Random Photos

Here are the last few photos from September, that didn’t fit into any other posts.

When everyone else works on cleaning the house on Saturdays, Little Miss wants to do her cleaning, too. She has decided that spraying the walls and scrubbing them is her job. She sure loves to spray water!

Licking the beaters is the best part of making pavlova!

The boys brought in four goose eggs one day. They decided to blow out the insides and paint the shells.

Mr. Imagination did this one.

Esther made herself a new dress, and used the leftover fabric to sew an apron for her little sister.

Princess doing what she does best.

On our way to the Dead Boring concert a few weeks ago, we got to see the Weka Pass train—it’s just a short excursion train from Waipara to Waikari. Fun to see a steam engine!

The kitchen table broke one day, so Simon and Mr. Diligence fixed it for us. I’m sure glad Mr. Diligence has learned to fix things, too, since Simon is no longer here!

Princess likes to try out all sorts of new places to sleep in.

She also wants in the house all the time. She can walk along the ledge outside the living room window, and she begs to come in that way.

Her favorite place to spend the day is on top of our refrigerator in the laundry room. One day, she was rolling around trying to get attention from the boys and fell off!

Mr. Imagination making toast for his breakfast on top the stove.

Little Miss showing off her ponytails.

A dear friend sent these flowers to me! I was bringing the cow home one evening when a truck turned onto our road. I kept the cow off the road, and wasn’t paying much attention to the truck, but it went slower and slower so I finally looked. The driver, a man who had been a neighbor at one house we lived in, was holding out these flowers to me! So beautiful. Thank you, dear friend!

One Sunday at church, a girl who loves Little Miss decorated her with these pansies, so I asked the girl if she would take some pictures for me.

These are places we frequently find the cats. Bandit wants a soft, warm spot. Princess wants to be on something, and the computer, when it’s open, is a favorite. If I close it she’ll find some other place. She loves to curl up on a sheet of paper!

Our beef cattle. The two black ones will soon be going to the works. The white one was our calf last year.

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.