Ahaura

December 2018 Photos

January 12, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

As usual, there are a lot of photos that don’t fit in any other post.

Mr. Sweetie was enamoured with this cicada that he found. It’s only an inch long.

We planted sunflowers in a square for a playhouse for the two youngest. They figured out what it was pretty quickly, and Mr. Imagination built a table for it. He took these next three pictures.

I planted zucchinis close to the sunflower house.

Little Miss loves helping me in the kitchen. She was actually quite helpful when I made Tomato-Cheese Pinwheels recently.

The canoe continues to take shape. Mr. Intellectual adds a strip or two every day.

The kittens are growing! Here they are at a month old.

This is Mr. Sweetie’s lego airplane.

Here is another example of the interesting vehicles we see driving past. This is an old Land Rover.

One afternoon, Little Miss helped Esther and I to make tortillas. She loves helping in the kitchen!

Another day, I sorted through a box of clothes set aside for her to grow into. She was thrilled to find that she could now wear this pretty dress!

Flax

January 1, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 4 Comments

We have a very large New Zealand flax plant outside our window. We have been enjoying watching the birds and bees pollinating it since it started blooming.

First, the flower stalks grew buds.

Then, the flowers opened.

Sometimes, this tui comes to call.

There are always bees around.

We also see a lot of starlings getting a drink of nectar. They end up with an orange cap on their head! I haven’t gotten a good picture of that, so here’s the best we could do.

Here’s another starling.

A bellbird has been coming, too, but it’s shy enough that if it sees the camera it is gone. This is the best I could get of it.

We are really enjoying the birds as they enjoy the flax flowers!

November 2018 photos Part 2

December 25, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of the random photos from November.

Princess tried out the bag of walnuts for a bed one evening. She soon decided it was too lumpy and hard, and moved to the laundry hamper.

We got home from town one evening, and immediately Little Miss got her school book and got started coloring pictures. She loves her preschool workbooks!

We enjoyed watching the tadpoles grow and develop legs.

The lemon tree outside our door was covered with blossoms for awhile. They smell so good! There are still some flowers, but also a lot of baby lemons.

Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination in the garden. We left strips of sod between beds to make nice paths to walk on. Because it rains so much, I didn’t want to be walking in mud.

Our rhododendron bush.

Living on the main road, we see all sorts of interesting vehicles. Some of the motor homes/ house busses are fascinating! Usually I don’t have the chance to get a picture, but this one stopped for a minute. It’s just a shed on the back of a truck.

Mr. Sweetie brought this huge bug in one day. We concluded, after some searching, that it is a huhu beetle (correct me if you know what it really is). That’s a lid that fits on a standard large-mouth preserving jar, so you can see how big the beetle is.

November 2018 Photos Part 1

December 22, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

November was a busy month! I ended up with a lot of photos that don’t really work for their own posts, so I’ll divide them in half.

The strip canoe is coming along nicely. This was early November; by now most of the hull is finished. I’ll have to get another picture soon.

The boys were in a hurry to have a boat and couldn’t wait for the strip canoe to be finished, so they cut open four barrels and welded them into a boat.

After the boat was finished, they attached the motor that was given to Simon, which he fixed so it would work, and asked their dad to take them down to the river one Sunday afternoon. The three oldest boys boated down the Grey River to the next town, 10 km (6 miles) by road but I’m sure farther by river. It took twice as long as we estimated, because they often had to get out and push it over shallow areas, and they sheared a pin once and had to fix it. (They didn’t have a spare, but found an old fence with loose ends of wire hanging off, cut a piece of that and used it for a pin!) They came back soaked, both from pushing the boat through the rapids, and from the rain that fell for awhile, but excited and ready to do it again!

We had quite the rain storm the first week of November. Here, we got 127 mm (5 inches) of rain in two days; up in the mountains there was twice that much or more. The river was raging from bank to bank. The younger boys and I drove across the bridge and back in the van just to see what it looked like. A woman drowned in a tributary of this river the evening of the day we took these pictures, far upstream, when the bank gave way under her as she and her family were looking at the flooding.

We also drove down to the creek below our town. It was flooded, too, of course.

Mr. Sweetie succeeded in opening a mango seed. I had never seen what is inside!

When we were in Christchurch in November, we went to a bulk foods store, and one of the things I was excited to find was corn masa flour! It’s yellow, rather than the white I’m used to using, but to find it at all was special. I made tortillas out of it, and then decided to make them into chips.

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss enjoyed brushing the tortillas with melted coconut oil, and then I cut them into chips. We sprinkled them generously with salt, and baked them for about 15 minutes. They were delicious—but quite hard. I think next time I’ll bake them for a shorter time.

Orwell Creek

December 1, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We are able to walk to a creek in about 5 minutes, and reach the spot where it empties into the river in 10 minutes. The boys found a spot that is deep and calm enough for swimming, so twice in the last several weeks we’ve walked down there on a Sunday afternoon. One of those days, they took Mr. Imagination’s boat along, and Simon floated in it down to the swimming hole. Then, they played with it and swam for awhile. It is a beautiful spot down there!

This time that we went down was two days after a torrential rain (we got 5 inches in two days; some places higher in the mountains got 2-3 times that much). The river obviously ran over this place—see how the grass is laid down!

Notice how the creek was still high. It had gone down about 6 inches since the day before, though.

When it was time to go back, Simon and Mr. Diligence twisted a grass rope with which to pull the boat up around a couple of bends, so they didn’t have to carry it so far.

These pictures were from the second time we walked down. Foxglove is in bloom everywhere now.

We crossed the creek just above its mouth. I liked this scene, with Gayle carrying Little Miss.

Mr. Diligence, Mr. Sweetie, and Mr. Imagination didn’t need help!

Simon gave Little Miss a ride home in his bike trailer, but going up the hill to get back to town was hard work. He stopped and had her push a little ways!

Here’s a video of the boat ride. Somehow, the quality turned out pretty poor; don’t try to full-screen it.

October 2018 Photos

November 10, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Little Miss taught herself to write her name the way it is on this picture. For a week or so, she spelled it MPI (or IPM or PMI). Then she added the A. Later that evening, Esther showed her how to properly spell her name, and she’s been doing it that way ever since. I’ve never had a 3-year-old who could write like this! She drew the picture, too, by the way, for her grandma when her daddy was going there.

We currently have three turkeys—two toms and a hen. They live in this pen. Mr. Diligence decided they need a proper run to live in, so he got started building one.

He enlisted the help of his brothers, and got started putting in posts, which are long pieces of wood that Gayle brought home from work for firewood.

Mr. Sweetie in the hole.

Mr. Imagination in the hole.

The run will go out from the chicken coop and around several bushes. Mr. Diligence is hoping that the bushes will provide enough cover for the turkeys to sit on eggs.

One of my gardens. By now, the plants are several times bigger! We’ve been harvesting kale leaves and lettuce and radishes from here.

The clothesline was supposed to go up and down, but the crank appeared to be broken when we moved here. For a birthday present, Mr. Diligence opened it up to see what was wrong. He discovered that it had simply slipped off the track because someone forced it down too far, so the boys easily fixed it for me. Now I can put my laundry up higher!

I bought these cups to start pumpkins in. Little Miss made stacks with them—Daddy, Mommy, and herself!

The doll sent to Little Miss by an aunt from America. She named it Susie, and I had the fun of sewing a couple of dresses for it.

One of her brothers made this daisy chain for her.

Mr. Intellectual moved the sheep across the road for more grazing. I was amused at the way he carried them.

Young Bicyclists

October 20, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Mr. Imagination wanted to build a car for himself. He ended up with a wooden contraption that his brothers helped him mount on a bicycle. It looks pretty funny, but he had a lot of fun with it for awhile! Little Miss has also ridden her bicycle a lot. This week, though, the training wheels broke off, so she can’t get herself going anymore. I got a video of her while she still could, though.

September 2018 Photos

October 6, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We watched a video one day of a man collecting dead leaves, twigs, flowers, and other things and building insects out of them, so Mr. Imagination decided to try his hand at it. This was his creation. He sure has an artistic bent!

The cats continue to amuse us. This box with old newspapers in it was Princess’s favorite bed for awhile, so her offspring decided it was THE PLACE to be, as well. One day, we found Grizzly and Goofball sleeping in it like this, cuddled together; apparently, Goofball had been asleep there and Grizzly decided she wanted it, too.

A few days later, we found this pose. It must have been too much work to find a way to get her whole body in!

Mr. Imagination, with some help from his brothers (maybe more than “some”!) built this boat. It works well, although Mr. Diligence was able to sink it by putting too much weight in, much to his satisfaction.

A friend sent Little Miss a card, just because. The card had a hole cut out of the front, so Little Miss made Goofball look through it.

The latest design for a boat—cut up barrels and weld them together for a double-hulled canoe. It’s still waiting for more time to finish it, though.

Poppy, a week or so before she calved.

I was walking home from checking on Poppy before she calved, on the road that goes east from our town, looking at the mountains to the west of us. It was so pretty, with range after range going off into the distance. Since I was looking into the sun, the picture turned out dark, but in real life it was quite light.

Little Miss loves books. If you say something to her, though, about reading them, she’s quick to respond that she can’t read.

Our new baby! This is Pansy, a purebred Jersey heifer. She’s full of personality, and very smart. Also, very stubborn. So cute and full of life, though!

We visited some friends in Canterbury last weekend, and the boys set an eel trap. They didn’t catch anything, though.

August 2018 Photos

September 22, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A friend invited our boys to go fishing with him one Saturday, so Gayle went with all the children to Greymouth. The friend had this kontiki, which takes a longline out a kilometer or two from shore, and has a section with a number of hooks on it. They ended up catching one kowai and a shark that got tangled in the line as they were reeling it in.

When they opened up the shark, they found a number of babies inside! They put the babies in the water, and they swam away.

One evening I noticed the most beautiful sunset over the mountains to the west! The colors were much more vivid than my camera was able to capture.

We took another trip to Pancake Rocks with some more friends who came to visit. This time, it was cloudy and misty, but there was a lot of water coming up out of the blowholes!

Simon had a week off work, so he spent some time on his canoe. Here are the first two strips in place!

The boys spent one afternoon digging up weed plants from the paddocks across the road. I was amused to see Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Imagination coming home this way!

Little Miss loves to listen to her grandma read to her. Grandma recorded herself reading a number of picture books, and Little Miss frequently wants to listen to the whole stack of books.

Mr. Imagination likes to listen, too! Once the others were finished with school, I let them listen without earphones.

Mr. Imagination found an old pingpong paddle, and made it into a paddle for a canoe! I noticed the blade laying around the other day, though.

I went out to our garden with my camera one evening a few weeks ago, and saw the clouds rolling in over the mountains to the west.

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss dressed their toy monkey up with gloves and shoes, and then wanted a picture. I let Mr. Imagination take the picture—it took about a dozen tries.

Clearing Land

September 4, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

The boys, with some help from their daddy, have been working diligently since the end of May to clear the land across the road for grazing for the cow. This first picture shows where they have been working for the past several weeks; what I can see of it from the kitchen window. This spot is to the left of the first and last photos in the other post I wrote about this project, at the end of the hill.