Random Photos

Here are the rest of our pictures from December! One Sunday afternoon, Gayle took the girls on a walk down to the river. They found a field of wildflowers.

Elijah found this interesting moth somewhere.

James has been working diligently on his sleepout. Here was the first of three coats of paint to go on. His little sisters were delighted to help!

Little Miss took this picture to illustrate a story she wrote about her chores, which include feeding a bottle to the calf.

After our budgie died in July or August, the cockatiel got very depressed. We finally got him a friend, hoping to cheer him up, but it was too late and he died a few days later. So, we got another budgie to keep the new one company, and we have two birds again! The blue one is a very young male. Some friends had a pair and hatched this one; we got it when it was old enough to leave them. The green one is a female. They get along very well. We named the blue one Reepicheep and the green one Jewel, since Esther had just finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia aloud.

The hollyhocks are blooming, so many dolls get made!

One afternoon I walked down the hill to have a look at the chickens, and took this picture up the valley from there.

Daddy was taking a nap, and when Miss Joy noticed the cat sleeping with him, she joined them.

It rained on Christmas Day. A lot of the day was spent playing games, but for awhile some of the fellows worked on denailing some timber that James had salvaged.

As always, we enjoyed seeing the tuis and bellbirds drinking nectar from the flax blossoms.

The big project during the Christmas holidays was building a new garage at Simon’s house to replace the one they tore down over a year ago when it threatened to fall down.

Here are the rest of the pictures I found from August. I finally had time to look at memory cards and phones again!

This is a normal sight at 9:30 each evening. Just before I go to bed, I feed the cats so that this one goes outside for the night. She won’t let me forget to feed them! She is friendlier at that time of day than any other time.

This was one of the t-shirt dresses I made for Miss Joy this winter.

Little Miss took this picture of her flower garden to send to Esther while she was in America.

One day, I noticed that the bag of kindling had a lot of pieces of wood that were nice for building blocks. I suggested that Miss Joy do something with them. She spent a couple of hours playing with those blocks, pretending various things with them. The piece leaning against the couch at an angle is a scanner for credit cards. Watch the video to see what else she was pretending!

Little Miss used some of the blocks, too, as well as all of the Jenga blocks, to make a line of “dominoes.”

Simon bought a hut that someone wanted to get moved off a local farm. We went one day to watch it be picked up and moved to his property.

The little girls like to make huts in the living room!

Elijah finished his apprenticeship! He is very happy to have that behind him and to be a fully-qualified carpet- and vinyl-layer.

Little chicks, a day or two after hatching.

Miss Joy wanted to have a candle-lit meal for her birthday celebration, so we did.

She also wanted candles on her dessert, which was ambrosia, a mixture of yogurt, whipped cream, berries, and chocolate. We don’t normally do candles, but I did get some for her.

Here are the rest of the pictures I have in my computer from these months. It’s time to sort through everyone’s photos again!

This picture should have gone with the post about building the new library shelves. A few days before Elijah built them, the younger boys and I painted them. It was the middle of winter and very cold, so paint dried very slowly–unless it was in the sun. So, we set the boards in the sun at the end of our driveway and got started as soon as it was almost warm enough. That was about 11:00, and there was still frost in the shade. The paint dried fast enough in the sun that we were able to do another coat every hour, until about 3:00 when we lost the sun. At that point, we moved them into the garage and did the last coat in there, then locked the cats out for the night and left the boards to dry overnight. It worked!

Because both Esther and Simon had birthdays while Esther, James and Mr. Sweetie were in America, we celebrated them early on an evening when Simon was here. Esther made him a trifle, and I surprised her with meringues that I made while she was away the morning before. We rarely have dessert, so having two desserts was fun!

Little girls + flowers = beauty!

James has been working on his sleepout when he gets the chance.

Mr. Imagination has been helping me with the incubator this winter. Here are a couple of pictures he took when we candled the eggs for the first batch. The first is an egg that hasn’t started to develop yet; we candle them before they go into the incubator, to check for cracks in the shell. The second is an egg we took out halfway through incubation. It has a blood line across the middle, indicating that the chick started to develop, and then died. He tried to get a picture of a viable embryo, but it came out so dark I couldn’t see anything.

I found this picture when I sorted them–someone was playing!

Esther bought a game to take with her and play en route to America. Her little sisters love to make patterns with the blocks.

The first hatch was very successful–80% of the eggs produced live chicks!