Just over a week ago I took a video of a walk through the garden. We hadn’t had rain, at that point, for about a month and a half, but a few days later, we got 2 1/2 inches over the course of 2-3 days, and everything is a lot happier! We’re bringing in bushels of food; yesterday Esther picked 46 kg (2 banana boxes) of tomatoes. Yum!
Ahaura
December 2024 Photos
Here are the rest of our pictures from December! One Sunday afternoon, Gayle took the girls on a walk down to the river. They found a field of wildflowers.
Elijah found this interesting moth somewhere.
James has been working diligently on his sleepout. Here was the first of three coats of paint to go on. His little sisters were delighted to help!
Little Miss took this picture to illustrate a story she wrote about her chores, which include feeding a bottle to the calf.
After our budgie died in July or August, the cockatiel got very depressed. We finally got him a friend, hoping to cheer him up, but it was too late and he died a few days later. So, we got another budgie to keep the new one company, and we have two birds again! The blue one is a very young male. Some friends had a pair and hatched this one; we got it when it was old enough to leave them. The green one is a female. They get along very well. We named the blue one Reepicheep and the green one Jewel, since Esther had just finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia aloud.
The hollyhocks are blooming, so many dolls get made!
One afternoon I walked down the hill to have a look at the chickens, and took this picture up the valley from there.
Daddy was taking a nap, and when Miss Joy noticed the cat sleeping with him, she joined them.
It rained on Christmas Day. A lot of the day was spent playing games, but for awhile some of the fellows worked on denailing some timber that James had salvaged.
As always, we enjoyed seeing the tuis and bellbirds drinking nectar from the flax blossoms.
The big project during the Christmas holidays was building a new garage at Simon’s house to replace the one they tore down over a year ago when it threatened to fall down.
Boating the Ahaura
The Sunday afternoon just before Christmas, the boys who were at church decided to boat down the Ahaura River from Jim’s Hut, just at the end of the Ahaura Gorge, to here, near the confluence of the Ahaura and the Grey Rivers. The girls decided to go along to drive the vehicle back, and do some hiking while they were in the area. So, they saw the boys off and then drove up the track a short way. They walked down another track to an old hut, and when they were coming back, some of the boys popped out of the bush! Just after launching the boat and kayaks, the barrel boat got swamped by big waves in the rapids. It sank–and the boys who were in it were glad to have life jackets on! After a brief conference, three boys decided to walk back to catch up with the girls and get a ride out to civilization, while the rest of the party continued down the river with the kayaks. (The boat has never been seen again. It had no flotation devices, and sank in a deep spot. James is unhappy that he lost his water bottle, which he had tied to the boat so he wouldn’t lose it in the river.) About five hours later, the kayakers reached Ahaura and demolished several large homemade pizzas!
Mr. Imagination ready for takeoff.
Little Miss
There is our last glimpse of the barrel boat!
The Garden in December
We finally finished planting the garden–although, to be honest, that is a job that never really finishes, since I keep planting little bits throughout the year. The most of it is done, though, and to celebrate, and as a way of keeping a record, I took a video as I walked through. So, if you want to see what we’re doing right now, have a look!
October 2024 Photos
Here are the rest of my pictures from October! I took this first picture one rainy day near the beginning of the month when we were in Greymouth. The annual Bookarama opened that day, and we were waiting in line when the doors opened. An hour and a half later we walked out with around 80 books between six of us, and went out to the breakwall to eat our lunch. The waves were quite impressive as they rolled in in front of us!
A picture of Miss Joy taking a picture!
This was our third lot of chicks for the year. For this hatch, I bought two dozen Barred Rock eggs, and then filled the incubator with about a dozen Black Orpington eggs from our pair of those chickens and a couple of dozen of our mongrels. During the night about three days before hatching, Gayle found the incubator unplugged! He quickly plugged it in again and within minutes it was back up to only about 5*C below what it should have been. We wondered if we would get any babies. The next day, we left for the weekend, and arrived home that Sunday afternoon to find no chicks yet, on the day they were due to hatch. We wondered…. and an hour or so later the first chick emerged! We ended up with 32 babies out of 39 or 40 that had candled fertile, and only lost 1 or 2 that died just before hatching–one of our best hatches yet! (Only one of the 13 Black Orpington eggs was fertile.)
I came into the kitchen one morning to find my monthly meal plan in tatters. It looked like a mouse had gotten it, but no mouse could have clung to the glass backsplash to nibble on that! Then, I saw a bit of snail poo behind it. A few days later, I found an enormous snail in the vicinity. The chickens enjoyed eating our culprit!
We spent several evenings in October observing the sky. We tried to find the comet that should have been visible, but couldn’t find it. There is a mountain range only a few miles to the west of us, behind which the sun sets early but the sky stays light for a long time. I took this picture of the moon one of those nights. We did get to see the International Space Station go over one night!
We did a couple of interesting demonstrations for science in October. One day, we made a scale model of the distances between the planets by marking them out on a roll of toilet paper. To see the whole distance, we took it outside so we could see the whole length at once.
Another day, we made a model of the relative sizes of the planets. Elijah was home that week, unable to work because he had bursitis in his knee, so I assigned him to help the girls make the clay balls and blow up the balloons to the proper sizes.
Sunday afternoon naps! Simon asleep on one couch, Elijah reading something…
…and James asleep on the couch on the other side of the room! This boy has two speeds: either full-steam ahead, or crashed.
Flood!
The last Saturday in October, we had four inches of rain in 24 hours–and there was a lot more upstream in the hills and mountains. That afternoon, I had to go down to the paddock where our cows live to work with them, and we discovered that the creek had flooded! We had to lead a cow through about eight inches of fast-flowing, muddy water; I discovered that I quickly get dizzy and disoriented with those conditions. I was thankful for a son who steadied me as we went through!
Water was backing up the small creek from the large one that is going through the center of this photo.
James is walking toward the water we had to lead the cow through. It was overflowing the banks of the small creek and going into the drainage ditch that runs through the length of the paddock.
This is the drainage ditch. It normally has a little trickle in the bottom!
This is a close-up of the flooding. The boys picked up the fence at this point, so it wouldn’t wash away.
This was the big creek, just upstream from our paddock, where it goes under the highway. There was a large log caught under the bridge, which is partly why we had a problem; you can see water being diverted to the right, where it went into the small creek and under the highway into our paddock.
I decided to walk down to the river at that point to see what it looked like. Quite impressive! By the next morning, though, the floodwaters had gone down.
Repiling the House
Elijah got started renovating the boys’ bedroom this winter. The project is moving slowly because he works five days a week, but he’s making progress. About the time he started putting the new closet together in a corner of the room, James decided that the piles under that side of the house should be replaced before Elijah went any farther, so that the house would be level! So, the boys devoted a Saturday to replacing nine or ten of them.
The first order of business was to put a jack beside each original pile, and then adjust it until the house was level with whatever point was highest. James borrowed his boss’s jacks and laser level for this part of the job (sure is handy that his boss lives right across the street and is happy to let James use the tools!). Then, they cut off the old piles some of which were supported by the house instead of the other way around, and jiggled them loose. When they had the old piles out of the ground, they dug the holes out a little bit. You can see here how much headspace there was. Rather challenging! I did not go under the house.
To get the dirt out, they used a square 5-gallon oil jug cut in half, with a rope tied to each end. One person stayed outside, pulled the full tubs out, and dumped them, and then they were pulled back under.
When all the holes were dug, they put the new piles in the holes and fastened them to the underside of the house. Then, they borrowed James’s boss’s cement mixer and poured concrete around the new piles. They got the concrete under the house the same way they got the dirt out, with those little tubs. The grass beside the house got torn up pretty badly, especially since it started raining halfway through the afternoon, but that side of the house is now level!
September 2024 Photos
Here are the rest of the pictures we took in September! This was the one picture I took when I went to the HEART retreat for homeschool moms near Christchurch. The view over Lyttleton Harbour is so beautiful!
Bluebell had her calf while I was away that weekend–a little bull. He’s very healthy, unlike her calf last year.
When Gayle and I went to Christchurch, we had a little extra time, so we stopped to walk through a park. The flowers were beautiful!
Esther often reads aloud in the evenings. One evening I noticed how enthralled these boys were. They were both listening intently!
The older boys went hunting and got more venison for us.
The youngest three love playing and taking pictures of each other and what they are doing.
I always enjoy seeing and hearing the tuis when they come in the spring. One morning while I was hanging laundry I got to see these two.
Around the Garden in Early Spring
Mr. Sweetie took my camera outside one morning in September to take pictures of the snow-topped mountains to the west of us across the Grey River. While he was out there, he took a lot of pictures around the garden and the house. I picked out my favorites to share here. Goofball likes attention, although she doesn’t demand it like her sister does. The chickens are Little Miss’s pets.
The chook house, where we brood babies, is in the middle of the garden. This was the first batch we hatched this year, at about three weeks old.
A fly on the new raspberry leaves!
Our back yard.
Miss Joy
The frame for a go-kart that Mr. Imagination is trying to build.
August 2024 Photos
Here are the rest of the pictures I found from August. I finally had time to look at memory cards and phones again!
This is a normal sight at 9:30 each evening. Just before I go to bed, I feed the cats so that this one goes outside for the night. She won’t let me forget to feed them! She is friendlier at that time of day than any other time.
This was one of the t-shirt dresses I made for Miss Joy this winter.
Little Miss took this picture of her flower garden to send to Esther while she was in America.
One day, I noticed that the bag of kindling had a lot of pieces of wood that were nice for building blocks. I suggested that Miss Joy do something with them. She spent a couple of hours playing with those blocks, pretending various things with them. The piece leaning against the couch at an angle is a scanner for credit cards. Watch the video to see what else she was pretending!
Little Miss used some of the blocks, too, as well as all of the Jenga blocks, to make a line of “dominoes.”
Simon bought a hut that someone wanted to get moved off a local farm. We went one day to watch it be picked up and moved to his property.
The little girls like to make huts in the living room!
Elijah finished his apprenticeship! He is very happy to have that behind him and to be a fully-qualified carpet- and vinyl-layer.
Little chicks, a day or two after hatching.
Miss Joy wanted to have a candle-lit meal for her birthday celebration, so we did.
She also wanted candles on her dessert, which was ambrosia, a mixture of yogurt, whipped cream, berries, and chocolate. We don’t normally do candles, but I did get some for her.
