Canterbury

I’m not sure what her problem was, but she sure thought it was terrible!

I dehydrated some strips of zucchini one day. When I brought the dehydrator in that evening to empty it, the children started eating them—and didn’t stop till they had eaten about half of them!

One afternoon, the hot water heater was boiling, after the fire had been burning most of the day. I said that the little boys ought to have their bath. Later, I went looking for Mr. Imagination, and this is what I found! Obviously, he didn’t catch what I really intended. Of course, Little Miss soon let go of her dress and was soaking. They had fun for awhile.

It rained! The creek had some water in it, and the little children had a lot of fun for a few days. What a mess!

Mr. Inventor’s latest project. An old brother in our church died a little over a year ago, and Mr. Inventor recently asked his widow if he could buy the man’s three old motorbikes. None of them are working, although the motors will turn over on two of them. He’s hoping to put together one that works. They had to dig them out from under several year’s worth of grass and thistles, to load them on the trailer. I managed to grab this shot of the boys riding on them up to the house before we left to bring them home from Kaikoura. All five boys are on board; Mr. Sweetie’s head is just visible behind Mr. Intellectual’s shoulder. There wasn’t time for a better picture before they disembarked.

Mr. Diligence doing school while Princess naps. That cat sleeps in the funniest poses! I have several more pictures for another post.

Mr. Imagination was given a huge teddy bear at a secondhand shop we went to on his birthday. Little Miss loved it, so when a friend at whose house we were a few days ago mentioned that she was sending some teddy bears to the op shop, I said Little Miss would like one. Did she want the bears, though? No—she fell in love with this penguin!

I often end up with an assortment of pictures that don’t seem to fit any theme, so here they are.

We see this rock wall every time we go to Kaikoura now. These rocks were stacked up to try to keep new rocks and dirt off the road if the slip slips again. I always think someone with a huge piece of equipment must have had fun stacking them up!

One of the boys found this cicada that died halfway out of the shell! They were quite intrigued with it.

We’re doing Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy this year for science. An assignment for the first chapter was to make a model of the solar system with balloons. From right to left are Mercury (black), Venus (orange), Earth (blue), Mars (red), Jupiter (orange), Saturn (pink with a green ring), Uranus (blue), and Neptune (purple). The yellow one represents the sun, although it would have had to be the size of half of our house. Jupiter and Saturn should have been twice as big as they are, but the balloons kept popping when we tried to get them bigger. And apparently, Pluto is no longer considered a planet! Even though this is quite out of scale, we had fun doing it.

I made tiny ponytails in Little Miss’s hair one day, just for fun. I think it will be awhile yet before we need to do any such thing again!

Our onion harvest this year.

We took the Inland Road to Kaikoura one Sunday when the coastal highway was closed due to slips from rain and fresh earthquakes. This is a church in Waiau, which was badly damaged in the November 14 quake. The bell tower is leaning pretty badly, although it’s hard to see in this photo.

One evening at the table, we were discussing how old each of us would be in Mercury years (Mercury goes around the sun four times for every Earth year). Someone got out our new abacus to figure out his daddy’s age. Multiplication is challenging with the abacus! We finally worked out how to get the answer, but it took awhile.

Mr. Intellectual drew this picture of a volcano, presumably in Hawaii, erupting into the ocean.

This is just a random collection of pictures I found on the camera of the children from the past month.

Mr. Sweetie picking cherries the second Sunday of the month.

Mr. Imagination’s reaction when I told him we were working on buying plane tickets to go to America in June. Think he likes the idea? We’re all excited!

To go to America, we have to get American passports for the two youngest. Mr. Imagination has one, but it will be expired before we go, and we haven’t done Little Miss’s American paperwork at all yet. So, one morning Esther and I worked on getting passport pictures taken. That’s a challenge!

We have a family staying with us for awhile. One day I was harvesting cabbage, with help from several children, and Mr. Sweetie found his head covered with cabbage leaves after I trimmed the head!

Mr. Inventor went to work again on his well. He got it dug down to about six meters below the surface, with about two meters of water in the bottom, but then the bottom caved in before we were able to try pumping out of it. I love his imagination and ability to make do.

Little Miss pretending to be asleep.

Mr. Sweetie wanted me to take a picture of him with this tower.