Our family's life in New Zealand
Mr. Inventor has been very busy living up to his name lately. He designed and built two bike trailers, after finding a picture online; the welder was used a lot over the past two weeks! He also figured out how to carve a wooden spoon. That was after the wooden knife carving contest between three boys; I didn’t get a picture of those creations, but they were very good.
Mr. Imagination has been unloading the washer for me for quite awhile now. He does a very good job of it. This morning, I had him load it for me with the next batch to be washed. He loved getting to push the buttons to start it going!
After Gayle got home this afternoon, he suggested that Seth start mowing lawn. He also told me he wanted to clean his truck. The next thing I knew, when I looked outside, this is what I saw!
Three boys mowing lawn (one mower no longer has the self-propelled feature, so two boys push it)….
Elijah was weed-whacking….
And these two were vacuuming! I love it when they are all working like this. Big sister is at work, too, cleaning at the place her daddy works. I need to get busy now; I’m the only lazy one at the moment! Time to fix supper.
Esther wrote this blog post yesterday. I loved the pictures so much that I asked her if I could share it here. She obliged—and even put it up here for me so I wouldn’t have to figure out how! Enjoy.
Today is a beautiful spring day. There are hardly clouds in the sky, and the sky is deep blue. My brothers are soaking up the sunshine, and getting some fun projects done before we move.
When they were working outside my window, I decided to take a quick break from school and get some pictures of them.
One was working on his crossbow (formerly a combined rubber band/arrow gun) made out of popsicle sticks, bike brake wire, and I don’t know what.
Another helped with the project, and the last one worked on stripping more bike brake wire to fix the brakes on his bike (at least, I think that’s what he was doing).
The last boy tried to scare me with an arrow and rubber band from the former rubber band/arrow gun, but I just took pictures of him. 🙂
And, realizing that wasn’t working, he picked up his bike and tried to get me to take a picture of his muddy bike tire (it didn’t work; I got a picture of his face instead).
Breathing the fresh spring air and looking forward to summer,
–Esther
P.S. We are planning, Lord willing, to move next week. This week, Mom was planning to get a good amount of packing done, but Sunday she came down with the flu along with one of my brothers. Then, another one came down with it the next day. Mom is finally doing well today, it’s taken a good three days for her to get over it. Praise the Lord, none of the rest of us have gotten it, and we’re praying we won’t! God is good.
Some of you may have seen a post like this a week or so ago, because I did post it, but it disappeared. I did six posts one evening, and scheduled them so they would appear every two days, but three vanished—one before it was posted and two after. Why does that happen? So frustrating. Anyway, here are these pictures again.
When you finish your chicken, use the bones for a telephone.
Playing in the rain!
He found a bag of carrots in the fridge and helped himself to a snack.
And here is the assortment of pictures from March that didn’t make it into their own posts!
A beautiful fall day–Esther enjoyed watching these steers out her bedroom window.
One night, we ran out of hot water, so my oldest son fired up the coal range. He stuffed it full of pine cones–and soon this is what the oven thermometer registered! I made him quit feeding it at that point. We had hot water!
Bigger brother reading to littlest brother!
This is the way to do math!
Finally, I have this post ready. I started it two weeks ago! I’ve been having computer problems; I bought a new laptop to replace my Windows XP desktop, since after this coming Tuesday it won’t be safe to use it online, and the new laptop was not working right. We sent it back to get fixed, and haven’t gotten it back yet; hopefully sometime in the next week! Anyway, that, plus the fact that for four days this past week our power was turned off for seven hours a day made it hard to do anything online–besides just daily busyness!
“Apples—I said, ‘Give me apples!’” This is Chessie, the cow we’ve had for nearly four years now. She’s rather spoiled.
Mrs. Moo, the cow we’ve been boarding and milking since I dried our cow off the end of January. She moves back with her owners when they move to their new farm the end of April.
The neighbor’s bull, who was with our herd for two weeks so Mrs. Moo will have a calf next year. We’ll probably see him again when it’s time to think about that for our cow.
Chessie again, two weeks before calving.
We went to the garden at the other place and filled the bed of the truck half full of onions, half full of ears of corn, and then the corn stalks on top!
I liked the expressions on their faces in this one! They had fun throwing corn stalks out for the cows to eat!
Look how dry the hills were! That was a month ago; now the hills are green again, since we’ve had rain a couple of times.
Time to catch up! Here are some pictures we took back in January that I never shared.
The littlest fellow still needs naps, although he doesn’t necessarily want them. One evening he fell asleep, and I laid him on the couch. When he started waking up awhile later, he ended up like this! While we were working on the new house, he took naps on a blanket in the corner of the living room.
This is a close-up of the windowsill in the living room. For 16 years, flies and bees had been the only occupants of the room! We scrubbed the white windowsill, then sanded and painted it—now it looks much better! I was amused at the layers of old paint on the outside; can you see all three?
The kitchen remodeling, getting closer to completion!
I painted the living room ceiling. It is wallpaper, but was looking old and dirty. The paint really freshened and brightened the room. I had to glue a lot of spots up, too.
The boys love playing around the creek!
The creek is nearly dried up.
I spent most of the last two days on the couch or in bed, with a migraine and breast infection. The one good part of that was that I had time to watch the little boys play. As I laid on the couch this evening, I enjoyed watching the youngest playing with some legos. He was totally engrossed in snapping them together. I love the way he sat on his feet!
A bit later, the two little fellows were going to “play bank”, and then it turned into jumping off the stool. I love the way they play together, and the youngest imitates so closely what bigger brother does!
A few Sundays ago, we were filling the van up with diesel in Kaikoura before heading home, and there was a couple there with a tandem bicycle. Apparently, Mr. Inventor studied it closely while we were there, because the next day he started building one of his own! He cut apart two or three junk bicycles and started putting the pieces together. He’s stalled right now, waiting for his daddy to do some welding for him. We’ll see if it goes any further, but I was enjoying the initiative and inventiveness–and he’s learned a lot about fixing bikes from this!