Activities at Home

My New Greenhouse!

June 8, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

My boys spoil me. They do so many things for me, and I just have to keep wondering how in the world I ended up with such wonderful sons! The most recent big project was building a greenhouse. When we lived in Cheviot, we were given the frames for two greenhouses, from two different people. We used one for a couple of seasons, and Simon assembled the other but it didn’t get covered with plastic before we moved and had to dismantle it again. They were two different shapes, but when the boys started working on erecting them here a month or two ago, they figured out how to put them together to make one long high tunnel, about 40 feet by 10 feet (13.5 m by 3.5 m)! The next hurdle was to cover them. After some searching, they found the old plastic from the hoophouse, and the new plastic we had bought for the other one. They were able to cobble them together and cover everything except the lowest part of one side; Gayle built a device for rolling up the lower couple of feet of plastic on the other side, for ventilation during the summer. We bought sheets of clear plastic to finish the part we didn’t have plastic for, and they built frames for them, and hinged the frames so they can be opened in the summer, as well. Now, I’m enjoying having salads growing in there for at least part of the winter! Here are a couple of photos of the boys working on tacking down the plastic.

This was a peek inside, during construction.

….and a view from the same place, this week!

This is a close-up of the bed right inside the door. I found a new-to-me variety of radishes called German Giant. They were advertised as getting large without getting pithy, and not going to seed so quickly. So far, they’re living up to their promise—I’ll sure be interested to see how they work in the summer! We’re really enjoying having radishes on our salads.

We transplanted the lettuces on the left into the ground here right after the framework was erected, and have been eating salads from that bed for a month now. I set out the lettuces, bok choy, and other things on the right a couple of weeks ago, and we’ll start eating them soon.And, here’s a fun picture! I found this leaf one day when I was washing lettuce. It was two leaves grown together! It’s hard to tell, but the midribs were stuck to each other. I had never seen one like this before.

May 2019 Photos

June 1, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Can you believe the first of June has arrived already? This year is flying past!

Here is the canoe the boys have built. Mr. Intellectual worked on the epoxy a day or two at the beginning of the month, then pulled it out of the garage into the sunshine to get the epoxy dry. With the cold, wet weather we’re having, it’s been next to impossible to work on this project.

One morning while her brothers did school, Little Miss played, “Going to a Conference.” She took all her dolls along. Here, she had been singing, pretending to be in a meeting; later they went to a bedroom (she carried all four at once) for lunch, and then went to the hallway to “sleep at Katie’s house.”

The boys noticed a pear tree across the road, beside where the cow grazes, with pears littering the ground under it. They asked the owner of the property if we could have the pears, and he gave them to us, so Gayle and the younger boys picked them all up one Saturday. We made a couple of large pans of pear/cranberry crumble–yum! Mr. Imagination and Little Miss helped me peel and cut up the pears for it.

When I placed an order recently for schoolbooks, I added the last two Pleasant Valley Farm picture books to the order for Esther. When they came, she showed them to these two, and they jumped up and down and squealed in glee–they love those books!

One day this week, we noticed a 20-foot shipping container being loaded into this truck! We had never seen that done before. Notice the rain falling heavily in this photo? That was the story of our week. For five days straight, we had torrential rains, for a total, here, of nearly 10 inches.

Mr. Imagination took this picture of a digger he is building. He loves to put things together.

Little Miss apparently brought a wasp in the house on her hair one day. It stung her just below the eye. She screamed for a good while. The next day, when I took this photo, it had swollen some, but not as bad as I thought it might. We had put plantain on as quickly as possible–it really helps!

I guess Mr. Sweetie was quite impressed by the way his milk foamed one day! I have several boys who love foamed milk (Esther found a foamer at a secondhand shop recently), but our milk often won’t foam.

This was our living room one evening this month. Simon and Mr. Diligence were listening to an audio book on Simon’s phone (which is only used as an audiobook player, by the way!). It looks like Mr. Sweetie was trying to listen in, as well. These boys are addicted to audiobooks.

My artist, Mr. Imagination, with the horse he made from marbles one day.

April 2019 Photos

May 18, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Little Miss draws a lot of pictures! This is a horse she drew for me a few weeks ago—see its hooves?

Mr. Diligence and a friend built this bike trailer for Mr. Imagination’s birthday. The little fellow has had a lot of fun pulling it around behind his bicycle.

Little Miss built a house in the living room one day.

Mr. Intellectual has done a lot of wood working lately. Here is one of his recent creations, a pancake turner from an old electric pole. The wood was very hard, but brittle, so this turner ended up breaking beyond repair, unfortunately. It was beautiful, though!

Simon can still get Mr. Diligence down!

One evening, the fire got going so hot that the children asked for marshmallows—and toasted them through the closed door! We’re being more careful now as to how full we load the stove with the offcuts from Gayle’s work at the mill.

What We’ve Been Reading Lately Part 2

May 14, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When I did a post like this in March, I was hoping to do another in a month. Here we are two months later—and I’m shocked by how many books we’ve read since then!

Links in this post are probably affiliate links that will help to finance Esther’s website if you buy a book through them.

Right now, in the mornings, we’re reading these books.

We start with a chapter from The Bible Story, Volume 9. We’re almost finished with this one, and then we’ll move on to Volume 10. Next, we read a page or two from Who Am I? and then a couple of two-page spreads from Mosque. This has turned out to be fascinating! We have finished learning about the actual building, and are now reading about how they decorated the mosque. Someone commented this morning that it’s a work of art! After we read these books, we read a history story; right now we’re reading Hoofbeats of Freedom, which I found on Internet Archive. It’s a story about the Battle of Long Island during the American Revolution. Internet Archive, by the way, has turned out to be a wonderful resource for us. We don’t have access to a very good library, but we can borrow digital books from this site for two weeks at a time. They have many, many titles published between 1950-1990, which have been scanned from libraries in the USA, especially the Boston Public Library. So, as long as the electric and the internet are working, we have quite a range of books to choose from for our schooling.

After lunch, we have been reading these books.

We finished the Little House books with These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years, and then started reading On the Way Home on Internet Archive. We also finished the Living Forest series with Beloved Rascals, and then started The Best of Ernest Thompson Seton, a collection of all-too-real animal stories. They tend to be rather sad! Little Miss shed a few tears as we read the story of Wahb, the grizzly bear who had a very sad life. Everyone was on the edge of their seats during the battle between Foam, the razorback hog, and a different bear (and could understand much better when a friend of ours here had two dogs cut up by a wild pig last week!), and we could hardly wait to hear the ending of the story about a little boy adopted by a badger. We loved hearing about how Annie Sullivan helped Helen Keller come alive, in Helen Keller’s Teacher, and Mr. Imagination was happy to hear The Little Woodchopper. Probably the most popular of these books, though, was A Tale of Gold, which I picked up at a second-hand shop when I was in Ohio in February. It’s about the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898. Simon heard a couple of chapters of it, and made his brothers keep him up-to-date on what I read each day—and whenever he had the chance to ask me to read aloud, that was what he—and they—all wanted until we were finished! It’s a lovely tale of a boy learning what is most important in life (although it had no Christian influence).

Here are a lot of the books we’ve read for history in the past two months. Many are from Internet Archive. As you can see, we do a lot of reading aloud!

And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? has always been my favorite about that famous historical figure. I like Jean Fritz’s way of telling a story! Adam and the Golden Cock told about the arrival of the French to help the Revolution. Of course, Alice Dalgliesh’s 4th of July Story tells about signing the Declaration of Independence, and Betsy Ross is the story of the woman who sewed the first American flag. It focuses on her girlhood as a Quaker girl in Philadelphia who loved to sew. George the Drummer Boy and Sam the Minuteman both tell the story of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but from opposite points of view—British and patriot. Guns for General Washington and Henry and the Cannons describe how Henry Knox brought artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. Guns is based on diaries kept by the people who made this incredibly difficult trip, and other contemporary documents. Poor Richard in France tells about how Ben Franklin went to France with two grandsons to try to get aid, and Powder Keg gives a plausible story for the mystery of how the gunpowder that was stored in Bermuda made its way to Boston to be used in those guns that were brought across the mountains by Henry Knox. Samuel’s Choice is a picture book about the Battle of Long Island. My favorite book of all these, however, is A Drop of Mercy, about the Mennonites during the Revolution. It is a very good story about the people who simply wanted to live in peace and honor God with their lives during those turbulent years.

We’ve also read a number of other books. These three go along with the history curriculum we’re doing right now, which I reviewed last week. In the Days of Noah is a great picture book about what the world before the Flood may have been like, and about the Flood itself. Genesis: Finding Our Roots is an in-depth study of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, and Adam and His Kin fleshes out those chapters in a novel. I’ve read it aloud several times, and am enjoying it again.

We read The Great Dinosaur Mystery and Dry Bones and Other Fossils to go along with Cross-Wired Science, which was also a program we got for review and have really appreciated.

In the evenings when the whole family is home, I read a chapter or two from Whistle-Stop West, based on the true story of a boy who rode the Orphan Train. I have always loved this series, by the author of the Grandma’s Attic books. We also recently read Ben & Mark, a photo story of two boys growing up in the high country of New Zealand. This is especially interesting to us, since we pass the turnoff to their home when we go to Christchurch, now. We read Black Boots and Buttonhooks a few weeks ago, too; it’s a very interesting story about a family pioneering in the King Country in the North Island in the early part of the 20th century.

I’ve been reading a lot of interesting books myself lately, too. We needed more schoolbooks to finish out the year, so when I ordered them from Christian Light Publications, I added some other books to the order. Armor of Light discusses lust, and how lust for anything opens us up to temptation in that area, and how to overcome it. Very good for anyone! I’m still reading God, Our Children, and the Facts of Life. It’s excellent! I also got Fingerprints for myself, and am loving the stories in it. It’s great for any mother. Lots to think about, and it makes me chuckle frequently. Thomas Edison, Wilbur and Orville, and The Great Gilly Hopkins are ones I picked up at a book fair last August. They’re all right—nothing special. I just started Island Nurses, from the same place, so I don’t know what it will be like.

I was excited to get to read A Forgotten Truth, the fourth book in The Agency Files series. This was a hard one to put down! Not only is it a good mystery, but there is a lot of truth contained in it. Joseph, Rachel’s Son is a great retelling of a famous story. I really appreciated how the author stuck to what is recorded in the Bible but fleshed it out so that it is a very interesting story. I finished Shadow Among Sheaves today; it’s all right, but not great, in my opinion. There are more kisses than I like, and a few swear words showed up. It is a story based on the story of Ruth in the Bible, but set in England in about 1850. Legends of the Vengeance is the first pirate story I have ever enjoyed—only Chautona could write one like this! It’s a good story for boys. Something Borrowed, Someone Blue is her latest book. There’s a lot to think about in this one. The ending isn’t totally a surprise, but it happens suddenly. I can’t give you a link for that one, because I got an advanced reader copy! I think it will be published in a collection in June.

Yes, I read a lot myself. It’s my way of maintaining sanity and taking a break.

Traffic

May 11, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Our house is right on a main highway. I’m thankful that our driveway is attached to a very small street, which in turn goes out to the highway, but there is only an empty quarter-acre section between our house and the main road. That gives us ring-side seats to everything that goes past! We don’t pay a lot of attention most of the time, but sometimes there are unusual sights in the trucking yards across the street that catch our eyes, and when the boys see a pilot vehicle go past with a Wide Load sign on it, they run for the window. Mr. Diligence grabs my camera as he goes, in case there is something very different. Here are some of the things we’ve seen in the past few months.

Traffic jam at the trucking company! What we didn’t get a picture of was the concrete truck that S-L-O-W-L-Y inched its way between these two trucks! He had mere inches to spare on each side.

Look closely—do you see the cow’s heads sticking out of the top of the truck? They were transferring cattle from one truck to the other here.

We frequently see big diggers go past.

One Friday morning, this house went past—and then my crew got to watch it be set down on a foundation in a section a block away from us!

This was the most recent odd load we saw go past—a toilet block!

And then there was this sight. When the ditches were being dug in front of our house for the fibre optic cables, the digger brought up part of the chassis of a vehicle! It appeared that the rest of the vehicle was still down there, rusting away.

One morning early, just after it began to get light, I was out milking and saw a pilot vehicle coming. The driver stopped and waved a lighted wand at a truck going past him down the highway, then went on slowly. Another pilot vehicle came along, and waved a lighted wand to stop someone coming off a side street. I was pretty curious by then, so I watched for the big load. It was the base of a giant crane on tracks! The boom of the crane had been taken off for transport.

Bits and Pieces

April 27, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When we were in America a few months ago, I was trying to explain to a few people exactly how small our kitchen is. These two pictures show all of my workspace. Quite often, the first step, when starting to cook a meal or do anything else in the kitchen, is to wash and dry dishes and get them put away.

A month or so ago, the electric line to the garage started blowing fuses. When Gayle and the boys looked into it, they found that a hole had been rusted through the box around the connections, and the wires inside were bare. No wonder it shorted! They got the wiring replaced, and decided to replace the old, rotting pole, as well. That turned out to be a huge ordeal; they had to chip through concrete several feet down. The replacement pole, while not new, is much better—and it, too is concreted in securely! This photo shows part of the process of chipping out the old concrete.

Mr. Intellectual has been enjoying making things out of wood lately. Here are two of his recent creations. I really like the pancake turner for doing stir-fries!

Mr. Imagination grabbed this winter radish and pretended to be a rhinoceros!

The younger children have harvested most of the pumpkins by now. They enjoyed all those different shapes and colors!

One evening, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss got out all their soft toys and lined them up on the couches. Someone enjoyed it enough to take a couple of pictures.

We had a few mornings chilly enough to start the fire in the living room. One of those times, someone noticed a flame coming out of the center of a log! He was impressed with it and wanted a picture.

As part of the process of installing fibre optic cables in our village, the company had to put everything back into the state it was in before they started working. The last step was to put some tarseal on our driveway where they had cut through to put the cable in. The boys really enjoyed watching that!

Children—March 2019

April 13, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I took quite a few pictures of the children in March! Here, we were doing a science experiment about camouflage. I bought some M&Ms, and they crumpled colored papers in three of the colors of the candies. Then, we put equal amounts of each of seven or eight colors of candy in the basket with the paper, and they were to see how many of each they could easily find in a minute. After counting and recording their results, of course, came the best part—eating them!

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss were playing with the marbles one day and made pictures with them. I let Mr. Imagination take photos of their cats. The first is his, the second is hers, and they made the third together.

The little boys asked for a box that came in the mail, one day, and they cut it up to make swords and shields. Little Miss wanted her own set, and struck this “fierce” pose when she wanted her picture taken.

Little Miss badly wants her hair to be braided now. She hardly has enough, but she loves the results when I take the time for it! (She just saw me writing this and said, “That was when I had long hair.” Now she wants me to braid her hair again!)

Mr. Imagination was picking up leaves to “start a campfire” one day, with Little Miss and Mr. Sweetie watching him.

Last year, Simon gave Little Miss some cosmos plants for her birthday. This year, Esther bought her some seeds, so I started several plants. I couldn’t believe how huge they grew! She has loved having her own flowers to pick, although she can’t reach very many.

While I was in the garden with the camera, I grabbed this picture of our marigolds. I haven’t grown many flowers in the past, but have decided it’s fun to have a few scattered among the vegetables.

Odds and Ends From February 2019

March 30, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

One evening, I took the camera down the hill to where I milk. We are deeply grateful to a local man for allowing us the use of this large paddock, and Poppy appreciates all the grass in it! Pansy has her own fenced-off corner to keep her from direct contact with her mother (for obvious reasons), but they can be fairly close. Notice the mountains across the river? I enjoy seeing them in all their different moods.

To get into the paddock, we cut across the fence near the top of the hill, using this stile that my boys built (on the suggestions of the property owner). Then, we scramble carefully down a very steep hill.

I wanted to make lasagna one day, so Mr. Imagination helped me make the noodles. Yum!

This was one of our first big pickings of tomatoes. Last week’s, about a month after this photo was taken, we got about twice as many as are in this picture! We’re very thankful for such a good harvest from our 104 plants. Today, I’m making the third enormous batch of salsa, since my big boys eat so much. We just happen to have very spicy peppers this year, which makes the flavor they enjoy, so the popular vote this week was to make salsa instead of bottling whole tomatoes and juice. We had about 110 pints from the first two batches; I think we’ll have 60-70 more after today. Hope that’s enough! Hard-working teenage boys eat a lot, and one of them was eating it by the cupful when I asked for taste-testers this morning. Notice the pink and black tomatoes? We had a bumper crop from our heirloom plants this year. We’re loving eating those super-tasty ones!

Little Miss is watching me write this. She wanted me to write down her story, too: The man was picking apples. Then he saw the big, bad wolf, and then he made a brick house quickly and then he went in it and the big, bad wolf said, “Let me come in, let me come in.” Then the guy said, “No,” and then the big, bad wolf said, “Well, then, I will huff and I will puff and I will blow your house in.” Then he huffed and he puffed and he couldn’t blow the man’s house in. He said, “There’s a farmer’s tree down the road. Will you get up at 6:00 in the morning and come with me to the farmer’s?” The end.

Boys and Their Projects

March 23, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

My boys have been coming up with some good projects lately, like usual. Mr. Intellectual has built this chair. It hasn’t been used yet, because he wants to treat it for wood borer before he finishes it.

Mr. Diligence was being a clown one day. His little sister had been given a sticker book for Christmas, and when she finished taking the stickers out, he took all the extra and made a hat for himself.

Simon made these hatchet handles while I was gone. The red one is rimu, the white one is willow, and the dark one is blue gum. He said that wood was so hard that it took twice as long to shape and sand as the others did. The rimu is a pretty hard wood, but brittle; it splintered when he was throwing the hatchets. In its defense, it was 80 years old; we tore it off the inside of the walls of Esther’s room last year. The blue gum is the strongest, and he likes it the best. He made the handle for the knife in the second photo from some redwood, when we lived at the last house.

Mr. Diligence built me this cupboard from some of those rimu boards. He spent several months on it, off and on, until he finally got the last coat of teak oil on it and the boys brought it into the house a few weeks ago. There are five shelves in it, and it is a perfect pantry for me. Now, the linen closet is much better organized, and the shelves are no longer in danger of collapsing from the weight of the cans stacked on them!

Mr. Diligence also got started on building the window seat we have been talking about ever since we bought this house. (Can you tell that he has to have a project to work on?) He built a bin into it for Little Miss’s toys. We’re planning to cover it with a cushion as soon as we get hold of a foam mattress to cut down to size. We bought the upholstery fabric for it—but our piece of leftover foam rubber wasn’t big enough. So, the seat is rather hard right now.

The little boys and Little Miss like to play in the sandbox. One day, they built this elaborate castle.

Simon occasionally spends some time working on his Austin. One day I found him polishing the chrome.

Another day he took it on a short test drive. Little Miss was getting ready to cry because I told her she couldn’t go along, so I asked if she wanted to take a picture. This is what she got as he was going out the street. Simon was excited that the car ran, but found out that he has to replace the gas lines. Also, he couldn’t get it started again after he got home.

January 2019 Photos

March 17, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Whew…I’ve been getting a bit behind. I really don’t recommend taking a three-week trip overseas in the middle of summer, then trying to jump right back into school and preserving the harvest when you get home, if you want to stay on top of things. And then, of course, pregnancy to add to the mix…and a three-day trip to the other side of the island last weekend…well, anyway, here are the last few photos from January. Sometime this week I hope to look through memory cards again so I can start catching up on everything that’s been happening since the middle of February!

The canoe got its last strips inserted, and Mr. Intellectual finished sanding the outside, before we left. They got the fibreglass they need to cover it, but haven’t started that process yet.

When we see an escort vehicle go past with an “Oversize Vehicle” sign on it, we usually watch to see what is coming. Usually, we see a large digger (excavator), but sometimes it’s something more exciting, like this bulldozer from a gold mine near Reefton. This machine is HUGE!

Here is a more common sight. I think a little boy was experimenting with my camera to see how he could best get pictures of vehicles going past.

This was one of our first harvests of zucchini. Isn’t it pretty? We’ve had many times more than this with subsequent harvests; I’m very happy with a number of the crops from the garden.

Here is a bellbird, as the flax blossoms were coming to an end.

One day, the boys picked a bunch of peas from a neighbor’s field, after he offered us what we wanted. The boys spent the morning building a pea sheller. It worked well—for a few minutes. Then, something stripped out and they finished the job by hand!

We sure enjoyed the kittens before they went to new homes!