• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Lots of Helpers

Our family's life in New Zealand

  • Home
  • Our Library
  • Math Freebie
  • Contact Us
  • Legal Policies
    • Disclosure and Disclaimer
    • Privacy Policy
You are here: Home / Archives for Random Photos

Random Photos

October 2022 Photos

November 13, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

As usual, I have a number of photos from October that didn’t fit into their own posts!

Gayle often walks somewhere with the little girls on Sunday afternoons. They like to go down to the bridge, and one time he took a picture of them on the sign for our little town.

One evening, Miss Joy requested that someone take a picture of her holding Princess!

One day, we saw helicopters flying over the river. The next day, they were flying over it again. We watched closely, and saw them following the riverbed exactly. We couldn’t figure out what was happening, but then we started hearing jet boats, as well. I searched online for awhile, and finally found information about a jet boat marathon that was happening. One leg of it was up the Grey River, and into the Ahaura! We went down to the riverbed to watch the boats go back downstream. They move fast!

Our heifer Bluebell had her calf in October. It was a little bull, so we decided not to keep him. We were glad that the farm Simon was working on wanted him for breeding!

Someone gave a battery-powered car to the family in whose home we meet for church. The little children love it! It can be operated with pedals and a steering wheel on it, or by a remote control. Here, Miss Joy and another baby were riding while one of the older children operated the remote.

I think these pictures are actually from September. The greenhouse was looking pretty lush! Since then, I have ripped out the old lettuce and planted peppers along the right-hand side.

I did an experiment with onions this year. The ones to the left were planted from seed directly in the ground in May. To the right, the top tray is ones of the same kind that I planted in that try in June, and the others were a different variety, planted in the tray in July or early August. We set them all out in the main garden at the same time, in September. I am hoping for larger onions than usual! So far, the ones I started earliest are doing best. The ones started in June mostly died, and the red ones, started last, are doing fairly well.

This is how I plant onions. I dig a shallow trench and lay the roots in it, then cover them with soil. After a few days the plants stand upright, and, theoretically, start growing!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Garden, Random Photos

August/September 2022 Photos

October 9, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

It’s time to catch up with the pictures I have from August and September. When our blogs went down, I quit posting on the weekends like I had been, because I couldn’t for a week and then had to redo two months worth of posts. Then, because we changed hosts, we had to pay hundreds of dollars for the new hosting service. There was no way we were staying with a company that frequently had downtime and then completely lost everything for a week, and didn’t have it all backed up when they got it back! We realized that my blog is taking up most of the space we need, because I have so many pictures. Esther found a program that compresses them to a much smaller format, so I’m working my way through the archives, finding all the pictures I used in old posts and compressing them, removing them from the blog and uploading them again. It’s fun to see all those old pictures from when my now-10-year-old was tiny, but it’s a lot of work! I have made it through almost the first year of blogging so far. As you can imagine, that takes a lot of time, which means I haven’t been thinking so much about putting up new posts. At the same time, seeing what I did with my blog back then in 2011 and 2012 has inspired me to put up more frequent, shorter posts. What do you think? Would you rather that, or longer, more infrequent catch-up posts? Comment and let me know what you like.

One evening I went into Esther’s room to talk to her about something and looked out her window. The clouds were incredible! I tried taking pictures with a camera and my iPad, and this is the best one I got. The clouds were even more spectacular than that!

We did this craft when we studied Uganda. It’s supposed to be a lion with a mane! I didn’t have the right colors of paper, so we made do with what we had.

Poppy had her calf on the first of August–another cute, tiny heifer. We named the new baby Rosie.

This is Mr. Imagination, Miss Joy, and Little Miss going across the road to visit the new calf.

The magnolia tree bloomed. That’s always beautiful! Half the tree seems to have died, though, which we can’t figure out.

Miss Joy loved her puzzles! She has three or four that she knows how to do, and some days she has put them together half a dozen times in a row. I think she’s gotten bored with them, though, because she hasn’t asked for them for awhile.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos

July 2022 Photos

August 8, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

For some reason, I often end up with only a few photos in July. It’s the middle of winter, so maybe there just isn’t that much that’s inspiring to take pictures of? Here are the few I found in my picture folder.

This is Mr. Sweetie, with Mr. Imagination’s cockatiel, Jo-Jo, on his shoulder. Jo-Jo prefers to sit on the organizers on top of my desk, or on a high cupboard, and watch what happens in the house, but sometimes Mr. Sweetie can coax him onto his shoulder like this.

Mr. Sweetie borrowed a book from a friend. He read it, and then Mr. Imagination picked it up and read the whole book. When they were going to return it, Little Miss found it in the van, and she read the whole book, too! If you know anything about the struggles I had teaching a couple of our older boys to read, you’ll know how much this picture means to me.

One day, the girls were playing on our street with the go-cart. First, Little Miss pushed Miss Joy around–and then they reversed! I tried to get a picture when I could see both their faces, but wasn’t fast enough.

Last Sunday after we came home from church, Miss Joy laid down on the floor and went to sleep. It was late enough that we had decided not to have her go down for a nap, but she obviously needed one!

This was about a month ago. She was so tickled to be able to “read” me this book! She had done a better job a day or two before, “reading” it to me, and wasn’t real thrilled about reading it again, but I coaxed her to and she obliged. I held the iPad above her head to get this clip, so she wouldn’t know what I was doing.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos, Video

May 2022 Photos, Part 2

June 26, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of our photos from May!

Esther made peanut butter one evening, from 5 kg of peanuts, and forgot to put salt in one lot of it. She put it all in a big bowl to stir the salt in, and was pretty amazed at how that much peanut butter looks. We normally put it in 2-litre buckets as we make each batch in the food processor, so we don’t see it like this.

We had a hailstorm one afternoon. The younger children were thrilled and ran outside to play in the ice that was coming out of the sky.

They scraped up some hail from the trailer bed and brought it in to show me!

James and Princess, enjoying the warmth from the fire. That’s one spoiled cat.

We killed a beef the end of the month, and Esther and I spent three days cutting it up. Lots of meat! This was everything from the two hindquarters, which we mostly made into roasts and steaks. We saved all the bones to make into broth, and all the fat, to render into tallow. We enjoy doing the work ourselves and being able to use everything.

Little sister, delighted to be joining her big brothers for breakfast; they usually leave before she gets up in the morning.

Miss Joy helped her daddy mow lawn one afternoon!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos

Late April/May 2022 Photos

June 3, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Whew! Finally I found a chance to sit down and work on this blog. Between visitors on the day I normally blog (two weeks in a row), a three-day migraine, internet issues, driving lessons for James (worthwhile: he passed his test!), and butchering a cow, it’s been an intense couple of weeks. And, the wonderful busyness continues, since we have more company coming this weekend. We are blessed! For the moment, though, I have a bit of peace. The younger children are finishing their schoolwork for the week by doing a small craft project, and then they’ll finish cleaning the house. I need to make a big pot of chili for tonight, when we’ll be feeding 4-5 extra young men plus a man from our church, and start on food for the weekend, and cut up the steaks from the cow, but that can all wait till after lunch. So, what did we do the end of April and in May?

Gayle took this photo on his phone from the top of the hill across the road, where we often graze animals. I like that he has the ability to take pictures, as that way special times like this are captured!

Gayle’s health is much better than it has been for many years, and he has a lot more energy, which means he can do things like take Little Miss for a walk after work. One afternoon they walked down to the river, and he took this picture under the train bridge.

The younger boys took two of their boats down to the paddock in which we keep our cows, and they love to play in the little creek that flows through one corner. Miss Joy loved a ride with Mr. Sweetie! This is a kayak that a neighbor gave the boys. They patched up a hole in it, and it works!

This is a boat that Mr. Imagination and Mr. Sweetie made. It works pretty well.

Gayle liked these toadstools, and of course the little beauty in front of them.

Elijah snapped this picture one evening when he was taking care of the chickens on top of the hill across the road, at sunset. Living between two mountain ranges means shorter days in winter, but we sure have some gorgeous scenery!

This was one of our huge pumpkins. It weighed over 9 kg (20 pounds), and had very thick, sweet flesh. If anyone wants seeds, just ask!

Some friends came for food and fellowship one Sunday evening, on the spur of the moment. After we ate, we enjoyed a lively game of dice. No gambling–just a lot of fun!

Jo-Jo is getting much better at flying. He isn’t loose often enough to be really good yet, so one day he found himself in this predicament when he landed on a blind and had to use every tail feather to keep himself balanced. As soon as she took the picture, Esther took pity on him and helped him down; he couldn’t figure out how to get off the blind by himself.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos

April 2022 Photos

May 8, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here we are in May already! The months fly by very fast. This first picture is Miss Joy driving her car. We use that crate to take Bibles to church–it keeps them off the floor of the van! She loaded herself into it when it was empty, along with a bear and several books, and pretended to drive. See her hands on the “wheel?”

It is time to finish the salve we started in early March. We had started three jars, and I got one finished just before Easter. Until meeting up with a friend in Timaru at Easter Conference, I didn’t have enough beeswax to finish, so now I need to do the other two jars. The first step is to strain the herbs out of the olive oil. Then, I weighed the oil, and for every ounce of oil, I added a Tablespoon of beeswax bits and the oil from one Vitamin E capsule. Then, I heat it all just enough to melt the wax, and pour it into small jars. The younger children (and a few of the older ones) love to eat the empty Vitamin E capsules! I opened about 50 that day, with such a big batch of oil, and they were all gone before the boys got home from work.

Also, a few days before Easter, Mr. Imagination brought up three baby turkeys! Because a hawk has been destroying all the turkey nests, these are the only ones we got this year. We kept them in the house for about two weeks; while we were gone a neighbor came in a few times a day to check on them. Now, we’ve gotten them acclimated to being outside in a small cage that we move around on our lawn. They got a lot of love the first week!

The day we drove over the mountains to Timaru was a gorgeous morning! It’s impossible to capture all we see with a camera, but here’s a tiny glimpse.

We harvested most of our pumpkins a couple of weeks ago. This is about 100 of them! On the far left you can see our biggest, a Hubbard. One end was rotting, so I cooked it immediately. It took a lot of work to get inside it. I had to use a cleaver and bang that with a piece of wood to finally crack the hard shell open. After I cleaned out the rotten bits and the seeds, I tried to weigh it. Both halves overloaded my 5 kg scale! I’m guessing it may have been about 13 kg, or 26-28 pounds. It was delicious, too! Very sweet. One of the gray ones was also almost that weight. It didn’t look quite so big, but had a smaller seed cavity. It was also very sweet. If any of my friends here in New Zealand want seeds, I saved all of them. The long brown one to the right is actually a zucchini. I hand pollinated it so the seeds would be what I wanted, and then watched it swell through the summer. It took only about three weeks to reach that size! I haven’t opened it up yet, because I’m making sure the seeds are totally mature. Anyone who wants zucchini seeds can have a few of them, too! I hope they are viable, anyway!

This is Elijah with his favorite toddler.

One morning right after we got off Daylight Savings, the girls were both up early enough to “help” take the cows back down to pasture.

At one point we had too many zucchinis, so I told the younger ones to cut them up. We cooked them a bit and fed them to the cows. The children had fun, and the cows had a feast!

Miss Joy loves to cut paper. She was delighted when Esther gave her an old phone book to cut.

The little girls set themselves up on Esther and Miss Joy’s bed one evening, with lots of pillows, soft toys, and books. They had great fun reading.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos

So Far in March….

March 27, 2022 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

We have not taken many pictures this month! I’ll have to be more intentional about taking some if I want to keep blogging. This was a potato someone found in the garden. It weighed an entire kilogram (over two pounds!).

We got our year’s supply of salve started. Packed into those jars is comfrey, plantain, lavender, calendula petals, and a bit of self-heal. We filled the jars with olive oil, and it is currently soaking for six weeks.

Miss Joy was delighted to figure out one day that she could tuck her doll inside her dress. That was her baby carrier!

James signed his apprenticeship papers, and to celebrate, his boss took him to the store and bought a bunch of tools.

Elijah took Mr. Sweetie on a trip to Dunedin to visit friends. They spent a day in Timaru with a friend, who took these two pictures of Mr. Sweetie using a giant slingshot at the beach.

They stopped at Moeraki Boulders, and Elijah caught a picture of Mr. Sweetie balancing this boulder on his head!

Filed Under: Activities at Home, Away From Home Tagged With: Random Photos

February 2022 Photos

March 13, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I don’t have very many pictures left from February. Guess we haven’t taken very many lately. I was working in the garden one morning when the neighbor asked if I had set that fire. I looked at him blankly, and he gestured to the south. I looked up–and saw this! Over the next few hours, the smoke drifted over us, making it quite hazy here for awhile. That evening, we learned that it had been just up the road from some friends of ours. It was set intentionally to burn off a paddock, and at the point that I took the picture, the fire was under control. Several hours later, though, it got out of control and they had a hard time putting it out.

Mr. Sweetie found this old coat in a box of rain coats that a neighbor gave us when she cleaned out the place where she lived for 50 years. It had been her husband’s. Mr. Sweetie loves it!

A cyclone hit us about a month ago, dropping around five inches of rain in 24 hours. Six or eight hours after the rain stopped, I walked down to the paddock with Mr. Imagination to see the flooding. Normally, the water is contained in a small creek to the right. It’s good that there is a drainage ditch to catch the overflow!

A friend sent a stamp collection to Elijah. He had great fun sorting his booty.

Apparently, someone thought Princess wanted to read a book!

These boys got home at the same time one afternoon, and I was amused at the contrast. James had been tearing down an old chimney, while Elijah was, as usual, laying new, clean carpet or vinyl. They are both hardworking young men!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos

January 2022 Photos

February 20, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I ended up with a lot of photos taken in January! I wonder why some months we take a lot and some months we don’t take many. This first one is of the bed that was supposed to be full of onions. Most of the onions died, so I left the volunteer potatoes, and then transplanted zinnias throughout it and portulaca around the edges. Lots of dill came up, too, and we ended up with quite a mix of colors. Now, a month later, the potatoes are dying back, but the zinnias are taking over, and this bed is really gorgeous! It’s right beside the driveway, so a good spot. I’m enjoying the flowers.

I was coming in from the garden one day when Esther was going out with her phone, and she grabbed this picture.

I took this picture to advertise the heifer that James is leading (she sold immediately!). We were moving the herd back down the hill to the large paddock we graze them in. They had been on the roadside above our town for a few days, but this day they wouldn’t stay in. One was in heat, and she was likely pushing the others out. Those of us who are home during the day locked them in this small paddock till reinforcements got home, and then I grabbed a quick picture before they headed down.

We needed another bed in the girls’ room so Miss Joy could move out of our room. The only way we could figure out how to fit her in there was to build a loft bed. I found several sets of plans online, and Elijah designed and built this. Little Miss sleeps up there, and Miss Joy sleeps in the queen bed with Esther.

One hot day, we took lunch down to the river bed and let the children play in the creek for a little while before we came back up.

The girls helped Esther make a rhubarb crisp one day. They enjoyed that!

The boys’ sleepout is no more. A couple of our boys had started demolishing it, and one day when a friend brought his children over for a little while they finished the job. That was great fun! Then, it had to be picked up and taken to the dump. That wasn’t so much fun.

Miss Joy loves being read to, and Mr. Imagination is learning the joys of reading aloud.

Little Miss had a birthday in January. She enjoyed opening her presents!

We finally replaced the grain mill that has been limping along for years. The little girls were intensely interested in how it worked when I tried it out.

So much fun to cover a salad with flowers!

Picking beans. I had a few bush/dwarf beans, but we got most of our crop from the runner beans on the trellis.

The joys of a crate, a blankie, and a thumb!

Jo-Jo is tame enough to ride on shoulders now. Mr. Imagination was thrilled the first time he could do this! At first, Jo-Jo bit anyone who tried to pick him up. Now, he might nibble, but gently. He keeps trying to fly, but since his practice time is limited to 10 minutes a day, he is still wobbly, and often crashlands.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos

December 2021 Photos

January 23, 2022 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Miss Joy found Daddy taking a nap!

I was reading aloud to the family one evening, and Miss Joy started bringing me books to read to her!

She informed Simon one evening that she was going to drive somewhere, so he asked her where her driver’s license was. She didn’t have one, so he gave her this business card. She got busy diligently signing it.

For Science, we made a model of a water molecule.

For a couple of days, the girls’ favorite activity was making soup, using flowers and leaves.

We bought a cockatiel for Nathan, since his budgie died. This little bird is named Jo-Jo. He’s still a baby, so he looked rather ragged when we got him. He’s looking better now, and getting slightly tamer.

The day before Christmas, we started working on the house. These are the before pictures of the sides we are redoing.

It didn’t take long to rip off the old weatherboards!

The flax bush in front of the house bloomed in December. We enjoyed watching the tuis come to drink the nectar.

When two or three tuis showed up at the same time, there were always raised feathers and arguing. It was pretty funny!

This is the view from our kitchen window. Actually, this WAS the view; all those pine trees at the left are gone now, and we can see the house behind them at the top of that hill.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: House Renovation, Random Photos

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 13
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

  • RSS Feed
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Goodreads

Recent Posts

  • Book Review–The Me I See In You
  • Book Review–She is My Child
  • Little Girls
  • Book Review–The Last Disciple: Crisis in Jerusalem
  • Christmas Day, 2022

Archives

Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links.

Subscribe to the Blog

Thank you!

Please check your email to confirm your subscription.

.

You can unsubscribe anytime. For more details, see our Privacy Policy.

The Family:


Dad and Mom (Gayle and Emma)

Girl #1, Esther, my right hand

Boy #1, Seth (Mr. Handyman)

Boy #2, Simon (Mr. Inventor)

Boy #3, Mr. Intellectual

Boy #4, Mr. Diligence

Boy #5, Mr. Sweetie

Boy #6, Mr. Imagination

Girl #2, Little Miss

Girl #3, Miss Joy

Book Reviews Website

IgniteLit

COPYRIGHT © 2023 · TWENTY SEVEN PRO ON GENESIS FRAMEWORK · DISCLOSURE & DISCLAIMER · PRIVACY POLICY