Lots of Helpers

Our family's life in New Zealand

Book Review–New Chicks at the Peaceable

by 2 Comments

About the Book:

Book: New Chicks at The Peaceable

Author: Caryl “Grami” McAdoo

Genre: Children’s Animals Picture Book

Release Date: November 23, 2023

Chickens from newborns to old hens have a “pecking order” but bullying is never right! What to do if you’re bullied by those around you!

My Thoughts:

My little girls enjoyed this story. They loved the pictures; we happened to read it on a day that we had chicks of our own hatching in the incubator, so they could really relate to it. On the other hand, I found it hard to read because there were typos on almost every page. I also struggled a bit with having the story chopped up with the author’s personal notes to the reader in between bits of the story. On the last page of the story, she talks to children about how they don’t have to be afraid of anything because God takes care of them. This would be a good book for children who have a lot of fears, or for little people who love chickens. The photography is beautiful!

I received a complimentary copy of this book from CelebrateLit, and these are my honest thoughts about it.

I received a review copy of this book from the author, and these are my honest thoughts about it. Links may be affiliate links, which will benefit Esther’s website if purchases are made through them.

About the Author:


Award-winning, Christian author Caryl McAdoo prays her story brings God glory. Of her best-selling novels, readers love her historical Christian romance family sagas most, but also enjoy their contemporary cousins, Caryl’s Biblical fiction, her new historical mystery series, and tales for young adults and mid-grade booklovers as well as the new picture books for the still younger set. The majority of reviewers award her stories five-stars and praise Caryl’s writing style and the depth of her characters, feeling as though they get to know them well.

The prolific writer loves singing the new songs God gives her almost as much as penning new novels—hear a few at YouTube! She’s been married to Ron fifty-five years, and they share four children and twenty-seven grandsugars. The McAdoos live at The Peaceable in the woods south of Clarksville, seat of Red River County in far Northeast Texas, waiting expectantly for God to open the next door.

More from Caryl:

As the chicken population grows at The Peaceable Farm & Bookery, troubles come–all based all on the true story! One of our beautiful ‘Golden Laced Wyandotte’ hens got broody and wanted to sit on a nest and hatch a clutch of chicks!

The wee peepers, designated the “Songsters” and named Reba, Celine, Loretta, and Miley (the last by a reader’s daughter), experience the famous and proverbial “pecking order” chickens are so famous for. In human terms that can be called bullying though, and so Goldie, their mother teaches the girls how to respond those bully chickens!

Grami loves her “backyard birds”, and so does O’Pa! She expects the name of the twenty acres she and O’Pa live on in Red River County—The Peaceable—to be the spur for all its inhabitants to cohabitate peacefully with one another—and that includes the chickens!

She and O’Pa, her husband of fifty-five years have bought an incubator to hatch purebred chicks then raise fine, healthy birds to their laying age—usually four to five months—before finding them forever homes. We love our flock, and the babies grow so fast. Watching them is so much fun and relaxing, too!

Grami knows each hen and rooster by name, and they all are so affectionate! They come running whenever I head out the door (mostly because they want to see if I brought any food! ) I love thinking about what they are saying to each other with all their clucking and purring and cackling!

This is why the books are partially written from the hens’ point of view as our first animals’ series, The River Bottom Ranch Stories featuring horses and goats and dogs among other wild animal characters. And all those farm animals were real ones that we owned and loved, too—like the chickens!

This series ‘Grami’s Stories for Children’ also has a narrator speaking throughout—that’s me, Grami McAdoo! I talk to the children through a few pages full of dialogue to teach them about poultry and things of God. In NEW CHICKS at the Peaceable, I talk about bullies and how Jesus teaches us to respond, how they can be scary, but God is always with us and sends His angels to protect us!

The illustrations are photographs of our real chickens and The Peaceable Farm & Bookery. In the back of the book, there are a few pages of “Chicken Terminology” and fun “Chicken Facts” to teach the little ones more about the wonderful world of chickens!

I pray the precious little ones so dear to God’s heart will love the story and be blessed by it! 

To purchase your copy, click here.

Hatching

by Leave a Comment

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:

Cross Country

by Leave a Comment

On the first Thursday of December, one of the moms in our homeschool group organized a cross country meet. Quite a few families from the region came, some driving 45 minutes from one direction and others coming an hour from the opposite direction. The children were divided into age groups; the youngest ran one kilometer, the middles (including Little Miss) ran two, and the older ones (including my two school-age boys) ran three kilometers. Part of their route ran through the bush, and I was stationed, with Miss Joy, at a fork in the trail just at the bottom of these steps, at the end of the swing bridge. Miss Joy was quite bored for awhile as we waited for the runners to reach us.

Then they came! Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination stuck together through the race.

I had given my camera to a friend who stayed at the finish line, and she got pictures of my children completing the race.

After the races there were athletic events. The only one I got a picture of was the shot-put, but they also got to throw a discus, do a long jump, and do sprints. This is Little Miss doing the shot-put. All the children had great fun that day!

November 2023 Photos

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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.

James’ Birthday

by Leave a Comment

James turned 18 the beginning of November. I have a very hard time coming up with gift ideas for my older children, as a rule, but this year I came up with the perfect gift idea–something he had been talking about for a long time. Watch the video here to see what we gave him!

He ate all of those saveloys within two weeks!

His littlest sister gave him a bag of jelly beans she picked out for him. He made a game of tossing them to his younger brothers; if they could catch them, they could eat them, but if they couldn’t, he ate them!

Mount George

by 2 Comments

I don’t have a physical bucket list, but one thing that has been on my mental bucket list for a long time is climbing a mountain. A week ago, we had a regional holiday on the Monday, and a friend told Gayle that he was taking his children to climb a low but challenging mountain on the coast north of Greymouth, Mount George. Gayle decided to take the younger children, and when I said I would like to go, too, the older ones (except Esther who didn’t want to get muddy, and Simon who was working) went as well. It was pretty funny to see their faces when I said I would go! I haven’t been able to do that kind of thing, because I’ve always had a baby or been pregnant or recently pregnant. Now, I’m more free to go on adventures!

This was one of the tamer parts of the track. It was still fairly steep!

See someone holding onto a tree? It was necessary, much of the time, to climb by pulling oneself up that way! Miss Joy is visible just past Gayle. She walked up, and back down the mountain! What a trooper.

The view got more and more amazing, the higher we went.

We were headed up past that outcropping of rock.

This was the worst bit. It’s nearly straight up, and you have to climb by holding onto a knotted rope. A ladder has been bolted into the cliff, and then at the top of it you have to get across the crack to the other side of the wall, then keep going up. Miss Joy had no trouble navigating it–but coming back down it took me several minutes to work up the courage to step across and onto the ladder where you can see someone going across on the way up, here.

There’s the top! Most of the children were up there long before we made it. As you can see here, Miss Joy was way ahead of me by this point–she’s at the left of the picture wearing a light blue dress.

Here is proof that I made it to the top of the mountain! It was very bright up there.

I saw this flower on the way down–so beautiful!

Cape Foulwind

by 2 Comments

Last year, when we went to Charleston for our anniversary getaway, we went to Cape Foulwind to walk to the lighthouse. It was raining, though, so after we sat in the car for awhile waiting for the shower to stop, we went on to where it wasn’t raining. This year, when we got there, the weather was dry and lovely, so we walked to the lighthouse and on beyond.

Most of the trees around the Cape are stunted from the constant wind and salt spray, but this larger one stands out.

The Cape Foulwind lighthouse.

Looking down from the base of the lighthouse. That concrete structure is apparently the base of an older lighthouse.

We walked along the top of the cliffs on a very nice, well-maintained track for a quarter of an hour or so. Then, my adventurous husband decided he wanted to get down to sea level and find the old railway bed that a sign had mentioned! So, he found a track down the cliff and we scrambled down. In most places, we couldn’t see where the railway had been, but we got to see this seal, who headed out to sea at sight of us.

We walked along the beach until our way was blocked by these huge boulders. I stayed on the ground, but Gayle climbed up to have a look at what lay beyond. Guess what? More sandy beach! The railway bed is visible just to the left, at the top of the rocks.

This rock, with its few brave bushes clinging on, is just offshore.

When we walked back toward the beginning of the track, we saw this place, where the railroad went through a cut. There was a quarry somewhere around here. We aren’t sure, but we’re guessing it was a granite quarry, because of the huge amounts of broken granite that line the shore.

This area seemed to be a dumping ground for rocks and dirt.

When we arrived back at the car, this cheeky weka wanted to get in with us, or mooch something.

We went on to Westport, and after turning around and backtracking, found our way to the south side of the mouth of the Buller River. This is the view looking south from there, and the lighthouse on the south breakwall.

October 2023 Photos

by Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of the photos from October. One of the younger children’s favorite places to go is the dump down the hill from our village. I was informed, “You don’t give us Christmas presents, so we have to come up with our own.” So, they drag home all sorts of “treasures.” These beams were among recent finds. One of the boys took pictures of them to send to Simon to see if he wanted them, and Goofball obviously wanted to be in the picture.

Our friends in Ngahere had a bonfire to get rid of Simon’s garage, which he dumped in their paddock (with their permission) to get rid of it.

We took some friends to Waiuta the beginning of October, and someone got this picture of Esther and Miss Joy.

Gayle often takes the children on a walk or to go swimming when he comes home from work. The day they begged him to take them swimming, they quickly decided it was much too cold, so they played in the warm, dry sand instead.

Another day they made a different kind of castles by the river.

My sister asked me how to make t-shirt dresses, so I sent her a picture of some I recently made for the girls.

This picture shows something amazing. That Jersey calf gave us a lot of trouble when he was born. He was born one afternoon, and by bedtime we could tell he hadn’t had a feed yet. I milked his mother and gave him a bottle, and he took it greedily. The next day, he wouldn’t suck at all. We tried him on a bottle a couple of times, and tried to get him to suck on his mother, but he absolutely refused. The next day, we forced a few cups of milk down him, but he was getting very weak. He struggled to stand up, and when he sucked it was very weak. Simon got us a tube feeder, and we tubed him twice. I asked for advice on a house cows group, and we prayed a lot for this calf. The third day, we followed the advice we got, and did something called the Madigan squeeze on him (google it). We did that twice, and the second time, he started making sucking motions. That evening when we put his mother in with him, he sucked on her for the first time! The next day, we went away for the weekend, so we left this calf with his mother. When we got home, he was bouncing around happily, acting perfectly normal and healthy. Two days after that, we had to move the cows to another location for grazing. Since that place isn’t calf-friendly, he had to stay behind with the beef-cross calf, so we gave him a bottle. The first time, he wouldn’t drink; the second time, he took nearly a whole bottle, and the third time, he was away. Since that day, he has greedily sucked down every bottle we give him, and wanted more. I took this picture to remind us of the miracle God did for us.

Little Miss had an assignment in her Language Arts book to write a poem about spring. She decided to illustrate it, too!

Sand art. This kept them busy while Gayle and I were away, and then the sand went in the trash.

This also happened while we were away. The girls made bouquets to sell to Esther!

This quad bike went up to the farm with Simon, so he can fix it.

Book Review–Building Character Through Picture Books

by 2 Comments

About the Book:

Book: Building Character Through Picture Books: 25 Family Devotions Based on Favorite Picture Books

Author: Terrie Hellard-Brown

Genre: Devotional

Release Date: May 27, 2023

Bring the Bible into bedtime. After reading the picture book together, families can read the short devotion, discuss compelling questions (questions for younger and older children provided), and end with prayer together as the children prepare to sleep. The book includes 25 devotions matched with 25 popular and classical picture books. Each devotion includes a section for parents to go further in the discussion or to add an activity to continue the conversation the following day.

My Thoughts:

I love picture books. I love reading them to my little girls—although when I’m honest I’ll admit that I don’t read them nearly as many as I read to my oldest children. Now, my read-aloud time is spread among a wide range of ages, most of whom want me to read chapter books—middle-grade novels—to them. The little girls enjoy listening to those books, as well, but when I have time to sit down and read several picture books to the youngest one, I tell myself I should do this more often! Recently, a friend of mine taught a class on finding literary devices in picture books, and she has referred a number of times to the possibility of teaching all sorts of scientific concepts from picture books. Then, I saw Building Character Through Picture Books, and was quite intrigued. 

I have not yet used Building Character Through Picture Books with my little girls. I was sent a digital copy of it to look over for this review, and frankly, that doesn’t work very well with a book like this. In a few months I will have the opportunity to get the hard copy here, and I know that will be easier to use. Then, if I can find the picture books that are used for these devotions, I would love to try Terrie Hellard-Brown’s ideas out with my little girls! Some of the books used are favorites with our children, as well as many others. We love Miss Rumphius and Caps for Sale! We have also read Courduroy, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and The Little House. I know my daughter would love to have me read these books and the others to her and discuss them.

I received a review copy of this book from the author, and these are my honest thoughts about it. Links may be affiliate links, which will benefit Esther’s website if purchases are made through them.

About the Author:

Terrie Hellard-Brown uses her experiences as a mother of four (three on the autism spectrum), 35+ years in ministry (15 in Taiwan), and 35 years teaching to speak to the hearts of readers. She writes and speaks to empower children and adults to embrace everyday discipleship every day. She teaches workshops and writes devotional books, children’s stories, and Christian education materials.

Her podcast, Books that Spark, reviews children’s books that spark imagination, emotion, questions, and discussion leading to teachable moments with our kids.

Her blog discusses living as a disciple of Christ while discipling our children. She challenges us to step out of our comfort zones to walk by faith in obedience to Christ and to use the nooks and crannies of life to disciple our children.

More from Terri:

As an English teacher, pastor’s wife, and missionary, I LOVE books. I’ve taught every grade from pre-K to community college in my career and taught the Bible to people who didn’t know anything about the Bible or Jesus, and through it all, I’ve come back to the joy of picture books and the simplicity of sharing stories that change lives. Of course, I love teaching Shakespeare, Dickens, and C. S. Lewis, but picture books are still where my heart is. So, it was only natural that I combined my two favorite things: picture books and the Bible.

My friends affectionately call me the Picture Book Lady since I have one to offer for almost any topic, event, or purpose. This new devotional book is no different. A dear friend said one day, “You should write a devotional book based on picture books!” Who wouldn’t jump at such a fun project!?

I chose some of my favorite picture books where I found connections to Scripture, and I began to write devotions to go along with each book. I wanted to use general market books so that we can use whatever book we’re reading with our children to make spiritual connections and bring in lessons naturally in those teachable moments. That’s how Building Character Through Picture Books was born.

To purchase your copy, click here.