Random Photos

I took this picture one afternoon to send to a friend who had left here a few hours earlier. The entire weekend they were with us, it was dry, and the morning of this day, the children played outside on dry ground while she and I worked on potting my tomato seedlings. As they left, it started to rain, and soon we had this again!

Mr. Imagination adopted this baby blackbird after a cat knocked it out of the nest. He diligently dug up earthworms and fed it, a couple hundred a day, for a week. We were trying to teach this baby to be independent when it suddenly died one morning. It took a while to work out what happened, but he thinks it may have choked on a large kernel of corn. That was a sad day. Then, a week later, the cat bit his budgie when someone opened the door while he was letting the budgie exercise, and that bird died. Not a good week for birds in our house. We’re missing the budgie.

Mr. Sweetie made this arrangement for Elijah’s birthday!

For science one day this week, we mixed cornstarch and water, and played with it. What fun the children had! We were learning about the three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas), and this was to demonstrate a non-Newtonian fluid.

Inside the tiny house. It’s crowded—but we can sleep a lot of people in there now!

Here are the last photos from August!

This cow took us by surprise on her due date. She had bagged up a little, but not much, and sure didn’t look like she was ready to calve, as far as I was concerned, when I looked at her the night before. In the morning, there was evidence that she had calved—but no calf! We searched around the area, and down the cliff which she was at the top of, and couldn’t find anything. Several hours later, Mr. Diligence went back out and searched more. The calf was at the bottom of the cliff, way back in a blackberry patch! He pulled it out, and he and Mr. Sweetie carried it up the steep cliff to reunite it with its mother. That calf is fine, but we know now—this cow doesn’t bag up much, and we can’t go by the way she looks!

During lockdown, Esther and Elijah got the tiny house painted. We were sure thankful we had bought the paint a month before that!

Gayle spent one afternoon helping get the chicks outside. One of our cats is a hunter extraordinaire, and had pulled one chick out of the coop through a crack under the door (I discovered the crime when I went outside and found her eating it on the step of the house). Therefore, we decided we had better electrify the top of the fence around the run, since that cat likes to perch on top of it. Here, Gayle is stringing up the wires.

The tulip magnolia bloomed—so gorgeous! See Little Miss swinging in it?

This is what is left of my winter garden—broccoli, cabbage that didn’t head, and leeks.

Inside the greenhouse. This is a patch of peppers we wintered over; I think two of them have made it through two winters now. Gayle transplanted the aloe plants into that area, as well, and there are two or three Cape Gooseberries.

Because lockdown caught us unprepared (I planned to buy enough potting soil for the year, but couldn’t because we were locked down so fast), I started my tomato seeds in the ground in the greenhouse, and then put them in punnets after I was able to get some potting soil. Here are the tiny baby tomatoes, starting to come up.

Most of the greenhouse is full of lettuce and spinach.

See how wet it is? This is a common sight. Any time it rains, we have surface flooding in the yard.

The garden on a rainy winter day.

The chicks are cosy and warm! This was a month ago, when they still needed heat from the lights.

About the end of August, they were big enough to go out into the run.

Simon replaced the head gasket on this car. It was Esther’s car, till the head gasket blew, and now he uses it for hunting.

A lockdown Sunday afternoon. We played an entire game of Chicken Foot dominoes—from Double 15 down to Double 0!

Gayle played games with the younger ones.

Esther saw this funny sight one day! They sure do enjoy the sun.

Simon’s birthday presents. We each gave him a bag of salt and vinegar chips, his favorite kind, wrapped in all sorts of wild and wonderful packages. By the third one, he had figured out the joke. The last one included monetary gifts from several of us.

We saw this out the window one morning. Our cows were at the top of the hill as the sun came up.

Finally, the last few photos from July!

Two little girls reading. Miss Joy is sitting on a bag of little bits of firewood.

I’m not sure what Simon was doing here! It was bedtime.

Our backyard most of the winter. I was glad when the boys dug in and tidied up that pile of wood.

I went out “shopping” one evening and brought all this in. It made two meals.

The blocks got used for a few days, as the younger ones enjoyed building towers.

I was delighted one evening when Simon and Elijah, both in their upper teens, played a game with Little Miss, age 6, for an hour or more.

What is he holding? Spider webs! We read a science lessons about spiders and their webs, so he went around the house collecting silk to see how strong it is.

I never got a post up last weekend. I always plan to do that on Sunday after we come home from church. This week, though, we came home for about 10 minutes and then took off to a hut the boys have been going to every so often the last couple of months, hunting possums. We stopped before we got there, though, and took off through the bush on a walking track the boys have been unsuccessfully searching for for about six weeks. I had been telling them they might find it more easily in the daylight (they hunt at night)…. This track, they were told, goes to a hut beside the river. We spent almost an hour walking along it before we decided we’d better turn around so we wouldn’t get caught in the dark. What a tramp! It obviously used to be a fairly easy walking track; it looks like it may have been the grade for a bush railway back in the logging days. Now, it’s getting overgrown, and there are trees laid down across it in many places from a cyclone 3 1/2 years ago. Someone had gone through with a chainsaw and cut out enough that we could get through, over and under the trunks, but it was a fun adventure! I may post about it sometime; Esther had her camera and took pictures. Anyway, that’s why you never saw a post last week, in case you noticed it was missing!

Here are the rest of our June pictures. Esther happened to be with Elijah at his job one day, and got a couple of pictures of him working. He was spreading glue on the floor, and when it dried, he laid down carpet tiles.

Two brothers conferring about the tiny house.

We went to Canterbury one weekend for a midwinter dinner, and then visited a couple of other friends. One person gave us a large stack of puzzles she was clearing out, and as soon as we got home, they were all being used!

We had to replace our stovetop. The boys enjoyed working on that!

This truck stopped across the road one day.

We grew a mixture of colors of carrots last year. Look at the white, yellow, orange and purple! It’s been pretty fun to have so much variety.

Here are the rest of our photos from May!

Esther took photos one evening of what everyone was doing. The little girls were reading books.

The younger boys were playing a game.

The bigger boys were also playing a game, and I was working on a puzzle.

Esther, Elijah, and Mr. Sweetie stayed up late to watch a lunar eclipse one night. A few of the rest of us woke up briefly to see it at this stage.

Just a typical evening! Simon and Mr. Diligence were wrestling.

Our little girls are good friends!

She loves yogurt!

We were working on a writing assignment, and someone who wasn’t even doing the course came up with a funny story!

Potty-training the doll!

The pictures we took during May don’t fit very well into categories, so I decided to just do two posts of random pictures.

This happened every day during May. This must have been a Saturday morning, since it was daylight. The cow in the lead is Poppy, the older one; the other is Pansy, her daughter. Pansy is now dry, so we’re only milking Poppy. They live in the paddock we use out of town; it takes about 10-15 minutes to walk them up here to the shed for milking.

Elijah has new clothes for work. He doesn’t often wear the high-vis pants, but he wears the orange shirt all the time.

The younger ones love to bike around. They often hook a trailer to one of the bikes so they can take Miss Joy for a ride, too.

The little girls found a snail! They spent a lot of time watching it.

A cold morning! It felt good to cuddle around the fire to do school

Miss Joy loves her babies. She spends a lot of time carrying them around, usually trying to get someone else to hold them.

Our entire herd of cows spent a few days up here across the road from the house. It was fun to see them, even though it was pouring rain. There are six: two cows, two steers and two heifer calves.

I am way behind with posting these pictures!

This is what the girls’ room looked like for several weeks, while we were redoing the carpeting in the hallway, which doubles as our library. All our books were packed in boxes for a few months, and stacked in the hallway, and when a date was finally set for putting in the new carpeting, I moved the books to Esther’s room. She was away for a month, and Little Miss doesn’t need all that space, so it worked.

Elijah got a new set of tools for floor laying. Here he is giving Simon a guided tour on the day he got the set.

I am doing Sonlight Kindergarten American History with Little Miss this year. One of our early read-alouds was The Missing Mummy. Mr. Imagination listened in, and was so intrigued by the story that he read ahead. He was so involved with it that he didn’t notice I took a photo of him reading!

We were given a tiny house by a man from Nelson! We met him at a friend’s funeral up that way in December, and he spent a night in our driveway in March. Several days later, he called and asked if we were interested in taking the tiny house he had been living in but didn’t need anymore. Our boys borrowed a vehicle and trailer, and drove up to Nelson on Friday night to get it. They got home with it late Saturday afternoon, also having purchased a vehicle for Elijah while they were up there!

Our little flock of goats. We don’t have any of them anymore; when one of the kids decided she was going to jump the fence and get out no matter what, we decided to get rid of them, and then we sent the nanny off to get bred. At this point, we’ve decided that they are enough work that we are better off without them, although we like goats and Gayle does well on goat’s milk.

Mr. Imagination with a katydid one Sunday afternoon at church.

Esther took this picture to show me the grain mill that a neighbor needed to get rid of. We helped this lady clean out her house when she moved away, and this mill is one of the things we took.

One week’s harvest of tomatoes!It was quite a process to get the tiny house into place! The boys put rollers under it and used a logger’s winch and chain to pull it to its corner. I was thankful that nothing—and noone—got broken!

Inside. It was just a shell; by now, it has been insulated and lined with another layer of plywood, and we plan to paint it and put down a vinyl floor covering.

We got one largish watermelon from our greenhouse this year. When we ate it, Mr. Diligence requested an entire round slice of it. Apparently, this has been a long-time wish of his!

One Saturday, Esther organized her brothers to help her build shelving for the container. She, Elijah and Mr. Diligence spent the day building two sets of shelves.