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More June 2024 Photos!

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Here are the rest of the pictures I saved from everyone’s cameras and devices in June. Sometime in May, Mr. Sweetie had a dentist appointment, so we spent the day in town. Esther went along, and we went to all the secondhand shops in town. I found a duvet cover that was so pretty I got it to make into dresses, and then put these together for the girls from it. The other side was yellow green stripes on a white background, and I got pajama pants for two boys from that! I was pretty happy with that find.

While Esther was away the first weekend in June, I found this email in my Spam folder. I was so amused that I took a picture of it to show her before deleting it.

Mr. Imagination builds a lot of things out of Lego.

I’m not sure what this was all about!

Our turkey flock. We have since butchered most of them. We have been spending way too much on feed for them, and not getting much in the way of returns, since hawks destroy most of the nests. And now, since a strip along one side of this paddock was sold, they don’t have anywhere safe to make nests. So, now I won’t have to put up with the mess they made in the milking shed! And, we’re enjoying eating turkey.

Miss Joy loves the attention her brothers give her! Mr. Imagination was underneath the coat.

One frosty morning, we were surprised to see this digger show up in front of our window! A house will eventually be built there. The fence that is visible, partially built, in the background, is finished now, and we can’t see our calf in the paddock across the road anymore.

A day or two after the digger worked in front of our house, it was used across the road to cut down trees around the trucking yards. Now, I can see this mountain from my kitchen window! I love that change. The tallest mountain is apparently the one across the river from the farm Simon went to first after leaving the mechanic shop, and the long ridge is behind the farm he is currently on–so he is between them.

The little girls built this tower one day. They were happy to use every block.

Elijah went to a weekend camp a month or two ago, in Canterbury. One day, a group walked to this bridge, in the Rakaia Gorge. I thought his pictures were so gorgeous I had to share them!

I don’t know where this is, but isn’t it beautiful? Elijah took it, likely on his way to work on morning, judging by the timestamp.

Esther took the girls on a walk around the block one afternoon. Miss Joy loves to ride her “bike.”

I love the way her ponytails stream out behind!

After going on a 4WD trip, Simon needed to wash his vehicle!

Birds–In Memory

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Mr. Imagination’s birds mostly stay in their cage and look pretty. We try to let them out to exercise several times a week, but because we have to do it when the cat is locked up it doesn’t happen every day. We are always able to pick up Jo-Jo, the cockatiel, but Kea, the budgie, doesn’t want to be touched. However, she will land on people’s heads now–or on a back, if someone is bent over! She weighs so little that sometimes it’s hard to know if she is still there. Everyone likes it when she lands on them!

A few days after I wrote that paragraph and scheduled this post, we found Kea on the bottom of the cage one day, unable to use on of her legs. We did what we could for her, but a few hours later she died. Jo-Jo is very subdued these days, and we miss our lively, beautiful bird.

Miss Joy

Mr. Sweetie

Mr. Imagination

Little Miss

I didn’t realize till I was putting this post together that I had pictures of all four of the younger children with the birds! Speaking of which, has anyone noticed how different my life is now from when I published my first post, in July 2011? At that time, I had six children and the oldest was 13. Since then, we have had three more babies, one child died, and four of them are now legal adults with jobs! At this stage, I have only four schoolchildren, and the youngest will soon turn five. Thirteen years can make a huge difference in a family.

Meat!

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We did a lot of butchering in June. The first weekend, while more than half the family were in Dunedin, a neighbor gave us a deer. Those of us who were at home got it boned out and minced, and then I made it all into hamburger patties.

A couple of weeks later, Simon killed a deer, and we made that one into mince, and froze it for later use.

We also got some nice pieces of backstrap from it.

The last weekend of the month we killed a beef heifer we raised for almost two years. She was the biggest beast we’ve ever processed ourselves, and when we weighed all the packages of meat while we were putting them in the freezer, we calculated that the hanging weight would have been about 275 kg (over 600 pounds). This was the quarters hanging in the carport, where they stayed for two days before we broke them down.

We made everything possible into roasts and steaks, and turned the trim into sausages.

The kitchen was a very busy, messy place that evening!

A few days later, I cut up the steaks, which we had put in the fridge in big bags, and the children helped to get them wrapped.

After a month, my hand has finally recovered from all that knife work!

Cats

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We continue to enjoy watching our goofy cats, and teasing them. Of course, any new surface must be sat on–this sheet of newspaper was obviously the best place around for taking a bath!

The house the little girls made was a great place to hide out, too–especially when we were trying to catch Princess to put her outside!

One evening, James started teasing Princess, and it was so funny I grabbed my phone to get a video of it.

Mr. Sweetie was amused at Grizzly enjoying the sun on top of our ute one day.

The picture above, of Grizzly from behind, reminds me of Capyboppy in the book by that title–a capybara that was a pet for awhile. This is the picture:

A friend stayed here with our boys for a few days, and the last day he was so worn out that I found this!

Aurora

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Along with almost everyone else in the high latitudes of the world, we were privileged to see the brilliant auroras in May. I didn’t get any decent pictures, but Esther got a few. She edited this first one to make the colors more like what we saw with the naked eye. Amazing! We saw this from our driveway, looking past the neighbor’s house with its lights on.

An hour or two later we drove up the road a little ways to where there were no lights, to see what we could see. The red was gone at that time, but there was a green glow in the sky that was also amazing.

May 2024 Photos–Part 2

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Here are the rest of the pictures I have from May. This first one is sad. She was playing on the trampoline after church one Sunday and fell off onto concrete. She gave herself a black eye and a concussion. After we got home and she had rested for an hour or two she wanted to know what she looked like, so I took this picture. She looked a lot worse the next day, though, as her eye got blacker, and then over the next few days it turned green and yellow. Within a week, though, the color was gone; within a day she had no visible effects from the concussion.

I’m not sure what this was all about. I do know they were being goofy! This is Mr. Imagination and Mr. Sweetie.

Someone got the idea that we should photograph all the tourists who stop to photograph our calf! We can’t now, though, because a fence has just been built along the road and we can’t see across there anymore.

I was working at my desk one evening and Little Miss brought me her rock creation, so I quickly snapped a picture of it.

Little Miss created this bouquet one morning, and then took a picture of it and asked me to print it. She then made it into a card for an elderly couple we were going to visit that afternoon at a rest home in town.

This is more of Little Miss’s artwork! She took this picture, too.

The Conking Donkey

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Mr. Imagination was assigned to write and perform a puppet show as part of his Language Arts program. He chose to adapt one of Aesop’s Fables from a book we have, and got his older brother to help perform it. This video was taken during a practice run, and then they performed it for our homeschool group the next day. The first few seconds are blurry, and then the camera got focused, so hold on till you can see what is happening.

This is the story he was inspired by:

May 2024 Photos Part 1

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It looks like we took a lot of random pictures during May that don’t share themes, so I’ll just do a couple of posts of those. One of the fads during that month was building Lego 4WD vehicles with a lot of flex. The creator of this one took this picture to show the flex.

When I work in the garden, there is often a fantail hanging around. One day I was able to capture this picture of it. Such cheerful little birds! They remind me of the chickadees we had in Michigan.

I took this picture one evening to show two of the older boys who weren’t home what they were missing: Homegrown roasted chicken, roasted potatoes and pumpkin from our garden, and coleslaw (also from our garden). It was delicious! One of the boys showed up in time to get some, but the other didn’t.

Mr. Sweetie discovered this when he went out to do his morning chores on a very cold morning.

This dress got ripped, so I got creative with a patch. I did talk the dress’s owner into using fabric that coordinated with the dress–she wanted to use some really wild fabric she found in my stash! I let her have that bit on the back to provide support there.

Three years ago, we let this little girl play with beans that were soaking–and she still occasionally asks to when she sees them on the counter!

This was the entertainment the evening we spent with friends in early May. He got a few levels higher before his tower collapsed!

Kea, the yellow and green budgie, does not like to be handled–but if Jo-Jo the cockatiel is on someone’s shoulder, she often lands beside him for a few minutes. Miss Joy loves when that happens!

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.

Toilet Remodel

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When we moved into this house over six years ago, the walls in the toilet looked fairly good. I didn’t like that they were wallpapered and impossible to really clean, but the room was all right. However, a year or two ago someone accidentally broke through the wall down near the floor, and gradually the walls became mildewy and the ceiling looked awful. Then, a few weeks ago, someone figured out what the noise was that we had been hearing for a few days… a leaky water pipe inside the wall. Our resident builder, James, tore a hole in the wall, found the leak, and got it stopped, and formed a plan of action. A few days later, Gayle and I went to town and bought plywood and paint, and that weekend James finished gutting the lower half of the room. He replaced the old gib board (wallboard) with plywood and put a piece of trim around the room at the join with the old wall. Esther requested that he build a box in the wall to hold rolls of toilet paper up above floor level so they’ll be accessible, clean and dry, so he did that, too, and created new corner trim for just outside the door. He had to replace the door jamb, too, because that was rotten because of a water leak sometime in the past before we came here. Compare the before and after pictures, and you’ll know why I am so happy that the job was forced on us!