lower part of the walls with them again after running them through a thicknesser to remove the paint and sand them down, and then they put a couple of coats of linseed oil from James’s drum on it. The upper part of the walls is plywood, and has now been whitewashed. The effect is beautiful!

Some of the random pictures I find on my phone!

A sunset over the mountains.

Mr. Imagination brought this bug in to show me one day. It was tiny!

Our first homeschool group meeting of the year was a picnic at Nelson Creek. It rained right after we got there, but then the sky cleared and it was perfect for swimming. See the boys up the bank, just above the midpoint of the picture? They jumped from there into the water.

We really enjoy these birds. The blue one, Reepicheap, is very active and curious, which makes him very fun.

Simon spray-painting the lounge ceiling in Elijah’s house. He has done a lot of painting there. This was immediately after he started; within minutes he had gotten hold of a respirator to wear for the rest of the job.

Little Miss sometimes helps Miss Joy with her flashcards. They like to make a game of it!

Esther made a pretty cake one day. I think it was a yellow cake; it had strawberries and raspberries on it.

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.