Random Photos

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.

As usual, most of the random pictures are of Little Miss. This one was taken at Castle Hill.

This was in Cass as well; I just looked at Esther’s memory card the night before she left for a couple of weeks in America.

An aunt sent this dress to us. I got the picture quickly after dressing Little Miss, before she got dirty!

The supermoon around the time of the earthquake.

Fun on the trampoline!

Mr. Inventor is a hard-working young man.

I never know what I’ll see when I look out the window! One evening, it was Mr. Inventor and Mr. Intellectual, giving several siblings a ride on the ladder!

Little Miss actually sat and read a stack of books for about 10 minutes one evening, after I bathed her.

This wild cat has been coming around in the evenings to look for food. We often have whey in buckets outside the kitchen door, and it likes to drink it. We were quite amused at the lengths the cat went to to get the whey! Unfortunately, this was just before our own cat disappeared. He always spent the evening with this wild cat and two others who also came around for food, but a day or two after we took this picture we saw him for the last time.

We had quite a surprise one morning when several vehicles pulled in. The mayor of our district was going around to the local schools and preschools, giving teddy bears to the little children of the area. Someone had suggested this to help children who were having trouble sleeping because of the earthquakes, and a large company donated the bears. He heard about us and brought our three youngest each a bear, too! They love them.

A few of us were privileged to see this beautiful double rainbow early one morning. There are perks to getting up earlier than most of the family!

Little Miss must have found a mud puddle! She loves them. Just recently, she came out while I was milking and found a puddle about six inches in diameter and less than a quarter inch deep. She sure splashed in that tiny bit of water!

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss playing at church.

Mr. Inventor and Seth spreading compost. This was the last thing they did together. I was going to assign Seth to do it by himself, but they got into an argument, so I had them do it together. They did, very cheerfully.

Mr. Diligence doing his schoolwork in the morning.

Mr. Intellectual made a pinata for his birthday. This is the first stage.

Mr. Imagination loves to make up tunes on the piano!

Spring flowers!

Mr. Diligence

I sorted our library and organized all the books one afternoon. This was Seth’s bedroom and he was a bit grouchy about the mess—and glad when I got it all cleaned up the same day!

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss

Mr. Inventor and Mr. Diligence like to go to the dump at the end of our road every week. They find some incredible treasures—like this all-metal, antique globe. The picture doesn’t do it justice; it was huge! They were able to sell it for quite a lot. I would have loved to keep it, but it was too big for our house.

We haven’t been taking very many pictures lately, apparently. I have time today to write a blog post, though, so I’ll share the few we have. We’re on our way to Dunedin for the weekend, so while we’re traveling on a straight, flat road between Ashburton and Timaru I’m taking advantage of a good battery in my laptop and writing. I do apologize for the fuzzy pictures; after noticing that several were that way, Esther noticed that someone had touched the lens of my camera and it was very smeary. She sweetly cleaned it for me.

Here she is, rocking her little sister right after we arrived home from church.

This is Mr. Inventor’s flock of turkeys. Too many toms! Five of them went into the freezer a few days later. Aren’t they gorgeous though? We’re planning to pick up a new tom for our flock on this trip, to avoid inbreeding.

A week or so ago, Mr. Intellectual helped me dig the rest of last year’s carrots. It was such a warm, sunny day that we cleaned them outside, and a few days later the boys helped me chop all of them and get them in jars. That will make quick soups even easier for the next year.

Little Miss was playing with this hat. She was delightedly waving “Bye-bye” to Esther in this picture. She is so much fun! She’s talking more all the time. Yesterday, she was chasing Mr. Imagination around and around the living room, and finally, in exasperation she exclaimed, “He has it!” It turned out that he had been given a small piece of candy, and she wanted it.

Mr. Sweetie was being silly one day, twirling around and around on my desk chair in this position! Little boys can be pretty amusing.

Little girls can be amusing, too. Little Miss has obviously been watching people lay down to read, so she did the same thing one morning while I was doing oral reading with some boys.

Little Miss helped Mr. Intellectual make breakfast one morning.

I was getting her ready for bed, and she ran away, jumped up on Daddy, and giggled.

This is why I record a lot of the books I read aloud to the boys. Mr. Sweetie spent an afternoon this week listening to Mountain Born, by Elizabeth Yates—a lovely story about a little boy and his lamb.