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May 2019 Photos

June 1, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Can you believe the first of June has arrived already? This year is flying past!

Here is the canoe the boys have built. Mr. Intellectual worked on the epoxy a day or two at the beginning of the month, then pulled it out of the garage into the sunshine to get the epoxy dry. With the cold, wet weather we’re having, it’s been next to impossible to work on this project.

One morning while her brothers did school, Little Miss played, “Going to a Conference.” She took all her dolls along. Here, she had been singing, pretending to be in a meeting; later they went to a bedroom (she carried all four at once) for lunch, and then went to the hallway to “sleep at Katie’s house.”

The boys noticed a pear tree across the road, beside where the cow grazes, with pears littering the ground under it. They asked the owner of the property if we could have the pears, and he gave them to us, so Gayle and the younger boys picked them all up one Saturday. We made a couple of large pans of pear/cranberry crumble–yum! Mr. Imagination and Little Miss helped me peel and cut up the pears for it.

When I placed an order recently for schoolbooks, I added the last two Pleasant Valley Farm picture books to the order for Esther. When they came, she showed them to these two, and they jumped up and down and squealed in glee–they love those books!

One day this week, we noticed a 20-foot shipping container being loaded into this truck! We had never seen that done before. Notice the rain falling heavily in this photo? That was the story of our week. For five days straight, we had torrential rains, for a total, here, of nearly 10 inches.

Mr. Imagination took this picture of a digger he is building. He loves to put things together.

Little Miss apparently brought a wasp in the house on her hair one day. It stung her just below the eye. She screamed for a good while. The next day, when I took this photo, it had swollen some, but not as bad as I thought it might. We had put plantain on as quickly as possible–it really helps!

I guess Mr. Sweetie was quite impressed by the way his milk foamed one day! I have several boys who love foamed milk (Esther found a foamer at a secondhand shop recently), but our milk often won’t foam.

This was our living room one evening this month. Simon and Mr. Diligence were listening to an audio book on Simon’s phone (which is only used as an audiobook player, by the way!). It looks like Mr. Sweetie was trying to listen in, as well. These boys are addicted to audiobooks.

My artist, Mr. Imagination, with the horse he made from marbles one day.

April 2019 Photos

May 18, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Little Miss draws a lot of pictures! This is a horse she drew for me a few weeks ago—see its hooves?

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Mr. Diligence and a friend built this bike trailer for Mr. Imagination’s birthday. The little fellow has had a lot of fun pulling it around behind his bicycle.

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Little Miss built a house in the living room one day.

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Mr. Intellectual has done a lot of wood working lately. Here is one of his recent creations, a pancake turner from an old electric pole. The wood was very hard, but brittle, so this turner ended up breaking beyond repair, unfortunately. It was beautiful, though!

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Simon can still get Mr. Diligence down!

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One evening, the fire got going so hot that the children asked for marshmallows—and toasted them through the closed door! We’re being more careful now as to how full we load the stove with the offcuts from Gayle’s work at the mill.

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Bits and Pieces

April 27, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When we were in America a few months ago, I was trying to explain to a few people exactly how small our kitchen is. These two pictures show all of my workspace. Quite often, the first step, when starting to cook a meal or do anything else in the kitchen, is to wash and dry dishes and get them put away.

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A month or so ago, the electric line to the garage started blowing fuses. When Gayle and the boys looked into it, they found that a hole had been rusted through the box around the connections, and the wires inside were bare. No wonder it shorted! They got the wiring replaced, and decided to replace the old, rotting pole, as well. That turned out to be a huge ordeal; they had to chip through concrete several feet down. The replacement pole, while not new, is much better—and it, too is concreted in securely! This photo shows part of the process of chipping out the old concrete.

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Mr. Intellectual has been enjoying making things out of wood lately. Here are two of his recent creations. I really like the pancake turner for doing stir-fries!

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Mr. Imagination grabbed this winter radish and pretended to be a rhinoceros!

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The younger children have harvested most of the pumpkins by now. They enjoyed all those different shapes and colors!

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One evening, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss got out all their soft toys and lined them up on the couches. Someone enjoyed it enough to take a couple of pictures.

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We had a few mornings chilly enough to start the fire in the living room. One of those times, someone noticed a flame coming out of the center of a log! He was impressed with it and wanted a picture.

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As part of the process of installing fibre optic cables in our village, the company had to put everything back into the state it was in before they started working. The last step was to put some tarseal on our driveway where they had cut through to put the cable in. The boys really enjoyed watching that!

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Children—March 2019

April 13, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I took quite a few pictures of the children in March! Here, we were doing a science experiment about camouflage. I bought some M&Ms, and they crumpled colored papers in three of the colors of the candies. Then, we put equal amounts of each of seven or eight colors of candy in the basket with the paper, and they were to see how many of each they could easily find in a minute. After counting and recording their results, of course, came the best part—eating them!

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Mr. Imagination and Little Miss were playing with the marbles one day and made pictures with them. I let Mr. Imagination take photos of their cats. The first is his, the second is hers, and they made the third together.

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The little boys asked for a box that came in the mail, one day, and they cut it up to make swords and shields. Little Miss wanted her own set, and struck this “fierce” pose when she wanted her picture taken.

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Little Miss badly wants her hair to be braided now. She hardly has enough, but she loves the results when I take the time for it! (She just saw me writing this and said, “That was when I had long hair.” Now she wants me to braid her hair again!)

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Mr. Imagination was picking up leaves to “start a campfire” one day, with Little Miss and Mr. Sweetie watching him.

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Last year, Simon gave Little Miss some cosmos plants for her birthday. This year, Esther bought her some seeds, so I started several plants. I couldn’t believe how huge they grew! She has loved having her own flowers to pick, although she can’t reach very many.

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While I was in the garden with the camera, I grabbed this picture of our marigolds. I haven’t grown many flowers in the past, but have decided it’s fun to have a few scattered among the vegetables.

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Odds and Ends From February 2019

March 30, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

One evening, I took the camera down the hill to where I milk. We are deeply grateful to a local man for allowing us the use of this large paddock, and Poppy appreciates all the grass in it! Pansy has her own fenced-off corner to keep her from direct contact with her mother (for obvious reasons), but they can be fairly close. Notice the mountains across the river? I enjoy seeing them in all their different moods.

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To get into the paddock, we cut across the fence near the top of the hill, using this stile that my boys built (on the suggestions of the property owner). Then, we scramble carefully down a very steep hill.

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I wanted to make lasagna one day, so Mr. Imagination helped me make the noodles. Yum!

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This was one of our first big pickings of tomatoes. Last week’s, about a month after this photo was taken, we got about twice as many as are in this picture! We’re very thankful for such a good harvest from our 104 plants. Today, I’m making the third enormous batch of salsa, since my big boys eat so much. We just happen to have very spicy peppers this year, which makes the flavor they enjoy, so the popular vote this week was to make salsa instead of bottling whole tomatoes and juice. We had about 110 pints from the first two batches; I think we’ll have 60-70 more after today. Hope that’s enough! Hard-working teenage boys eat a lot, and one of them was eating it by the cupful when I asked for taste-testers this morning. Notice the pink and black tomatoes? We had a bumper crop from our heirloom plants this year. We’re loving eating those super-tasty ones!

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Little Miss is watching me write this. She wanted me to write down her story, too: The man was picking apples. Then he saw the big, bad wolf, and then he made a brick house quickly and then he went in it and the big, bad wolf said, “Let me come in, let me come in.” Then the guy said, “No,” and then the big, bad wolf said, “Well, then, I will huff and I will puff and I will blow your house in.” Then he huffed and he puffed and he couldn’t blow the man’s house in. He said, “There’s a farmer’s tree down the road. Will you get up at 6:00 in the morning and come with me to the farmer’s?” The end.

January 2019 Photos

March 17, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Whew…I’ve been getting a bit behind. I really don’t recommend taking a three-week trip overseas in the middle of summer, then trying to jump right back into school and preserving the harvest when you get home, if you want to stay on top of things. And then, of course, pregnancy to add to the mix…and a three-day trip to the other side of the island last weekend…well, anyway, here are the last few photos from January. Sometime this week I hope to look through memory cards again so I can start catching up on everything that’s been happening since the middle of February!

The canoe got its last strips inserted, and Mr. Intellectual finished sanding the outside, before we left. They got the fibreglass they need to cover it, but haven’t started that process yet.

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When we see an escort vehicle go past with an “Oversize Vehicle” sign on it, we usually watch to see what is coming. Usually, we see a large digger (excavator), but sometimes it’s something more exciting, like this bulldozer from a gold mine near Reefton. This machine is HUGE!

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Here is a more common sight. I think a little boy was experimenting with my camera to see how he could best get pictures of vehicles going past.

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This was one of our first harvests of zucchini. Isn’t it pretty? We’ve had many times more than this with subsequent harvests; I’m very happy with a number of the crops from the garden.

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Here is a bellbird, as the flax blossoms were coming to an end.

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One day, the boys picked a bunch of peas from a neighbor’s field, after he offered us what we wanted. The boys spent the morning building a pea sheller. It worked well—for a few minutes. Then, something stripped out and they finished the job by hand!

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We sure enjoyed the kittens before they went to new homes!

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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.

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

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