Lots of Helpers

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Activities at Home

Leaf Fun

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When the leaves fell off the peach trees in May, the three youngest had great fun raking them up and playing in them. I remember loving maple trees when I was young, because of the wonderful leaf piles! This isn’t as good, but as close as our children are likely to get to that. While they were playing with the leaves, they got the idea of making a movie about it. I’m not sure what the plot was supposed to be, if any, but I put together the clips they got. You might want to turn it off when it starts getting crazy–when all three are tumbling together in the pile.

April 2024 Photos

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Here are the rest of April’s photos! A few days after Easter, our new cow, Maple, finally calved–three weeks after we thought she would, based on what the previous owner told us. I had started to wonder if something was wrong! No, just a late calf. Elijah took this picture when he went down to take care of the chickens and discovered a new calf, which another boy had overlooked when he went down an hour or so earlier. The calf is a bull, a Jersey/Dexter cross. These first two pictures are from the first evening; the third picture was a week or two later, after we started bottle-feeding him and he decided that people were all right. His name is Clifford, as in Clifford the Big Red…Calf!

Remember how much fun we had earlier this year hatching chicks? Well, we ended up with a lot of them. The roosters from the first two batches have moved into the freezer by now, and we sold the pullets. These are some of the pictures we took to advertise them.

We went to Reefton for church one Sunday, and before coming home, drove around to check out the project that has been ongoing for several years: rebuilding the hydroelectric plant. Reefton was the first town in the Southern Hemisphere to be lit with electric lights, but the electric plant fell into disrepair a long time ago. They got a grant recently to rebuild it as a museum. This is the water race, looking toward the building that will house the turbine.

What happens when a four-year-old hurts her foot? She gets to sit on the couch with her blankie, a big stack of books, and the recordings that Grandma made of those books! She spent a couple of hours listening to those stories after cutting her foot badly.

I don’t normally take my phone with me when I go down to milk the cows in the morning, but one day I did. On the way up the hill, I looked up the valley to the east, and saw this breathtaking sight.

Here were our record-breaking vegetables in April–a potato and a tomato. The weights are in grams.

I was surprised one day when the children showed up with a pukeko chick. I had them take it right back down the hill and try to give it back to the parents–hope it survived!

March 2024 Photos

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And here are the rest of our photos from March! First, some pictures of the animals. I bought a new cow; she is behind Little Miss’s head in this first picture. She gives the type of milk we need, and was due to calve soon, so we needed to sell a couple of our other cows who don’t have the genetics we want. I took this picture to upload in an advertisement for Poppy, our old faithful cow. The girls were delighted to pat her while I was taking pictures–but there were a lot of tears the day we loaded her into a truck to go to her new home. We also sold her daughter Rosie, the one at the far left of this picture. Both have good homes, which I’m happy for.

These are the pullets from the first lot we hatched. We sold a few, but we need to sell the rest.

These are the turkeys. They are quite curious about everything! I took this picture the day Poppy went to her new home, while I was waiting for the truck to arrive.

And these are the house pets!

The garden has been outdoing itself this year, with bumper crops of almost everything. I’ve sent several boxfuls of zucchini we weren’t getting used down to the the cows. Here, the little children are cutting them up, having fun carving before the squash got eaten.

Mr. Imagination found this rutabaga in the garden. He wanted to know what it tasted like, so I cooked part of it. We didn’t like it, though (probably too old), so the cows got that, too. It didn’t go to waste!

This was one day’s harvest of tomatoes and beetroot. Since, we’ve had much larger harvests of tomatoes. We’re getting a bit tired of dealing with them.

Mr. Imagination turned 12 in March. He requested kebabs for his birthday meal, so the children had great fun assembling them, and then he got to help grill them.

Miss Joy wanted me to take a picture of her tower.

We saw this across the road one day. It’s apparently a hotel on wheels!

These four pictures were taken by Mr. Sweetie. He was intrigued by the artistry created by a foggy morning and steamy windows.

We went to Timaru for Easter Conference as usual. On Sunday afternoon I supervised our four youngest, and several children from another family, for an hour or so at a park across the street from the hall. This was a game of tag in which they couldn’t touch the ground. If they did, they were automatically it!

I got cold after awhile, so I suggested that the girls use the colored pencils an older lady had just given Miss Joy, and draw pictures. They spent the next half hour or hour, until the next meeting, drawing, while the older young people sang next to them.

February 2024 Photos

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We didn’t take many pictures in February, after we got home! I was too busy trying to catch up. This first picture shows part of what I had to catch up on. We harvested a couple of bushels of beans every week for about a month.

We had fun, too. This book that Elijah and Simon were enjoying is one that my mom sent along with a lot of other books that I had stored at her place. We went to the North Island to meet up with people who came from the States and other places to hold a conference, and it was a good opportunity to have books brought in suitcases. This book is hilarious, and I thought Mom would enjoy seeing it being enjoyed.

Kea, the budgie, does not like humans to touch her. She will not allow us to pick her up or hold her. However, we got home from church one day, and found her desperately trying to push out between the bars of her cage. We let her out to fly–but she wanted right back in! She was so focused on pushing through the bars that she let us hold her until she could go back to her cage. We ended up putting her in a smaller cage with narrower spaces between the bars, and the next day she was back to normal.

This cat is often found sleeping in very strange places. Anything confined is perfect for her–especially if it’s something new!

January 2024 Photos

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I’ve finally finished posting the pictures from our North Island trip! Now to catch up on the photos from around home. Here are the rest from January.

After a couple of four wheel drive trips, the boys’ trucks were in need of a wash. Miss Joy happily helped operate the power washer!

James spent more time working on his sleepout. This was the day he started cladding the outside.

The boys cleaned the carport and garage. They decided it was time to get rid of this old stationary engine that had been sitting there for about three years. Simon wanted to restore it and get it working again, but finally gave up. Elijah listed it on Trade Me for a $1 reserve auction, and it went up over $250! The next challenge was to load it on the buyer’s truck. This was the test run with the tractor-mounted crane that Simon and James built to hoist cattle they are butchering. It worked, so when the buyer came to get the engine, that’s how they lifted it! The engine had wheels under it, so it was easy to get it out of the carport, but too heavy to lift by hand.

We went to Nelson Creek for a baptism one Sunday afternoon, and of course the children wanted to swim.

See what James has on his feet to go swimming? They were actually very light-weight boots, full of holes so they didn’t fill up with water.

I think this was taken down at the river.

Little Miss wanted to make braided bread, so Esther helped her.

Part of the second hatch of chicks. It’s so fun to see them hatching!

Garden–December 2023

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I didn’t take very many pictures of the garden in December. I spent an hour one morning talking to my sister on the phone while I weeded this patch. That was a great way to pass the time while doing a job like this!

The entire bed before I finished…

…and after the weeding was finished and I mulched it.

One of the children took a picture of these roses by the house.

They also got a close-up of some of the strawberries!

While I was working in the garden one hot afternoon, the children had a waterfight with the neighbor, using his water guns, which he offered them the use of. It was pretty funny to watch!

I took this video the second week of January.

December 2023 Photos

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Here are the rest of the pictures from December! James worked on his sleepout for the first two days of the Christmas holidays. He and Mr. Sweetie got all the walls framed up.

Miss Joy busy doing school!

Elijah grew a beard for a couple of months. I got a picture of him just before he took it off.

The younger boys built this bike ramp and had a lot of fun doing jumps and taking pictures of it.

We’ve been enjoying watching the birds on the flax blossoms outside our windows. This is a tui; we have also see a bellbird and a lot of starlings.

We had a lot of rain the last couple of days of December, so the afternoon of the 31st, the girls and I walked down to look at the river. It had already gone down several inches.

Esther got the game Ticket to Ride, and we spent a lot of time playing it.

She’s a bookworm already!

Esther has been making masa, and Miss Joy helped her grind it one day, and then played in the moist dough.

Hatching

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We bought a new incubator a couple of months ago, when the old one we were given quit working. So far, we have used it for two batches of eggs. Our first batch, which started with 56 eggs, gave us 35 chicks. Hatch day was very exciting! This was the first one to hatch. The poor thing had a few hours with no company, and was very lonely.

That evening, we took all the babies out of the incubator; there were already 24 of them!

The next morning we moved all 35 out to the brooder.

About a week later, we started the incubator again, with a fresh batch of 56 eggs. Princess decided this was a great place to sleep; it was nice and warm! However, she must have pushed the lid a little, and that messed with the turning mechanism. We had to make Princess stop sleeping there.

These eggs are hatching tonight; so far, we have 16 chicks out of the 55 that we left after candling the 56 we started with. The first lot moved outside into a pen on the grass yesterday. There were 34 of them left; a cat pulled one through a crack in the side of the coop one day and had a snack. We patched up the crack. This picture shows what I saw one day this week when I opened the door:

November 2023 Photos

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Here are the last of the pictures we took in November! We went to Canterbury to visit friends early in the month, and Mr. Imagination and his friend went hunting. They were pretty pleased with themselves!

Miss Joy was worn out on the way home. She fell asleep a few minutes after leaving, and slept most of the three hours home. Little Miss pretended to be asleep, but she never actually dropped off.

The children found this toy truck at the dump, their favorite “shop.” They got their big brothers to help bring it home, and then Mr. Imagination replaced the motor with one from a lawn mower, and got it running. They had great fun driving it around for a couple of weeks, and then broke something. Simon took it up to his house to do something with it.

Simon and Elijah went hunting one night and Mr. Imagination went with them. They were pretty excited to get this deer! It was a young hind, so very tender.

While Esther and I were cutting up the deer, I asked Miss Joy to peel some carrots for the next day’s soup. She got one or two peeled, then got distracted eating them!

One Sunday afternoon, Miss Joy was having fun spinning around. She wanted me to get a picture of her dress swirling out, so I did, and took a few seconds of video footage, too.

We got to go on a field trip to Shantytown, a historical village close to us. We had a short lesson about using native plants for food and medicine, then went on a brief bush walk, collecting leaves. Then, we investigated the leaves, learning what we could from observing them.

We also got to watch a demonstration of sluicing, a method for mining gold that was used in the Gold Rush days.

We put 56 eggs in our new incubator.

We found the cat cuddled up to the incubator one evening!

Garden–November

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We got most of the garden planted in November. We also got a water tank to collect rainwater from the garage roof to use in dry times! It is enormous; we estimate it holds about 15,000 liters (that’s in the neighborhood of 3,000 gallons). It took a couple of tries to get a HIAB truck (crane) to get the job done, and even then we were holding our breath to see if the truck would get back out of the garden after setting the tank down! It worked–praise God–and now we’re hoping for enough rain to fill the tank.

Our pitcher plant is blooming this year. Such an interesting plant!

We got a truckload of 10 cubic meters of compost delivered, and spread it through the garden. The children did part of the job, and Gayle finished it.

Remember my story about the tomatoes that didn’t grow? A friend in Canterbury mailed me her extra seedlings, and I potted them. A month later, they were looking like this, and now they are growing fast in the ground!

These are the ones I started in early October. This is seven weeks after seeding them. They grew fast!

After setting out the tomatoes we spread newspapers on the ground in between them, and then rotten silage that a local farmer gave us. We’re hoping for few weeds! This thick mulch is certainly keeping the soil moist. Other places have gotten rather dry already, but it’s very wet under those layers of paper and hay.