Activities at Home

Back Home Again!

September 7, 2017 by NZ Filbruns 3 Comments

Yes, I know we’ve been home in New Zealand for around six weeks now. It has taken me awhile to get caught up on posting on here. I like to keep things in chronological order, because that’s just the way I am, so here we go.

This was our first evening home. We landed in Christchurch around 9:30 am, so got home around noon. We unloaded the van and I cooked lunch; in the afternoon I unpacked all the suitcases and plastic totes we had packed with books, fabric, and other treasures we brought home. We sure enjoyed the warmth of the house; a friend had come early that morning and started both fires for us. It was quite chilly outside, since it was still midwinter. We were used to the heat of midsummer in Ohio, of course, so the warm house was especially welcome. By evening, what with the difficulty sleeping sitting up on the airplane the night before, and the eight-hour time difference between the Eastern time zone of the United States and our time here, these boys fell asleep waiting for supper to be ready. We tried to wake them up to eat, but finally gave up and carried the two younger ones to bed. Mr. Diligence stayed all night on the couch. Little Miss wasn’t asleep, but she was imitating her brothers!

A couple of mornings after we got home, we were treated to a visit from this pair of Paradise Ducks in our yard!

Our first Sunday home, we went to church in Kaikoura, enjoying thoroughly the beautiful mountains. Some us us found out how much we had missed the mountains and the sea while we were gone!

Little Miss was delighted to finally get to wear this dress, which a great-aunt had given her. Because of the long sleeves, I saved it to wear here, where it’s colder, rather than in Ohio where it was so hot.

The cats were happy to be home. We picked them up on our way home from the airport, and they obviously remembered this place. We wondered if they would run away, but they were happy here right away. Esther was amused when she saw this scene one afternoon.

This was our second Sunday home; we went to Waikari for church. It poured for a couple of hours, but the skies started to clear as we left, and then we saw this brilliant double rainbow!

Looking back the other direction, this is what we saw.

We greatly enjoyed our trip to America, but there is no place like home, and no place like New Zealand!

Video–The Great Water Trick

June 27, 2017 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

It’s been a few years since our children have made a movie, but they’ve been planning one for about three years. They finally figured out how to do it, and got it made in February. Somehow, I forgot to post it then, so here you go. I love this one!

Video–Happy Hill Farm

June 18, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

This is a video Esther made many years ago, before we moved to New Zealand. She did a short tour of our farm, plus some fun bits of her brothers playing. This is quite a keepsake to us; we love to watch it every so often.

May 2017

June 11, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

And the rest of the pictures from May! This is a fairly common sight in the morning; here Mr. Inventor is doing his typing lesson while his cat keeps him company, and Mr. Sweetie is trying to get himself started on his Math in a cozy spot in front of the fire.

After a heavy rain, the underground cistern overflowed, so Mr. Imagination and Little Miss had great fun playing in the puddle one morning. Great fun, that is, until she got muddy—see the picture below! Then, she was done. Because the cistern was overflowing, and we had no need for the water, I let the boys pump it out to the duck pond. They forgot to turn the pump off at bedtime, though, and Esther discovered it sucking air the next afternoon when we were away! Oops. It’s refilled now, though. Quite a contrast to a few months ago, when we were saving water in every way we could. We’re so thankful for rain!

Mr. Sweetie was playing with a candle one day. The wick was long enough he was able to get it to curl around like this, and he wanted to take a picture of it.

On chilly days, the fire is a main focal point.

I’m not sure what these two were up to. They made a line of the Childcraft books along the hallway. And the blankets wrapped around them? I don’t have a clue!

Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination again.

Little Miss in May

June 4, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

This is a busy little girl. She’s always looking for things to do, especially if they feel like she’s helping with something. Here, she found the tomatillos I had just washed, and spent about half an hour transferring them from one container to another and back again.

Little Miss is happy—but is the cat as happy? This cat is extremely tolerant of her tormenter. She’s only scratched Little Miss a couple of times, and she is mauled daily and hauled around a lot.

Two little people in a boat!

This little girl doesn’t like having her hair in ponytails. I put the rubberbands in to go to church, and tell her she can’t take them out till after church, and she mostly leaves them. One day, she brought me five rubberbands and wanted them all put in! Silly girl. They didn’t last long, though; she soon pulled them out.

“Want to take this book to ‘Merica! Read it wif Gamma.” She has no idea what an airplane is, but she’s pretty excited about the upcoming trip.

She got one of my coverings out of my drawer and put it on. She was pretty pleased with herself!

She unloaded an entire shelf of books the other day, onto the couch. When I told her she would need to put them away, she sat herself down and said she had to read all of them first.

Busy Boys

June 2, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

My boys know how to keep themselves busy. Here are a few of the projects they’ve been doing lately. Mr. Inventor built this tandem bicycle. He cut apart a couple of bikes and welded them back together. The boys love it; they can hook a trailer to it and with two of them peddling they can carry quite a load.

Counting down…till we fly to America. This was a few weeks ago; the chains are pretty short now!

Mr. Diligence made a cross, and Mr. Intellectual engraved Seth’s name and dates on it, to temporarily mark the grave until we get a proper headstone.

Mr. Diligence researching something.

Some of the busyness is not serious—sometimes they pull shenanigans like this! It took Mr. Intellectual quite awhile and a bit of help to free himself.

Mr. Inventor spent one morning trimming trees so he could mow under them.

The loggers. Mr. Inventor cut these logs across the road, and they hauled them home this way!

Mowing lawn one last time before we leave. He didn’t want to rake up the grass clippings, so he used the bag and pulled a wheelbarrow tub around to put the grass in so he didn’t have to walk to the other side of the yard every time it was full.

April 2017 Pictures

May 30, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Time to get caught up with the random pictures!

Remember that post I did about salsa? After I added all the other ingredients, I ended up with two pots full!

Does Little Miss look like she has gained some weight? We were given a big boxful of shoes, gumboots, and a few dresses, her size or a little smaller. She wanted to wear all the dresses at once, so she has five dresses on in this picture!

One afternoon when everyone was away except her and me, she found this sunflower head and sat herself down to pick the seeds out. She got a handful before she got tired of it.

Yes, this is me laughing. I had sent a text to Gayle at work, and although he got an advertising text sent him just before that, he didn’t see mine. So, I sent him another, and we were all laughing about the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Gayle reading my text.

One of our favorite meals—straw hats.

Little Miss

What to do with an empty chips bag—tape it shut tightly, then pop it with a bang! Boys….

We didn’t have a hard frost till early May, but I picked all the peppers the end of April. These were all from the greenhouse. I was astounded; I hadn’t thought they did so well this year!

This silly cat is always looking for a new spot to sleep.

I’m fixing my bicycle!

Gayle took the boys to the beach to get some sand, so the sandbox is full again. It’s been quite popular—although I’m glad the main popularity only lasted a couple of days; a lot was tracked into the house during those days.

Mr. Diligence and Little Miss mowing lawn.

Mr. Inventor, Little Miss, and Mr. Diligence all mowing at once.

Evening Walk

May 26, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We don’t have enough grass here for our animals, so we graze the cow on the roadside during the day. We bring her home every evening before dark, to milk her and keep her in our paddock overnight. Seth always used to bring her home, and after he died Mr. Intellectual took over the job. One day around the first of February, though, I went to get her when everyone else was away and decided it would be a good way to get my daily walk in. I do it when I have time in the evening. Usually I take Little Miss in her stroller, but one evening in April I invited Mr. Imagination to go along instead. He was thrilled to get to go, and rode his bicycle ahead of me. One treat was seeing the moon rising over the hills to our east, the other side of Cheviot.

There’s our cow, waiting for us!

Connections

May 18, 2017 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I love the connections we sometimes get to make. We’ve been reading aloud a book titled The Broken Blade, a story about voyageurs who traveled from Montreal to Grand Portage in 1800. The main character is a young boy whose father got injured just before signing up with a crew for the summer’s trip, so Pierre went in his father’s place. In the chapters we read this morning, the five canoes reached Lake Superior, and as they crossed a large bay a fierce storm came up. They barely reached the shore of an island before the canoe sank.

At lunch, we often watch some educational videos online. One we watched today was from an article I came across this morning, about a shipwreck recently discovered in Lake Superior.

We watched the video, and then read a bit of the article. As we were reading, I wondered where the wreck was, so then we went to Google Maps to find Michipicoten Harbour. As we looked at the map, we started thinking it looked like the map in The Broken Blade that we had been studying this morning. We grabbed the book, and sure enough, it was the same bay! What fun.

By the way, The Broken Blade is quite a gripping story about the voyageurs and the hard life they lived. We are really enjoying it, although there are some very graphic places, such as when they killed a deer or when one man was killed. It’s so real, you feel like you were there. We are rather upset with how the author made the one man die, and wondering why it had to be him. We’re hoping there is a good reason later on. What I loved about all this was the connections some of the children made, between the book and real life, and what’s happening today! I also loved that it was totally unplanned!

This is the map we were looking at in our book; the yellow arrow shows where the canoes got caught in the storm. As far as we can tell, they landed on the island.

Here is the Google Maps page we looked at:

And I just realized, we actually did a bit of geography today! That doesn’t happen every day.

Strange People

May 14, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We had some very strange-looking people in our house this evening. First, this apparition appeared:

He wouldn’t tell us his name, but we think maybe it was Mr. Imagination. Sure sounded like his giggle, anyway! Then, a little while later, this one showed up in the kitchen:

Later, after we ate, we were treated to a sword-swallowing show. I’ll let you catch a brief glimpse of Mr. Inventor’s skills.