Lots of Helpers

Our family's life in New Zealand

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Activities at Home

March-April 2023 Photos

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Here are the rest of the pictures I have found on our devices from the last couple of months. For some reason, we aren’t taking many pictures. I guess we’re too busy living life to document it! And, nothing that exciting has been happening; just daily life.

We found a pear tree near the river that no one claimed, and processed a lot of pears. What a treasure!

James had a bicycle accident in March and landed on his face on the pavement. The three younger children all saw it happen, and Mr. Imagination drew this picture while I was at the hospital with James. He had a concussion and his face was messed up, but by now he is no longer extra tired, no longer getting headaches, and his face is looking much better.

The hot peppers in the greenhouse have done very well this year. I dried a lot and ground them in the food processor into hot pepper flakes. When I need cayenne pepper powder, I’ll grind that in the spice grinder.

Elijah went to the farm on which Simon is working and they shot a stag. Elijah had quite an audience the next morning as he skinned it before he went to work!

We spent the day boning out the deer, and got about 80 kg (170 pounds) of meat.

As usual, we went to Timaru for Easter. We took a shortcut on the way, which led through a very beautiful area I had never seen.

The Lego lovers of the family built some four-wheel drive vehicles, and then tested them out on the stove.

February/March 2023 Photos

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Barring our trip to Karamea, detailed in the last several posts, I haven’t taken many pictures this year! I’ve been living life, not documenting it. Here are the ones I have from the last couple of months, though.

The last time I went to the States, four years ago, Mom gave me a quilt top that my sister had pieced, from blocks I cut out of a lot of fabric scraps before we moved to New Zealand, over 13 years ago. I put the quilt top in a closet and basically forgot about it because I didn’t know what I was doing with it. After she got through all the other sewing projects we had on hand, Mom still wanted something to do, so we figured out what to do with this quilt top. We found an old sheet for the back and a couple of flannel sheets for the middle, and she tied it together for a comforter. The next problem was to find a place to do the work. Our house is too small to lay it out on a floor, so she took it outside! The ground was dry, so it worked. It was amusing, though, to see a quilt laid out on the grass.

We found a playground in Karamea, and Miss Joy and Little Miss played on it for a little while one afternoon. This little girl is infatuated with playgrounds!

We arrived home from Karamea on a Friday, and spent the entire next day working through the ripe produce that had accumulated in the garden while we were away. This was over 250 pounds of tomatoes, and the green pile in the living room was cucumbers. As you can see, we ran out of room on the table for the washed tomatoes and had to make piles in the living room, too! We are very thankful to have a lot of jars of tomatoes to use over the winter.

The little girls love to dress up. I love how Little Miss sometimes reads to Miss Joy, who obviously loves that, too.

James is helping to build a house behind us, on the edge of the hill on which our village is situated. We took a field trip one morning to watch them pour the pad for it. How do you like the view? The mountains you can see are the Paparoa Range, between us and the Tasman Sea.

Just before Mom left, the children decided they needed to make Chocolate Cream Doughnuts, after we read a book in which the main character built up a business making them. I had the stove covered with pots that day, as I was canning, so they used a camp stove on the table to do the deep frying.

The children liked helping us peel tomatoes when we canned them this summer. What a mess they made of themselves, but we appreciated their help!

On the way home from taking Mom to the airport, we bought a budgie. Kea now lives with Jo-Jo in his cage, and they are very happy together. We started out with them in separate cages, but the birds soon let us know they wanted to be together. The funny thing is that Jo-Jo has put on so much weight since he has company that he can hardly fly now! We’re trying to force him to fly every day, hoping to slim him down a little. Kea flies very well. We can hold Jo-Jo, but Kea won’t let us touch her. She readily goes back into the cage after a fly, though.

Simon was feeling enough better by March that he looked for things to do outside. Obviously, the children benefited from this!

One Saturday morning, we started seeing vintage cars cruising around the village. Mr. Imagination took my camera and went out to take pictures of a lot of them. It was a rally that went around the various villages in the Grey Valley.

January/Early February 2023 Photos

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We’ve had a wonderful summer! My mom was here for three months (December, January and February). She left a couple of days ago, just as the weather is turning cooler and feeling like fall. We’ve been very busy canning food from the garden and going on trips, so we’re hoping life slows down a little now. I’ll soon start writing posts and sharing pictures from our week of vacation a couple of weeks ago, but today I’ll share a few other pictures that have been waiting.

We washed Miss Joy’s blankie one afternoon, and she watched it spinning around in the washer! She can hardly function without that blankie, although we’re working on weaning her from it except in bed. Slow process, that.

We haven’t seen that many rainbows this summer, because it’s been a very dry year, but this double was gorgeous.

We played a lot of games with Grandma while she was here. This is TransAmerica; we also played a lot of Wingspan.

Even with a broken collarbone, Simon can play a game with his little sister!

The inside of the strip canoe finally got a coat of fibreglass and epoxy! Now it sits in the garage and waits for the gunwales and seats.

I took the picture above and then headed for the house. On the way, I noticed Gayle chopping wood, so got his picture, too.

All those tiny green plants are baby beets! I let six Chiogga (candy-striped) beets go to seed, and these came up from the seeds that dropped.

James and his crew are building a house at the far west side of our village, about a five-minute walk from our house. We went to visit him and see what they were doing. They had built the forms for the concrete, and were lining everything with polystyrene before pouring the floor.

The girls often went on a walk with Grandma, and this one frequently campaigned for a stop at the playground. I love how her ponytails are flying up in this picture!

Photos–November/December 2022

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Somehow, I missed sharing these photos! This first one was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and obviously Simon and James were tired.

Mom was sending a birthday card to one of my brothers in the States, and several of the younger children wrote letters to their cousins to include with it. Mr. Sweetie took several pictures to add to his letter. This one was taken from the hill across the road, and shows our house and garage, and, to the right, the small guest house Mom is staying in.

A thistle on the hill across the road.

Foxgloves–a major weed in the pastures.

A view of our back yard from the roof of the tiny house.

Next, he climbed the garage roof to take some pictures. This is Esther tying up the tomatoes to the posts on the other side of the greenhouse. It sure looks different now–the tomatoes are taller than I am!

Another view of the garden from the garage roof.

Looking down from a tall tree at part of the back yard and a corner of the garage.

The corner of the back yard by the garage, with the boys’ collection of bicycles and their workshop.

A photographer has come several times to take pictures of our family. Here, one of the children got a picture of him!

Little Miss learned to make hollyhock dolls this year. She loved them!

After she took a picture of her doll, I suggested she take a picture of the incredible hollyhock plant! I’ve never seen one so tall. It no longer looks so nice; it’s about done, and falling over.

She also took a picture of a potato blossom.

Esther spent several days staining the woodwork around the deck of the tiny house. It now has a roof, too!

Garden, January 2023

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As usual, I love the way the garden looks right now. January is such a wonderful time in the garden! Everything is at its peak of beauty, and the weeds haven’t taken over yet. I took a few minutes the other day to make a video tour. It was interesting watching it this afternoon. The little lettuces in the last minute have doubled in size since I took the video two days ago! And, it’s raining today, with more predicted tomorrow, so things should grow even more. (I also noticed that two of the cats managed to get themselves into the last couple of minutes!)

Three Years Old

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There are a few extra cameras floating around here right now. Several people have either upgraded or gotten phones that take good pictures, so the old cameras were up for grabs. One of the boys gave Miss Joy an old camera that still works, and she spent several days taking pictures of whatever caught her fancy. Some turned out fairly good, so here is a glimpse at life as seen by a three-year-old.


Science

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Several months ago, we were sent a box of Covid tests by the government, because we live more than 20 km from the nearest testing station. They expired in December, and we had never so much as opened the box, so I let the school children experiment with them. They tested all sorts of things… lemon juice, kombucha, whey, broth, mud, cow poo, the cow’s nostrils (the milk cows were right outside our windows that day). Much to their disgust, nothing tested positive! I enjoyed watching them write down their predictions and the results they got.

Little Girls

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We got some good pictures of our little girls over the past couple of months! This was an evening we went to visit some friends. One of their children spread dish soap on the trampoline, and the children all had great fun! Later, we bathed Miss Joy and the youngest of the children of that family.

The little girls occasionally make soup. Here, they are stirring soup in “pots” over “stoves.”

James bought a new backpack, and put Miss Joy in it to test it out. She was delighted!

The girls were walking around one day eating sorrel leaves and checking the strawberries for ripe fruit.

One of her brothers gave Miss Joy a camera, and she had great fun playing with it for a few days.

Elijah arm-wrestled the little girls one day! I was too late to get him wrestling with Miss Joy; she needed some quality time with her thumb and blankie after losing.

Miss Joy put this cloth on her head one day, and then brought me the camera and asked me to take a picture of her.

Critters

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Somehow, I ended up with a lot of pictures of animals this month.

One of the boys borrowed my camera to take pictures of the cattle to share with his cousin. This is the two milk cows. Bluebell is on the left, and her mother Poppy on the right.

The young stock were on top of the hill that day. The two biggest ones are steers, and the two smaller ones are heifers. The Jersey heifer is Poppy’s calf from this year, Rosie. The other is a beefy that Simon brought us from the farm on which he worked. We assumed it was a bull, and gave it a masculine name…until Gayle and Elijah went across the road to castrate it two months later. That’s when we realized that no one had ever looked to see what gender it was! We changed her name.

The calves. Rosie and Ramona are best friends.

These cats are not best friends, but they do end up sleeping in close proximity sometimes, when conditions are right! This is my miniature greenhouse. It was getting too hot to start plants in it, so I left it propped up. Now, I have a frame covered in shade cloth, in the same place, to start the summer’s crops.

This cheeky weka lives in our garden. It scratches the mulch away from the plants and eats the tomatoes.

The flax in front of the house are in bloom, and we often see a tui drinking from them.

I was hanging laundry one morning, and one of the tuis serenaded me from a nearby tree. It went on long enough that I was able to get a video of it!

One day, the boys took Mom on an adventure. At one farm, they saw this family of pigs.

At another farm, they saw these deer.

Someone was moving an old wool underlay one day, and discovered a bumblebee nest inside. We had never seen such a thing! Thankfully, no one got stung.