Lots of Helpers

Little Children’s Fun

June 15, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

The little children got their legos back last week, after a month or so without them. When there is a dispute about legos, I take them away for a month—I refuse to arbitrate disputes such as, “He took my piece!” or “She has my man!” If they can’t work out these problems without my input, they don’t need to play with those toys. They have a lot more fun when they only have them periodically, anyway. This time, Simon remembered a website we used to use, which has plans for all sorts of lego creations. He got me to help him find it, and they printed out several different things to build. Little Miss is delighted with her train!

Mr. Imagination chose an airplane, and with help from a friend, got it put together.

Here are a couple of pictures that I asked Esther to take with her camera in March, when we were visiting friends in Canterbury. The children were playing on the hills and in the creek on the farm, and found these geckos. They had a lot of fun with them!

My New Greenhouse!

June 8, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

My boys spoil me. They do so many things for me, and I just have to keep wondering how in the world I ended up with such wonderful sons! The most recent big project was building a greenhouse. When we lived in Cheviot, we were given the frames for two greenhouses, from two different people. We used one for a couple of seasons, and Simon assembled the other but it didn’t get covered with plastic before we moved and had to dismantle it again. They were two different shapes, but when the boys started working on erecting them here a month or two ago, they figured out how to put them together to make one long high tunnel, about 40 feet by 10 feet (13.5 m by 3.5 m)! The next hurdle was to cover them. After some searching, they found the old plastic from the hoophouse, and the new plastic we had bought for the other one. They were able to cobble them together and cover everything except the lowest part of one side; Gayle built a device for rolling up the lower couple of feet of plastic on the other side, for ventilation during the summer. We bought sheets of clear plastic to finish the part we didn’t have plastic for, and they built frames for them, and hinged the frames so they can be opened in the summer, as well. Now, I’m enjoying having salads growing in there for at least part of the winter! Here are a couple of photos of the boys working on tacking down the plastic.

This was a peek inside, during construction.

….and a view from the same place, this week!

This is a close-up of the bed right inside the door. I found a new-to-me variety of radishes called German Giant. They were advertised as getting large without getting pithy, and not going to seed so quickly. So far, they’re living up to their promise—I’ll sure be interested to see how they work in the summer! We’re really enjoying having radishes on our salads.

We transplanted the lettuces on the left into the ground here right after the framework was erected, and have been eating salads from that bed for a month now. I set out the lettuces, bok choy, and other things on the right a couple of weeks ago, and we’ll start eating them soon.And, here’s a fun picture! I found this leaf one day when I was washing lettuce. It was two leaves grown together! It’s hard to tell, but the midribs were stuck to each other. I had never seen one like this before.

May 2019 Photos

June 1, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Can you believe the first of June has arrived already? This year is flying past!

Here is the canoe the boys have built. Mr. Intellectual worked on the epoxy a day or two at the beginning of the month, then pulled it out of the garage into the sunshine to get the epoxy dry. With the cold, wet weather we’re having, it’s been next to impossible to work on this project.

One morning while her brothers did school, Little Miss played, “Going to a Conference.” She took all her dolls along. Here, she had been singing, pretending to be in a meeting; later they went to a bedroom (she carried all four at once) for lunch, and then went to the hallway to “sleep at Katie’s house.”

The boys noticed a pear tree across the road, beside where the cow grazes, with pears littering the ground under it. They asked the owner of the property if we could have the pears, and he gave them to us, so Gayle and the younger boys picked them all up one Saturday. We made a couple of large pans of pear/cranberry crumble–yum! Mr. Imagination and Little Miss helped me peel and cut up the pears for it.

When I placed an order recently for schoolbooks, I added the last two Pleasant Valley Farm picture books to the order for Esther. When they came, she showed them to these two, and they jumped up and down and squealed in glee–they love those books!

One day this week, we noticed a 20-foot shipping container being loaded into this truck! We had never seen that done before. Notice the rain falling heavily in this photo? That was the story of our week. For five days straight, we had torrential rains, for a total, here, of nearly 10 inches.

Mr. Imagination took this picture of a digger he is building. He loves to put things together.

Little Miss apparently brought a wasp in the house on her hair one day. It stung her just below the eye. She screamed for a good while. The next day, when I took this photo, it had swollen some, but not as bad as I thought it might. We had put plantain on as quickly as possible–it really helps!

I guess Mr. Sweetie was quite impressed by the way his milk foamed one day! I have several boys who love foamed milk (Esther found a foamer at a secondhand shop recently), but our milk often won’t foam.

This was our living room one evening this month. Simon and Mr. Diligence were listening to an audio book on Simon’s phone (which is only used as an audiobook player, by the way!). It looks like Mr. Sweetie was trying to listen in, as well. These boys are addicted to audiobooks.

My artist, Mr. Imagination, with the horse he made from marbles one day.

Trip to Kaikoura

May 26, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

This weekend we made a quick trip to Kaikoura. We hadn’t been back there for church since we moved here, almost a year and a half ago. Most of us went to visit our friends there a year ago, and we’ve seen some of the people since then, but there is one dear lady we hadn’t seen at all. It was so good to be there and touch base again with the people we spent eight years with!

On our way, we stopped for a little while in Waiau, and the children enjoyed playing at the playground in the warm sunshine. Mr. Imagination got hit in the face with a piece of playground equipment (a brother got a little careless in bouncing it) and apparently had a slight concussion; the next half hour of his trip was miserable. After he had a short nap, he was fine.

Left to right: Mr. Intellectual, Mr. Diligence, Mr. Imagination, Mr. Sweetie, Simon

Our next stop was the cemetery in Cheviot where Seth is buried. We had bought a headstone for him six months ago, and hadn’t seen it yet. That was rather an emotional part of the day.

We next moved on to St. Anne’s Lagoon, just south of Cheviot, where we had a picnic lunch. The lagoon was gorgeous on this clear fall day–look at those reflections! It was so nice to see the lagoon full of water again. A couple of years ago, during the three-year drought that Cheviot endured, the lagoon dried up.

After lunch, we headed on to Kaikoura, where we had a joyous reunion with old friends. There were still a few hours of daylight, so we went out to the Peninsula. Most of both families walked partway around at sea level, then climbed a stairway to the top and came back to the car park. The mother and I, and some of the children, walked out on the rocks a little way, then went back to their house and started preparing food. It is so amazing to see what low tide looks like now–so different from before the November 2016 earthquake, when the sea floor rose two meters.

April 2019 Photos

May 18, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Little Miss draws a lot of pictures! This is a horse she drew for me a few weeks ago—see its hooves?

Mr. Diligence and a friend built this bike trailer for Mr. Imagination’s birthday. The little fellow has had a lot of fun pulling it around behind his bicycle.

Little Miss built a house in the living room one day.

Mr. Intellectual has done a lot of wood working lately. Here is one of his recent creations, a pancake turner from an old electric pole. The wood was very hard, but brittle, so this turner ended up breaking beyond repair, unfortunately. It was beautiful, though!

Simon can still get Mr. Diligence down!

One evening, the fire got going so hot that the children asked for marshmallows—and toasted them through the closed door! We’re being more careful now as to how full we load the stove with the offcuts from Gayle’s work at the mill.

What We’ve Been Reading Lately Part 2

May 14, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When I did a post like this in March, I was hoping to do another in a month. Here we are two months later—and I’m shocked by how many books we’ve read since then!

Links in this post are probably affiliate links that will help to finance Esther’s website if you buy a book through them.

Right now, in the mornings, we’re reading these books.

We start with a chapter from The Bible Story, Volume 9. We’re almost finished with this one, and then we’ll move on to Volume 10. Next, we read a page or two from Who Am I? and then a couple of two-page spreads from Mosque. This has turned out to be fascinating! We have finished learning about the actual building, and are now reading about how they decorated the mosque. Someone commented this morning that it’s a work of art! After we read these books, we read a history story; right now we’re reading Hoofbeats of Freedom, which I found on Internet Archive. It’s a story about the Battle of Long Island during the American Revolution. Internet Archive, by the way, has turned out to be a wonderful resource for us. We don’t have access to a very good library, but we can borrow digital books from this site for two weeks at a time. They have many, many titles published between 1950-1990, which have been scanned from libraries in the USA, especially the Boston Public Library. So, as long as the electric and the internet are working, we have quite a range of books to choose from for our schooling.

After lunch, we have been reading these books.

We finished the Little House books with These Happy Golden Years and The First Four Years, and then started reading On the Way Home on Internet Archive. We also finished the Living Forest series with Beloved Rascals, and then started The Best of Ernest Thompson Seton, a collection of all-too-real animal stories. They tend to be rather sad! Little Miss shed a few tears as we read the story of Wahb, the grizzly bear who had a very sad life. Everyone was on the edge of their seats during the battle between Foam, the razorback hog, and a different bear (and could understand much better when a friend of ours here had two dogs cut up by a wild pig last week!), and we could hardly wait to hear the ending of the story about a little boy adopted by a badger. We loved hearing about how Annie Sullivan helped Helen Keller come alive, in Helen Keller’s Teacher, and Mr. Imagination was happy to hear The Little Woodchopper. Probably the most popular of these books, though, was A Tale of Gold, which I picked up at a second-hand shop when I was in Ohio in February. It’s about the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898. Simon heard a couple of chapters of it, and made his brothers keep him up-to-date on what I read each day—and whenever he had the chance to ask me to read aloud, that was what he—and they—all wanted until we were finished! It’s a lovely tale of a boy learning what is most important in life (although it had no Christian influence).

Here are a lot of the books we’ve read for history in the past two months. Many are from Internet Archive. As you can see, we do a lot of reading aloud!

And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? has always been my favorite about that famous historical figure. I like Jean Fritz’s way of telling a story! Adam and the Golden Cock told about the arrival of the French to help the Revolution. Of course, Alice Dalgliesh’s 4th of July Story tells about signing the Declaration of Independence, and Betsy Ross is the story of the woman who sewed the first American flag. It focuses on her girlhood as a Quaker girl in Philadelphia who loved to sew. George the Drummer Boy and Sam the Minuteman both tell the story of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but from opposite points of view—British and patriot. Guns for General Washington and Henry and the Cannons describe how Henry Knox brought artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. Guns is based on diaries kept by the people who made this incredibly difficult trip, and other contemporary documents. Poor Richard in France tells about how Ben Franklin went to France with two grandsons to try to get aid, and Powder Keg gives a plausible story for the mystery of how the gunpowder that was stored in Bermuda made its way to Boston to be used in those guns that were brought across the mountains by Henry Knox. Samuel’s Choice is a picture book about the Battle of Long Island. My favorite book of all these, however, is A Drop of Mercy, about the Mennonites during the Revolution. It is a very good story about the people who simply wanted to live in peace and honor God with their lives during those turbulent years.

We’ve also read a number of other books. These three go along with the history curriculum we’re doing right now, which I reviewed last week. In the Days of Noah is a great picture book about what the world before the Flood may have been like, and about the Flood itself. Genesis: Finding Our Roots is an in-depth study of the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, and Adam and His Kin fleshes out those chapters in a novel. I’ve read it aloud several times, and am enjoying it again.

We read The Great Dinosaur Mystery and Dry Bones and Other Fossils to go along with Cross-Wired Science, which was also a program we got for review and have really appreciated.

In the evenings when the whole family is home, I read a chapter or two from Whistle-Stop West, based on the true story of a boy who rode the Orphan Train. I have always loved this series, by the author of the Grandma’s Attic books. We also recently read Ben & Mark, a photo story of two boys growing up in the high country of New Zealand. This is especially interesting to us, since we pass the turnoff to their home when we go to Christchurch, now. We read Black Boots and Buttonhooks a few weeks ago, too; it’s a very interesting story about a family pioneering in the King Country in the North Island in the early part of the 20th century.

I’ve been reading a lot of interesting books myself lately, too. We needed more schoolbooks to finish out the year, so when I ordered them from Christian Light Publications, I added some other books to the order. Armor of Light discusses lust, and how lust for anything opens us up to temptation in that area, and how to overcome it. Very good for anyone! I’m still reading God, Our Children, and the Facts of Life. It’s excellent! I also got Fingerprints for myself, and am loving the stories in it. It’s great for any mother. Lots to think about, and it makes me chuckle frequently. Thomas Edison, Wilbur and Orville, and The Great Gilly Hopkins are ones I picked up at a book fair last August. They’re all right—nothing special. I just started Island Nurses, from the same place, so I don’t know what it will be like.

I was excited to get to read A Forgotten Truth, the fourth book in The Agency Files series. This was a hard one to put down! Not only is it a good mystery, but there is a lot of truth contained in it. Joseph, Rachel’s Son is a great retelling of a famous story. I really appreciated how the author stuck to what is recorded in the Bible but fleshed it out so that it is a very interesting story. I finished Shadow Among Sheaves today; it’s all right, but not great, in my opinion. There are more kisses than I like, and a few swear words showed up. It is a story based on the story of Ruth in the Bible, but set in England in about 1850. Legends of the Vengeance is the first pirate story I have ever enjoyed—only Chautona could write one like this! It’s a good story for boys. Something Borrowed, Someone Blue is her latest book. There’s a lot to think about in this one. The ending isn’t totally a surprise, but it happens suddenly. I can’t give you a link for that one, because I got an advanced reader copy! I think it will be published in a collection in June.

Yes, I read a lot myself. It’s my way of maintaining sanity and taking a break.

Traffic

May 11, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Our house is right on a main highway. I’m thankful that our driveway is attached to a very small street, which in turn goes out to the highway, but there is only an empty quarter-acre section between our house and the main road. That gives us ring-side seats to everything that goes past! We don’t pay a lot of attention most of the time, but sometimes there are unusual sights in the trucking yards across the street that catch our eyes, and when the boys see a pilot vehicle go past with a Wide Load sign on it, they run for the window. Mr. Diligence grabs my camera as he goes, in case there is something very different. Here are some of the things we’ve seen in the past few months.

Traffic jam at the trucking company! What we didn’t get a picture of was the concrete truck that S-L-O-W-L-Y inched its way between these two trucks! He had mere inches to spare on each side.

Look closely—do you see the cow’s heads sticking out of the top of the truck? They were transferring cattle from one truck to the other here.

We frequently see big diggers go past.

One Friday morning, this house went past—and then my crew got to watch it be set down on a foundation in a section a block away from us!

This was the most recent odd load we saw go past—a toilet block!

And then there was this sight. When the ditches were being dug in front of our house for the fibre optic cables, the digger brought up part of the chassis of a vehicle! It appeared that the rest of the vehicle was still down there, rusting away.

One morning early, just after it began to get light, I was out milking and saw a pilot vehicle coming. The driver stopped and waved a lighted wand at a truck going past him down the highway, then went on slowly. Another pilot vehicle came along, and waved a lighted wand to stop someone coming off a side street. I was pretty curious by then, so I watched for the big load. It was the base of a giant crane on tracks! The boom of the crane had been taken off for transport.

Product Review—Pathway to Liberty

May 8, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I’ve always been quite interested in studying history, and for the past several years have been enjoying looking over various history curricula to compare them. I’m always looking for the perfect history course, and have pretty well come to the conclusion that I’ll never find exactly what I’m looking for. I keep looking, though, because it’s interesting to see what people put together. When the opportunity came up to review a course offered by Pathway to Liberty Homeschool Curriculum, I decided I would like to check out one of their levels. I chose Year One, Universal History of Pathway to Liberty’s History Curriculum, the first of four years that take students of all ages through the entire scope of world history. I chose this level because one of the first books studied in this level is one that I have been wanting to study with my children, and also because, when I’m comparing history courses, I like to look at the beginning of time.

Universal History starts with Genesis 1. After studying the first 11 chapters of Genesis in some depth, we will move on to studying the ancient civilizations. After studying Abraham, a couple of weeks are devoted to Egypt, and then the main focus is the history of the Old Testament, spending a little time with Babylonia and Persia as they enter Biblical history. A couple of weeks of the history of Greece wrap up the year.

So far, we have gotten through the first four weeks of this course. I requested two of the four levels, so I have Mr. Diligence doing Level Two and Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination doing Level One. Level One is intended for K5-3^rd grade. Mr. Sweetie is in 4^th grade, but struggles enough with writing that I decided the lower level would be best for him. Level Two is for 4th-6^th grade; Mr. Diligence is in 8^th grade, but he, too, struggles enough with academics that I thought the lower level would be a better fit for him. (Levels Three and Four are for grades 7-9 and 10-12, respectively; they do the same reading and watch the same YouTube videos as Level Two, but do more in-depth research and writing.) Levels One and Two are quite different, but at the same time they correlate well with each other. For the first three weeks, Level One was a study of the days of creation and the character of God. Meanwhile, in Level Two, Mr. Diligence watched a video on YouTube each week and we began working our way through Ruth Beechick’s Genesis: Finding Our Roots, which I had been wanting to study ever since I borrowed it from a friend a few years ago. In Week Four, we all started studying Noah, and the younger ones are studying In the Days of Noah with me (I make Mr. Diligence sit in on reading that one, too!). One thing Level One includes that the older ones don’t is coloring pictures for nearly every lesson. My boys didn’t want to do them, but Little Miss loved coloring several. She also loved helping to make this poster of the days of Creation. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, but it’s something that I don’t get done without something pushing for it to happen, like this review.

I have really enjoyed this study, so much so that I plan to go through the rest of the course that we were given. The boys grumble about taking time to do it, but they are learning and enjoying what they learn all the same. One thing we picked up on when we were reading the Book of Adam, from the 2nd-4^th chapters of Genesis, was that the tone of the writing is that of an eyewitness. I was reading chapter 2 aloud, and Mr. Intellectual challenged me on what he heard; he was sure I had misread something. When he looked it up in the Bible, however, we were all rather excited as we talked about the rivers of the Garden of Eden. The wording could hardly have been anything other than an eyewitness account—read it for yourself if you’re dubious. Then, of course, as we worked our way through Beechick’s book, we came to that same conclusion.

The videos we have watched so far on Pathway to Liberty’s YouTube channel have been good. The first few didn’t really stand out, but the one we watched for Week Four about Noah and the world that perished, which we watched all together one evening as a family, was absolutely fascinating. The younger children probably didn’t get much out of it, but we stopped it to discuss points with the older ones a couple of times. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes up in the future!

This curriculum is available either as hard copies or digital. I received the digital copies, which means I can print as many as I want for my children. I three-hole punched the paper, then tied the books together with yarn, which is working well.

One part of this course we have done some, but not as much as recommended, is word studies. The recommendation is to choose five words every day to find definitions for from the Webster’s Dictionary 1828. We have done a few, but not that many. We also haven’t done the writing assignments recommended. We could go to a lot more depth with this study. It could easily replace a lot of Language Arts, tying it together with history, which would be great. I just don’t have the energy for that right now!

My conclusion about this history course? So far, it is very good. It looks like the entire year that we were given is going to be great. Looking ahead farther, I would guess that I, personally, would not do well with the slant of the year in which American History is studied; having moved away from the United States I don’t share the same view of US history that it looks like this author has. However, I do greatly appreciate the way she ties history into the Biblical framework. The study we did in Level One about the character of God was absolutely great. I will admit that it was hard to figure out what answers she was wanting for some of the questions; if I hadn’t had the answer key handy for the first three weeks of that level, I would have had no idea how to answer some of the questions.

Be sure to read some of the reviews that other people have written! All four years of this curriculum have been use and reviewed by various families, so there will be a lot of different points-of-view. If you’re looking for a Bible-based history course, this may be one you want to check into.

Universal History, The Middle Ages, US History & World History Curriculum {Pathway to Liberty Homeschool Curriculum Reviews}

Timaru Trip

May 4, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

We went to Timaru over Easter weekend, as we have since 2014. As always, it was a wonderful time of worshipping and hearing the Word preached, and spending time with many friends, both people we have known for a long time and those we just met for the first time. I took a few pictures of the spectacular scenery on the way and on the way home—but never took the time to pull my camera out of my purse while we were down there!

The sun rose while we were going through the mountains; here we are starting to head up toward Arthur’s Pass from the west.

After we went over Arthur’s Pass, as we approached Porter’s Pass, we noticed a thin line of snow just along the tops of the mountains.

Awhile later, once we were down on the plains, we looked back, and could see the other side of those same mountains!

We took a route we haven’t taken before, and got to enjoy the gorgeous Rakaia Gorge.

On our way home, we enjoyed the spectacular scenery again. This is between Porter’s and Arthur’s Passes, again.

Bits and Pieces

April 27, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When we were in America a few months ago, I was trying to explain to a few people exactly how small our kitchen is. These two pictures show all of my workspace. Quite often, the first step, when starting to cook a meal or do anything else in the kitchen, is to wash and dry dishes and get them put away.

A month or so ago, the electric line to the garage started blowing fuses. When Gayle and the boys looked into it, they found that a hole had been rusted through the box around the connections, and the wires inside were bare. No wonder it shorted! They got the wiring replaced, and decided to replace the old, rotting pole, as well. That turned out to be a huge ordeal; they had to chip through concrete several feet down. The replacement pole, while not new, is much better—and it, too is concreted in securely! This photo shows part of the process of chipping out the old concrete.

Mr. Intellectual has been enjoying making things out of wood lately. Here are two of his recent creations. I really like the pancake turner for doing stir-fries!

Mr. Imagination grabbed this winter radish and pretended to be a rhinoceros!

The younger children have harvested most of the pumpkins by now. They enjoyed all those different shapes and colors!

One evening, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss got out all their soft toys and lined them up on the couches. Someone enjoyed it enough to take a couple of pictures.

We had a few mornings chilly enough to start the fire in the living room. One of those times, someone noticed a flame coming out of the center of a log! He was impressed with it and wanted a picture.

As part of the process of installing fibre optic cables in our village, the company had to put everything back into the state it was in before they started working. The last step was to put some tarseal on our driveway where they had cut through to put the cable in. The boys really enjoyed watching that!