Lots of Helpers

Our family's life in New Zealand

Moving Cows

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One afternoon, we moved four of the cows to the roadside for grazing.

Left to right: Curry, Red, Checkers, Mrs. Moo.

Chessie was sad that she couldn’t go, but we reserved the good grazing in the paddock for her.

Gayle got home as we were putting the cows in their new spot.

The first thing they did was to go to the end of the strip and gaze longingly at the grass they couldn’t have!

One day, our neighbor took this mob of sheep down the road.The next day, he took these cows down the road. That’s the kind of traffic jams we have to put up with.

Little Boy Having Fun

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Our  littlest, who recently turned two, loves playing outside. One evening, I looked out the kitchen window to see him hanging over this gate! His big sister grabbed the camera, then ran to his assistance. It turns out that he had climbed up, dropped a pen he was playing with, then couldn’t get it. Poor little fellow was quite distressed. After he got the pen back, though, he was fine. The next act was to try to stare down the calf—and then he pretended to shoot him with the pen!

Another day, I was hanging laundry and he came out and wandered over to the shed where a puddle forms instantly under a leaky rain gutter when it rains. At that time, we hadn’t had rain for a few weeks, and he sadly commented that there was no water there. Within a few hours, however, it started raining and he happily discovered the puddle again!

He somehow manages to lose his pants frequently, and we often don’t get them back on for awhile. He likes it better this way.

One day, Daddy was fixing a door and had to lay down to see what to do with it. He had helpers!

This little fellow’s favorite activity for a couple of days was “cooking”. He would get all the pots he could carry from the cupboard in the kitchen, then spread them out on the floor in the living room and “cook eggs”. Those pots were HOT! he said.

Birds

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One morning we saw this kingfisher right outside!

Esther saw this Yellowhead another day.

And this little fellow lives in the house! He was alone for a few days, until more hatched. Now he has three friends to live with him in the corner of the kitchen.

We were all glad when some more hatched to keep him company, because he would set up such a racket when he wanted attention. He loves to ride on shoulders, but only one person likes it. He leaves “calling cards” behind!

He calls this chick his peregrine falcon!

Rain

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This has been a very wet autumn. We live at the bottom of a valley, and it is WET here! One day was especially wet. It had rained all week (that was a Thursday), and poured all that day, too. I looked out in the afternoon and was shocked to see the creek from the living room window. Normally, it trickles along at the bottom of a ditch and there is no way to see it. The ducks were having fun, but within a few minutes even they gave up and went to find calmer water. The creek had already overflowed its banks just past our house, and was rapidly building up a river across the paddock beside us.

I went out soon after these pictures were taken, and went to check the stock. Normally I don’t do that, but we’re thankful I did that day. The creek upstream from the house, in the paddock our animals are in, was only a foot below the top of its banks; normally it is a good six feet down in a gully. I could see that if it would overflow, as seemed likely, it would flood the area where our chickens were. Gayle got home from work about that time, so we spent the next hour cleaning out a chicken house we had things stored in and putting all the chickens in there. By the time we got that done, the creek had risen another half a foot and was swirling more angrily than ever. Another hour and it overflowed! The boys came and told me that there were several inches of water in the shed where I milk, and that it was up to the buildings. I had no idea when the water would go down, so I went out to milk in the flood. By that time, there was half a foot of muddy water swirling around in that shed! We were thankful that we had put all the feed up on top of two pallets to keep it out of the water. One of the boys had to sit on the other side of the cow and hold the bucket to keep it from floating away while I milked. Meanwhile, there was a river flowing fast along the front of the buildings, and around and under the house. We moved the calf to higher ground so he wouldn’t be standing in the water. Unfortunately, between the dark and the rain that continued to pour down, we have no pictures to show you—and we weren’t sorry an hour later to realize that the water was gone already! It goes up and then down very fast, apparently. The road was a raging river, too; there are drifts of gravel in places on the roadsides, a foot or more thick!

A week later, there is still a lake in the paddock beside the house. It’s beautiful on a clear day!

New Calf

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This is rather old news by now. It is another of those posts that disappeared. On the morning of March 21, when I went out to milk Mrs. Moo, I discovered a calf frisking around Chessie! I had gone out to check on her late the afternoon before, and thought she probably had another day to go—shows how much I know! As far as we can figure, she had the calf that evening yet; the boys saw her laying down in a funny way while they were choring but didn’t think anything of it. The calf was dried off and running already. In fact, a couple of hours after we found him, he spooked and ran away! He went across the road, through the neighbor’s fence, and across a very large paddock to the far corner! One of my boys chased him down and caught him, and then they brought the ride-on mower with a hand cart tied on behind to fetch him home. We trussed him up and tied him on so that he couldn’t move, and then tied him up when he got back to his mother. He’s still a fiesty little thing, a month later. We’re bottle-feeding him, but he doesn’t trust us an inch. He’ll come for his bottle, but very warily, as if we’re going to eat him! (Don’t tell him that’s his ultimate fate—it’s a couple of years down the road yet, but that is his destiny.) He is a Jersey/Angus cross, by the way.

For this first month, we kept him in this small chicken yard out the kitchen window. I tried a few times to get someone to get a video of him playing, but I don’t think we got it. It was awfully fun to watch, though! Once or twice a day, he would start racing around and around, sometimes butting the walls of the building or fighting an empty bucket. Usually he did it at dusk. Such a circus! He loved it when the chickens would be let out for a little while—company!

 

A Field Trip–On Sunday?!

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I’ll try again with this one, too; it is one that vanished in the past week. Rather frustrating!

This story really starts back in January. We were on our way south and passed a big yellow railroad track fixing machine. We’ve seen those a lot of times, since we drive along the railway so much (it parallels Highway 1, which is the main highway on this island and we drive on it practically every time we go anywhere; the railway is visible from the highway probably half the distance from Christchurch to Kaikoura). That day, my 8-year-old asked me how those machines work. I told him I didn’t know, but that if we saw one sometime that was at a place we could pull off, and if there were workmen there who seemed to have time to talk, and if we had extra time, we would stop and ask. Well, one Sunday morning soon after we moved, all those things came together. As we were driving to church, we reached the coast after coming down out of the hills, and approached the first tunnel that the highway goes through. Ahead on the other side of the tunnel, we saw one of those track-fixing machines, and I told Gayle what I had told our son. As we came out of the tunnel, we saw that the machine was right at the end of a short passing lane, with a pull-off right there beside it, and there were two men standing behind it on the track, talking; one was obviously the operator of the machine! We had a rare extra 15 minutes, so Gayle pulled off and asked the man if he would tell us how it worked. Sure, he was glad to! He explained it all, and then took us up into the cab to show us the computerized controls. That machine clamped onto the rails and pulled them in or pushed them out to make them exactly the right distance apart. There were two or three other machines that traveled in a unit with that one, which did other jobs, leveling the track and I’m not sure what else, but they were ahead, through another tunnel. We thanked him and went back to the van as he started moving ahead again. When he came out of the next tunnel, we got to watch as they coupled that machine to the next one. What a great field trip! It was especially meaningful to me because a man in the church I grew up in, someone I knew all my life and who died just about six months ago, had spent a lot of his life building that type of machines. He didn’t build this one; it’s Austrian-built; but it was the same basic idea.

 

Kaikoura Peninsula

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One Sunday afternoon, when we had visitors from America at church, we went with them to the Peninsula. It was a gorgeous fall afternoon. We really enjoyed visiting with our new friends and showing them around.Mountain climbers.
Very tired and ready to go home–Daddy is still talking!A bed of bull kelp.
Gazing out to sea from the overlook at the top of the Peninsula.

More March Pictures

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Some of you may have seen a post like this a week or so ago, because I did post it, but it disappeared. I did six posts one evening, and scheduled them so they would appear every two days, but three vanished—one before it was posted and two after. Why does that happen? So frustrating. Anyway, here are these pictures again.

When you finish your chicken, use the bones for a telephone.

Playing in the rain!

He found a bag of carrots in the fridge and helped himself to a snack.

Passport Photos

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We had to get passport photos taken recently, because the older six children all needed their passports renewed and we need to apply for permanent residency within the next week or two. Taking those photos is quite a challenge! Here are the best we came up with; they will work for the residency application, but we had to get professional ones for the passports.

Fail! What a character.

This isn’t a passport photo–just a cutie!

He doesn’t need a new passport, nor does he need to be included in the residency application, but he wanted his picture taken when everyone else got theirs taken.

March Pictures

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And here is the assortment of pictures from March that didn’t make it into their own posts!A beautiful fall day–Esther enjoyed watching these steers out her bedroom window.

One night, we ran out of hot water, so my oldest son fired up the coal range. He stuffed it full of pine cones–and soon this is what the oven thermometer registered! I made him quit feeding it at that point. We had hot water!

Bigger brother reading to littlest brother!

This is the way to do math!