Little Miss learned how to turn “round and round” a few weeks ago. She had great fun practicing her new skill!
I love watching Little Miss run and jump! She rarely moves slowly; this is her normal pace of life. She’s a very busy little girl!
Book Review—New Year’s Revolutions
Chautona Havig has written yet another book this year! After writing Christmas Stalkings, she wanted to tell Neal Kirkpatrick’s story—he’s sort of the villain in it. New Year’s Revolutions, therefore, is both a prequel and a sequel to Christmas Stalkings (see my review here).
Christmas Stalkings is told mainly from Wendy’s point of view, as she prepares for Christmas with her seven cats and deals with someone entering her house and moving things around. New Year’s Revolutions tells the story from her neighbor Neal’s point of view—but starts earlier and goes on a long ways after the first story ends.
For the rest of my review, you’ll have to visit Esther’s website! Read it here.
To buy the book, just click on the title. I used Esther’s affiliate links, so if you buy a book through them, she will get a little money to put toward maintaining her website and it won’t cost you any more.
Book Review—Exploring Creation with Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day
We have finally finished our science course for the year. It was very hard to get in time for science this year, with the crazy schedules we had all year, and a lot of time off school for one reason or another. Toward the end of the year, after several of the boys finished some subjects and I had more time, we were able to do lessons more often. I have thoroughly enjoyed our study this year, of Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day. I am greatly enjoying getting an in-depth look at various topics from a strongly Christian, Creationist point of view. Jeannie K. Fulbright has done an excellent job with this book, as with the other books we’ve used that she wrote.
Because this review has now been published on Esther’s website, I’ve removed the rest of it. Read my full review here.
More of Little Miss
If you get tired of seeing pictures of our little girl, just skip this. We think she’s someone pretty special, and more fun all the time. She is really developing her own personality. This presents some major hurdles at times, because she is so independent, but fun at the same time. A few days ago, we were having family worship in the kitchen. Most of the family was sitting around the table, and I was on my rocking chair in the corner, holding her. She said, “Mommy, please help me.” I asked what she needed help with. She answered something about “the persons.” I asked if she wanted to be at the table with the others—yes, that was what she wanted! This evening, she came to the kitchen with Mr. Imagination’s shoes on. She announced, “Three, four shoes! Seven, eight, ten shoes!” One evening, she fell asleep early, so I laid her on the couch. She ended up putting her feet up on the arm of the couch!
She is determined to help in any way she can. A favorite job is rinsing dishes. Here, she is helping Mr. Inventor.
Think Little Miss and Mr. Imagination enjoyed their blackberry muffins?
She was thrilled to get a new coat!
I ordered some preschool books for Esther to bring home from America for Mr. Imagination. As soon as she unpacked her suitcase, he started coloring in the coloring book from the set. Little Miss grabbed another book and started coloring in it! That wasn’t very popular, so I quickly grabbed an old school book for her. She’s been diligently coloring pictures every day since. One morning I came in from milking and she said, “Mommy, see me picture!” She carefully scribbles over every little picture on a page, and on some of the words that are by themselves. She also likes to draw a picture during family worship; Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Sweetie draw pictures most days while we read, to illustrate a verse from our chapter. After we finish reading, they show us their picture and explain what they drew. The last couple of days, Little Miss has stood up to show off her picture, too! The most important part, to her, is her name, which she asks us to write on the page over and over. She loves her name.
This kitty shirt was in a bag of clothes that was given to us. I wasn’t going to keep it, but she found it and asked her daddy to put it on her. She was so happy I let her have it. She ran outside to jump on the trampoline as soon as she had the shirt on!
She’s very happy to have Esther home from America. For several days, she seemed to be afraid Esther would disappear again, and the first day Esther went back to work, when Little Miss went out to her room and found her gone, she was quite upset. She didn’t want to let go of Esther after she returned. These two pictures show what she was doing at one point, hugging Esther’s legs tightly. I like the way her dress swishes in the bottom picture—this is one little girl who doesn’t hold still! She moves at top speed most of the time! This dress, by the way, was another item she found in the bag of donated clothes. She loves red dresses, so I let her keep it.
History 15—Part 3
I thought surely I had done at least a third post in this series! Life got pretty crazy in October, and we haven’t done much of our history reading. Right now, Esther is on her way home from America, and I’m a couple of chapters ahead of her. Time to do a bit of serious reading, Esther! I’ll share my notes up to where she has read. For the first two installments of notes on Unwrapping the Pharoahs, go here and here.
Chapter 15 talks about Thutmosis I. He was an extremely rich, powerful king. It is likely that he is the Pharoah whose daughter Solomon married, and the father of Hatshepsut. One bit of supporting evidence is that none of his records mention invading the hill country of Israel, although he did invade Syria. He erected the first obelisks.
Chapter 16 is about Hatshepsut. She became regent for her stepson Thutmosis III at the age of 15 when her husband died. Seven years later, she proclaimed herself Pharoah, at age 22, and ruled for 22 years. She was likely the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon. She left inscriptions describing a trip to the “Land of Punt”. Egyptian inscriptions refer to the Land of Punt as being in Palestine. Jesus mentions the Queen of the South coming to visit Solomon, and Daniel refers to the king of the South being from Egypt. She would have been going to visit her sister, who married Solomon.
Chapter 17. Thutmosis III conquered many cities, making them tributaries. He is more than likely the “Shishak” who looted Jerusalem in Rehoboam’s day. He seems to have been friendly toward Hatshepsut, who usurped his rule at first, until late in his reign when he destroyed all her inscriptions.
Chapter 18. Amenhotep II, son of Thutmosis III, wanted to imitate his father’s victories. He took immense amounts of booty and prisoners in his second campaign, but a subsequent one was different. They went no farther than south/central Palestine and only 2 horses, 1 chariot, and some bows and arrows returned. Was this the battle in which God miraculously defeated the “Ethiopians” for Asa?
Chapter 19. Thutmosis IV became Pharoah even though he had 2 older brothers. He claimed that the Sphinx told him that if he removed the sand covering it he would become the next Pharoah. He died young of a wasting disease.
Chapter 20. Amenhotep III had over a thousand wives. His favorite was the daughter of commoners. He had many statues made of himself. His 38-year reign was peaceful. His huge statues were made of layers of stone rather than one huge one, so they weren’t repurposed for other uses.
Chapter 21. Akhenaten tried to change the worship in Egypt to the sun disc Aten rather than the sun god Amun. By the revised chronology, he was contemporary with Ahab king of Samaria, meaning that neither Moses nor David could have copied him, as they are accused of doing. His wife Nefertiti was a beautiful woman, and they had six daughters.
Chapter 22. Tutankhamen was insignificant as a Pharoah; he is only famous because his tomb was left intact. He married his sister (who had been married to their father); she had 2 stillborn children.
Chapter 23. Soon after Tutankhamen’s death, the 18th Dynasty ended. Rameses I became Pharoah, but only for a year. His son Sethi I accomplished a lot, including an invasion of Syria and Palestine.
(The link in this post is an affiliate link for Esther’s website, and if you purchase the book through this link it will help her website. I would have linked directly to the review on her site, but the website is down right now and will be till Esther gets home to work on it.)
Memories of Seth
Yesterday was Seth’s birthday. He would have been 17. Naturally, I was thinking about him a lot through the day, and decided to share some pictures from when he was little.
The day Seth was born was a day I’ll never forget. He was due the middle of January, so we had Gayle’s family’s Christmas gathering early. We were going to go home on Monday. Our car needed new shocks, so Gayle and his dad worked on that first. We finally left his parent’s place around 3:00 in the afternoon and headed home (they lived in Ohio, we lived a 6- or 7-hour drive away, in Michigan). After an uneventful drive home, uncomfortable for me because of constant Braxton-Hicks contractions, we walked into our house at 10:00 at night to find it “peopled” with mannequins! My sisters, who didn’t get to decorate our car at our wedding two years before because we hid it, had gotten revenge by decorating our house while we were away. (I was going to insert a picture of it, but apparently one of our photo albums is missing.) We spent a couple of hours tidying up, then went to bed at midnight. I woke up at 6:00 Tuesday morning in labor—a month early! We called the midwife, and she came as soon as she could. She allowed us to stay home to have the baby. Around 4:00 in the afternoon, I started to bleed. The midwife started really praying. About two hours later, around 6:15, Seth made his appearance. He was very blue, but started breathing and pinked up within a minute. We were thrilled to have our first boy! Esther wasn’t sure about him the first day, and was mad at me, but she soon learned to love him. She was only 16 1/2 months old when he was born, but she was determined to pick him up and carry him around. One time, I had left him asleep on a chair in the living room and went into the bedroom. She picked him up and carried him to me, dropping him at my feet. Thankfully, we had a thick, soft carpet, and he never even woke up!
Two weeks old
Nine months old
Five years old
Eight or nine years old
Ten years old
Pictures From Late November 2016
As usual, most of the random pictures are of Little Miss. This one was taken at Castle Hill.
This was in Cass as well; I just looked at Esther’s memory card the night before she left for a couple of weeks in America.
An aunt sent this dress to us. I got the picture quickly after dressing Little Miss, before she got dirty!
The supermoon around the time of the earthquake.
Fun on the trampoline!
Mr. Inventor is a hard-working young man.
I never know what I’ll see when I look out the window! One evening, it was Mr. Inventor and Mr. Intellectual, giving several siblings a ride on the ladder!
Little Miss actually sat and read a stack of books for about 10 minutes one evening, after I bathed her.
This wild cat has been coming around in the evenings to look for food. We often have whey in buckets outside the kitchen door, and it likes to drink it. We were quite amused at the lengths the cat went to to get the whey! Unfortunately, this was just before our own cat disappeared. He always spent the evening with this wild cat and two others who also came around for food, but a day or two after we took this picture we saw him for the last time.
We had quite a surprise one morning when several vehicles pulled in. The mayor of our district was going around to the local schools and preschools, giving teddy bears to the little children of the area. Someone had suggested this to help children who were having trouble sleeping because of the earthquakes, and a large company donated the bears. He heard about us and brought our three youngest each a bear, too! They love them.
A few of us were privileged to see this beautiful double rainbow early one morning. There are perks to getting up earlier than most of the family!
Water Play!
One warm afternoon, Esther gave Mr. Imagination and Little Miss a tub of water to play in. They sure had fun splashing!
Gore Bay After the Quake
We took my mom to Gore Bay only once while she was here. I wanted to take her again yesterday (she left today), but Monday I ended up in the hospital with a miscarriage, so that changed all our plans for the week.
Gore Bay didn’t seem much different. The boys thoroughly enjoyed playing in the water. It was right on high tide when we arrived, so the water was gradually going out. That meant they had to stay fairly close in because of the undertow, but they had a lot of fun anyway. Mr. Inventor dug a pool for Little Miss to splash in. She loved that!
Among all the white and gray rocks along the shore, we found these red and green ones! They were much prettier when they were wet.
The hillside going down to the water was covered with nasturtiums and sweet peas in bloom. The smell was so heavy! It was really lovely.
One of the first things we noticed when we arrived at the bay was this fresh slip. The soil at the very top of the cliff had fallen down to the bottom. Then, soon after several of us thought we felt a small tremor, we noticed it was still falling; we saw clouds of dust going down several times. Esther tried to capture it in a video; this short clip shows some.
Aftermath
It’s now been a little over two weeks since the earthquake. We’re no longer feeling tremors very often, although I hear that Kaikoura still is. We’ve cleaned up all the damage here, and the helicopters are no longer coming in very often. I did hear a couple, several times today, but nothing like the 40+ landings a day the first week! For several days, maybe a week, there were a lot of loads taken to Kaikoura dangling from under a helicopter. This was one of the first few loads; sewer pipes to repair damage.
This was a load of water lines. It’s much bigger than it looks!
The rugby club building, across the road from us, where we had Seth’s funeral, was somewhat damaged. Several large windows were broken out, and dishes thrown to the ground and shattered. The boys took this picture through a window.
In a classic example of closing the door after the horse runs away, we had the boys put fronts on the shelves. I miss seeing my shining jars of food, but I will admit this is much safer when we live in an earthquake-prone area!
On our way to church on Sunday, we noticed this hillside. See the jagged horizontal lines? Those were not there before the quake! 