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October 2022 Photos

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As usual, I have a number of photos from October that didn’t fit into their own posts!

Gayle often walks somewhere with the little girls on Sunday afternoons. They like to go down to the bridge, and one time he took a picture of them on the sign for our little town.

One evening, Miss Joy requested that someone take a picture of her holding Princess!

One day, we saw helicopters flying over the river. The next day, they were flying over it again. We watched closely, and saw them following the riverbed exactly. We couldn’t figure out what was happening, but then we started hearing jet boats, as well. I searched online for awhile, and finally found information about a jet boat marathon that was happening. One leg of it was up the Grey River, and into the Ahaura! We went down to the riverbed to watch the boats go back downstream. They move fast!

Our heifer Bluebell had her calf in October. It was a little bull, so we decided not to keep him. We were glad that the farm Simon was working on wanted him for breeding!

Someone gave a battery-powered car to the family in whose home we meet for church. The little children love it! It can be operated with pedals and a steering wheel on it, or by a remote control. Here, Miss Joy and another baby were riding while one of the older children operated the remote.

I think these pictures are actually from September. The greenhouse was looking pretty lush! Since then, I have ripped out the old lettuce and planted peppers along the right-hand side.

I did an experiment with onions this year. The ones to the left were planted from seed directly in the ground in May. To the right, the top tray is ones of the same kind that I planted in that try in June, and the others were a different variety, planted in the tray in July or early August. We set them all out in the main garden at the same time, in September. I am hoping for larger onions than usual! So far, the ones I started earliest are doing best. The ones started in June mostly died, and the red ones, started last, are doing fairly well.

This is how I plant onions. I dig a shallow trench and lay the roots in it, then cover them with soil. After a few days the plants stand upright, and, theoretically, start growing!

Ducklings!

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The last morning I walked down to the bottom paddock to milk the cow before we brought them up here for grazing for a few weeks, I noticed a pair of Paradise ducks with a new brood of ducklings. They were swimming out of our small creek into the big one. A few days later, when the boys went down to play, Mr. Imagination soon came up to get his camera because they were back in the small creek. He got these pictures. Aren’t they cute!

Birthday

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Yesterday was my birthday. It was a perfect day–a normal day! I did school with the children in the morning, and that went well. We’re winding down our school year already, finishing a few of the subjects for the year, so we don’t have as much to do. In the afternoon, I got to play in the garden for awhile, and got some more things planted. Then, I cooked one of my favorite meals in the evening (steaks from a steer we raised, roasted kumara/sweet potatoes, and Silverbeet/Swiss Chard, with a delicious dessert I hadn’t made since I did Home Ec in high school). I was amazed at the gifts my family gave me. Mr. Sweetie gave me that beautiful bouquet, Elijah gave me a bay tree, and James gave me a lavender plant. Then, Gayle brought in a gift, which I didn’t expect: he replaced the touch lamps on our nightstands, which came with the house and were much the worse for wear since they were loved by a toddler, with new ones! I feel very spoiled.

August/September 2022 Photos

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It’s time to catch up with the pictures I have from August and September. When our blogs went down, I quit posting on the weekends like I had been, because I couldn’t for a week and then had to redo two months worth of posts. Then, because we changed hosts, we had to pay hundreds of dollars for the new hosting service. There was no way we were staying with a company that frequently had downtime and then completely lost everything for a week, and didn’t have it all backed up when they got it back! We realized that my blog is taking up most of the space we need, because I have so many pictures. Esther found a program that compresses them to a much smaller format, so I’m working my way through the archives, finding all the pictures I used in old posts and compressing them, removing them from the blog and uploading them again. It’s fun to see all those old pictures from when my now-10-year-old was tiny, but it’s a lot of work! I have made it through almost the first year of blogging so far. As you can imagine, that takes a lot of time, which means I haven’t been thinking so much about putting up new posts. At the same time, seeing what I did with my blog back then in 2011 and 2012 has inspired me to put up more frequent, shorter posts. What do you think? Would you rather that, or longer, more infrequent catch-up posts? Comment and let me know what you like.

One evening I went into Esther’s room to talk to her about something and looked out her window. The clouds were incredible! I tried taking pictures with a camera and my iPad, and this is the best one I got. The clouds were even more spectacular than that!

We did this craft when we studied Uganda. It’s supposed to be a lion with a mane! I didn’t have the right colors of paper, so we made do with what we had.

Poppy had her calf on the first of August–another cute, tiny heifer. We named the new baby Rosie.

This is Mr. Imagination, Miss Joy, and Little Miss going across the road to visit the new calf.

The magnolia tree bloomed. That’s always beautiful! Half the tree seems to have died, though, which we can’t figure out.

Miss Joy loved her puzzles! She has three or four that she knows how to do, and some days she has put them together half a dozen times in a row. I think she’s gotten bored with them, though, because she hasn’t asked for them for awhile.

Pork!

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A few weeks ago, a friend called us to say that someone had a lot of wild pigs that had been killed in a competition, and they were available for anyone who came to get them. Elijah drove the 15 minutes to pick up three for us and two for another friend. We won’t turn down free meat! We got ours skinned that night.

The next day, Esther and I spent the morning boning them out. Wild pork has a rather gamy flavor, so I wanted to make most of the meat into sausage. We saved two legs for ham, and threw away one entire pig because it smelled so strong we couldn’t stand it. We ended up with 70 pounds of meat to make into sausage! She put it through the mincer, and then we weighed the meat and mixed in the seasonings. Then, she put it through the mincer again.

After Gayle and Elijah got home, we stuffed the sausage into casings.

Miss Joy had a great time helping to package the sausages!

Now, we’re enjoying (only slightly gamy) delicious pork sausages!

Tomatoes

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It’s that time of year when we start all the tomato plants we need for the upcoming summer! This year, Esther wanted to help, so she could learn how I do it; most years, I do all of this project by myself. Late in August, we put the seeds into the soil.

We put the tray of seeds in the greenhouse under a second layer of plastic until they germinated. Esther cleaned out that corner of the greenhouse. There are several tomato plants there that she transplanted in there from the garden, where they started growing late in the summer. We had kept an extra layer of plastic over them all winter, and they lived, although, with low light levels for a few months, they didn’t thrive. One has a green tomato on it, though!

About a week or a week and a half later, the tiny seedlings were ready to prick out and transplant into individual punnets. It was a beautiful day, so we sat at the picnic table to do this job.

I took this picture on the 25th of September, about a month after we initially planted the seeds. The plants had been in our hothouse, a frame covered with greenhouse plastic on our back step, which faces the sun.

Today, the 29th of September, five weeks after starting the seeds, I decided it was time to transplant the little tomatoes into bigger pots. Little Miss helped with this job; she loves writing the labels! We didn’t get the entire job done, but did about a fourth of them, choosing the largest plants to start with. Now, they get to live and grow in the big greenhouse until time to plant them in the garden.

Milking Time!

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We decided to set up our milking machine down in the paddock where the cows live, at least for now. We’re only milking one cow at the moment, and she walks so slowly that it’s hardly worthwhile to bring her up here to milk with the machine–but my arms can’t hold up to handmilking. So, right now, I’m walking down there twice a day. It’s a lovely walk most of the time (except when it rains). I took my camera along yesterday morning when I went down at 7:00 for the morning milking.

This cherry tree is in bloom along the roadside. I have been thoroughly enjoying the beautiful flowers and the fragrant aroma!

This is the view from the gate into the paddock. I love seeing the range of mountains to the west of us–the Paparoa Range.

There’s Poppy, waiting for me. Behind her are the young stock. The one in the middle is Bluebell, who will have her first calf in the next few weeks, and the two yearling steers are on either side of her. Bluebell is Poppy’s daughter. Notice the nice roof James built for the hay, to keep it from spoiling so fast?

We moved the old milking shed up from the low spot where we had first placed it, to this place on the stopbank, where it never gets mucky. James built a shed up against it to house the milking machine.

Meanwhile, the calves wait for their bottles. The brown one is Rosie, Poppy’s latest calf, and the other is a beefy that Simon brought home from the farm he works on. They are best friends, and Rosie gives the bull calf a good scrubbing with her tongue every day.

Explanation

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In case you are wondering why so many posts are coming through this week that look familiar… there is a reason. And a good one.

Last week, the day after I posted the second of the two reviews I had due for the week, my blog went down. So did Esther’s website and blog. After a couple of days, we learned that the problem was with our hosting service. A hacker had gotten in to their website and completely wiped all 12 of their servers. They immediately started restoring websites from their backup, but it took until today to get our blog back up. Most of it came back; I need to redo two months’ worth of posts. That means that you will be getting more emails than normal. I apologize for that; just delete them.

We will be switching to another hosting service as soon as possible. However, Esther can’t get into the back end of the back end of all three websites. Her username and password didn’t transfer over. She is trying hard to get that back, but we don’t know when we’ll be able to get that. Until then, we can still post as normal, but we can’t move to a different host that is (hopefully) more reliable–this one has had problems in the last few months–and we can’t back up the blogs. Esther is wishing she had been able to back them up, but until a couple of months ago, we didn’t have enough data to be able to do it, and then she didn’t think about it when we changed internet providers. Lesson learned–we’ll be backing up frequently after this! It’s not a nice feeling to wonder whether the blog is gone for good.

Ancient Egypt

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A little over a year ago, we started working through a Project Passport study from Home School in the Woods, about Ancient Egypt. We worked on it off and on until about April, when we finally finished it (we were alternating one of these stops with a science lesson, a geography lesson, and a few writing lessons–one “extra” a day). I’ve been intending ever since we finished to share some photos of the final products, and finally got them taken today.

This was one of our biggest projects. We all worked together to build this temple. It was quite interesting to see the different parts of it!

Each of the children made their own model of the step pyramid, and wrote a paragraph about it. Interestingly, there is a theory that Imhotep was actually Joseph! (This was Little Miss’s model.)

After we finished the study, we assembled lap books with all the mini books we had been making through the entire study. These lap books are made from a file folder with card stock taped inside to make more pages. Can you guess whose this book is? Clue: the boys don’t like the color pink!

These are the mini books we put inside–aren’t they creative! I love using the things that Home School in the Woods comes up with.

We also wrote a newspaper. We added a couple of articles or pictures to it with each lesson. This was a good way to review what we had learned.

We also did other projects that didn’t go into the lap book. We stored these in 2- or 3-ring binders.

We didn’t end up doing most of these projects. We just cut out the cards and put them in our books. One was to make a reed boat; someone did get around to doing that, but I forgot to get a picture of it.

We added to a timeline all the way through the study, too. It was quite easy to see where to put the figures, and quite interesting to look at how historical events fit together.

We added a postcard to our rack for each lesson. Some had funny stories–the most memorable was the one about the pharoah being annoyed by the hippos roaring hundreds of miles away!

We also added places to our map as we went. We put glue on the Nile River, and added black pepper to represent the silt that overflowed from the Nile each year during the Inundation.

We thoroughly enjoyed doing this project, so much so that, even though we didn’t get a project from Home School in the Woods for review this year (instead, we got the timeline set I reviewed a few weeks ago), the school children wanted to do something and I bought a lap book set about the Wonders of the World. We’re enjoying working through that, and I’ll post pictures when we finish it.

July 2022 Photos

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For some reason, I often end up with only a few photos in July. It’s the middle of winter, so maybe there just isn’t that much that’s inspiring to take pictures of? Here are the few I found in my picture folder.

This is Mr. Sweetie, with Mr. Imagination’s cockatiel, Jo-Jo, on his shoulder. Jo-Jo prefers to sit on the organizers on top of my desk, or on a high cupboard, and watch what happens in the house, but sometimes Mr. Sweetie can coax him onto his shoulder like this.

Mr. Sweetie borrowed a book from a friend. He read it, and then Mr. Imagination picked it up and read the whole book. When they were going to return it, Little Miss found it in the van, and she read the whole book, too! If you know anything about the struggles I had teaching a couple of our older boys to read, you’ll know how much this picture means to me.

One day, the girls were playing on our street with the go-cart. First, Little Miss pushed Miss Joy around–and then they reversed! I tried to get a picture when I could see both their faces, but wasn’t fast enough.

Last Sunday after we came home from church, Miss Joy laid down on the floor and went to sleep. It was late enough that we had decided not to have her go down for a nap, but she obviously needed one!

This was about a month ago. She was so tickled to be able to “read” me this book! She had done a better job a day or two before, “reading” it to me, and wasn’t real thrilled about reading it again, but I coaxed her to and she obliged. I held the iPad above her head to get this clip, so she wouldn’t know what I was doing.