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Winter Harvest, and random pictures

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One thing I really enjoy about our climate here is being able to grow things year-round.  Right now, it is the equivalent of early December in the Northern Hemisphere.  I harvested our salad and some vegetables for soup today, and spent some time weeding.  After spending six hours teaching the children, weeding is a great way to relax and reset.

Today’s harvest–lettuce, radishes, green onions, parsley, and celery.

He was waiting for me to fill containers with weeds, so he could dump them into a larger container for me.

There was snow on the hills around us early last week.  We went to Dead Boring that day, and enjoyed the beautiful snowfall on the way there.

The Hurunui River, looking towards the sea.

Farmed deer near Greta Valley.

Coming over the Omihi Saddle into the Waipara Valley. You can see the Southern Alps in the distance.

A hill to the west of us.

And, some pictures of the children. Elijah was doing school, and baby wanted to do the same.

Jealousy–I was holding Mr. Sweetie, and baby had to get in between!

Tired baby–he fell asleep being pushed in a stroller outside, and couldn’t wake up for supper.

One of baby’s many funny poses!

Baby thinking about the hat someone put on him!

James dumping a container of weeds.

Messy Faces!

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Baby showed up at the door this afternoon, in the tow of Big Brother who was saying, “Be prepared!”  It took awhile to figure out what he got into, but eventually we found that he had been playing with a bucket of mud, and obviously decided to paint his face!  He enjoyed the clean-up, once I quit turning him upside down to wash his hair. Tonight, he painted himself again.  This time, it was easier to clean up!

I haven’t been doing well at keeping this blog up, so I’ll just put in some more miscellaneous pictures from the past week or so.  Maybe I’ll aim to do that in the future–just go through the memory card once a week or so and put up pictures of the highlights of the week.

Our landlord put 180 dry dairy cows into the paddock next to our house over the past week. He keeps them here for the winter to allow their home farm to rest. They arrived in big double-decker stock trucks.

The paddock he put them in is planted in kale, which is 4-5 feet high! Notice how the cows are dwarfed by it!

This is the first section, after 24 hours of grazing by about 120 cows. By the next day, nothing was left except short stubs of stems.

This enormous spider was on a cupboard in the laundry room one night when I was putting laundry in the washer! It was 1 1/2 inches long.

Simon invented a stir-fry one evening, with goat meat, onions, mushrooms, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and an egg. It was delicious!

At the same time, Elijah was mixing up apricot-chocolate chip muffins, and Seth was making coconut bread, which I didn’t manage to get a picture of before it disappeared. Both were scrumptious!  The kitchen was quite the busy place that evening, as all three boys were cooking while I was trying to fix supper.  Also during that time, a friend dropped off my cell phone which had gotten left somewhere, and someone else came for milk!

Random Photos

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This one turned three! Here he is with the gifts his siblings gave him.

The annual Dead Boring Bike Hike–ready to take off!

I followed the bikers in the van; I never saw the oldest two boys till the end. I passed these two a number of times.

I also passed Esther and her friend a number of times.

The chicks in the house are growing–when they started doing this trick we had to put a screen over their home!

Elijah got the idea to build this house from skewers and modeling clay. James helped out.

And look who can climb up on top of things already!

This one (Mr. Sweetie) found his daddy’s gum boots one afternoon!

Someone gave the chicks a perch, and they like to sleep on it. It’s rather comical–they try to sleep with their head tucked under their wing, but when they fall asleep their head falls down!

Pretty daring!

Muddy boy! Somebody wants to go outside!

Now this is a cheesy grin (literally)!

This Past Week or Two in Pictures

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I keep thinking about things to blog about, but real life keeps getting in the way.  So, here are a bunch of pictures to give you a glimpse into the past couple of weeks.

Now that he can get around we have to be more diligent about cleaning up ashes!

Last Tuesday we had the biggest hail I have ever seen. When it hit a boogie board in front of the house it bounced up 3 meters (10 feet)!

After the storm passed, the cows finally made it to the trees for shelter–and when the sun hit them a cloud of steam went up!

Hail on the trampoline.

Almost crawling!Gayle and the boys built the framework for raised beds on Saturday.

On Sunday we stopped to explore some rock pools along the coast.

Starfish Sea anemone

This Past Week

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It’s not real easy to write when most computer time involves multi-tasking (which being interpreted means feeding the baby!).  I’ll just put in a few pictures from this past week.

Baby thinks life is rough!  He even frowns in his sleep!

For Dead Boring last week, we met in a gym and the children played while the moms talked.  The group is so large now that we’ve had to split in two, but still want to all see each other occasionally.  Four times a year we plan to meet this way, and just have a social day without sharing writings like we normally do.  The children played hockey.

These are two of my boys, James and Simon.

The child farthest left and the one third from right are mine.

Baby studies things–mostly to figure out how they’ll taste!

Haircuts last night!  This was the pile after I cut six heads of hair!

Bedtime story!  We’re reading Horse of a Different Color, by Ralph Moody, right now.  Baby was asleep with his mouth clamped tightly shut.

On our way home from church today, we stopped for half an hour at the beach, where the Kowhai River empties into the sea just south of Kaikoura.  The waves were very high today.  I love those cliffs in the distance, just south of Oaro.

Brotherly love–the bank at the edge of the parking area, going down to the river’s edge, was steep, with these large rocks.  I like this one so well I put it on my desktop screen!

This is the boy who reads the best, enjoying Naya Nuki by Ken Thomasma for the fourth time.

Big sis was playing with her new tripod, and caught this picture.  Glad that leg was up to hide everything else!

Mud and Boys and Life

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This has been another normal, interesting week.  The “mud” in the title comes from Wednesday evening, when the three youngest boys slipped outside after supper when I wasn’t watching.  They went into the garden, which they had been told before supper not to do, and played in the mud.  I’m sure it was fun–but what a mess!  I didn’t get a picture of it, but it looked worse than this one from Michigan two and a half years ago!  This time, they were coated from head to toe in thick, sticky clay!  Because they had disobeyed, and because they knew beforehand what the penalty is for getting muddy, I had no compunctions about hosing them down with a cold-water hose.  I had  to hose and rub with my hands to get the quarter inch of clay mud off their clothes, then had them take off their clothes, and hosed them again, and then sent them to the bathroom to finish off with a cold shower!  And it wasn’t a warm evening.  They all decided they don’t want that again.  While the youngest watched the other two getting cleaned up first, his lip stuck out farther and farther as he considered his coming fate.

One warm evening, the kitchen door was open, and Ginger came along to see what we were doing.
I spent a couple of days this week sorting clothing.  Does this look anything like a secondhand shop? or a garage sale?  We’ve been blessed with lots of hand-me-down clothes for the boys!

Next step:  sort through what each boy had in his drawers/closet and decide what to keep and what to put away/throw away.  Here is Seth’s stack (think he had more than he needed?):

One rainy day, Esther decided to make a batch of bread, since it always raises better on that sort of day.  I gave instructions while I worked on clothing.  It turned out pretty nice!

One day this week the sun shone!  I did lots of laundry (and it all got dry!) and we weeded the strawberry bed.  We found a number of ripe strawberries.  Yumm!  We have to get them quickly or the slugs eat them.

Aren’t Esther’s kids cute?

We went to Gore Bay for a baptism this afternoon, and when I mentioned we wanted a family picture, one of the ladies there offered to help take one.  It took quite a few tries to get one with everyone’s eyes open, and this is the best.

After the baptism, we went to the home of the girl who was baptized for a meal.  Joe discovered this wheelbarrow and had so much fun with it that they gave it to him when we left!

So there you have it–several tiny glimpses into our week.  It was a good one!