Random Photos

Now that I’ve finally uploaded all the pictures and stories about our big trip over New Year’s, I can go back to sharing photos of daily life. Here are the rest of December’s pictures.

Princess loves large black-and-white stuffed animals. Does she know she blends in with them?

I had a miscarriage in early December, and spent a day in hospital. That evening, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss put a lot of flowers on my night stand!

After many years of struggling to teach dyslexic children to read, I love seeing scenes like this. Mr. Sweetie is reading a Hank the Cowdog book here. I bought several of them when someone was selling them used, and they are quite popular!

I’m not sure what was going on here, but this is all of my children except Esther—in one photo! From left to right are Mr. Sweetie, Miss Joy, Simon, Little Miss, Mr. Imagination, Elijah, and Mr. Diligence.

This little girl loves to sit on or in anything!

When he was cleaning, Mr. Imagination found this white-tail spider. They are somewhat venomous, so he made sure it died.

My sister sent a packet of Koolaid and a recipe for playdough made from it. Once I finally got around to making the recipe, Little Miss had great fun playing with it!

Goats are quite amusing.

One afternoon, this tractor stopped in front of our house, and Simon, the mechanic, went out to see if he could help. It turned out that the fuel line had been turned off, so the man got about two blocks from the local garage, and ran out of diesel in the lines. Simon helped him bleed the lines. Esther and I were amused at how many boys it took to  help! (This isn’t all ours; two neighborhood boys also stopped to help.)

One really exciting thing that happened just before Christmas was that we got “new” carpeting in the living room! This is what we had on the floor before—a very wornout carpet on the bottom, with several pieces patched together to make a top layer.

After supper the evening before the big day, we pulled out the carpet. This was the old carpet underneath.

This is the subfloor.

The day before Christmas, a friend came right after breakfast and started laying the underlay. Since then, Elijah has started an apprenticeship with this man, laying carpet and other floor coverings.

The finished carpet! We shampooed it and left the furniture out till the next day.

There was still somewhat of a cat smell for a day or two. Princess was extremely suspicious, and wouldn’t enter the room for a couple of days.

Esther is enjoying having goats again. This was awhile ago, not long after we got the nanny. They are now being moved over the hillside in the background, across the road from us.

Recovery: Simon and Mr. Diligence spent a few days playing Phase 10, before they both got fed up with sitting around healing. Then, they found other things to do, outside, of course, while still being as careful as possible with their knees. Simon went back to work yesterday, after two weeks off. His knee didn’t hurt when he came home last night, but his calf muscles and feet did. Mr. Diligence is still limping around.

On his 2nd or 3rd day of recuperating, Simon’s back was hurting, so he laid on the floor for most of the day. He was listening to audiobooks, and helped his baby sister listen, too.

She loves to have someone to cuddle up with!

After a week, I took Mr. Diligence to the doctor to have the dressing changed. I took this picture to show Esther how it was healing.

After several days of sitting, they couldn’t stand it any longer, and went out to do something useful. They scooped sawdust from the chicken coop into buckets, and the younger boys hauled it to the potato patch for mulch.

Ten baby turkeys hatched the day Mr. Diligence was in the hospital! I took this picture to email to Esther, who was with him.

Our young chickens started laying in mid-November. We’ve been inundated with eggs! The chickens are selling, though; there are only four of the young ones that aren’t spoken for yet.

Mr. Diligence took these pictures of the bridge construction just outside of town the day I took him in to get his stitches out. The bottom picture is our current bridge, the one that’s being replaced. It was built in the 1930s; the deck is wooden, with tarseal on top—although that is no longer being maintained, since the new bridge should be ready within a year.

Here are the last of the photos from August!

Little Miss helped me harvest some purple broccoli one day with the basket a neighbor gave her, and then she took it to her bedroom to show Esther.

We did an art project one evening as part of our study of New Zealand for geography. The three children each cut out shapes and made them into a picture of sheep, then glued on cotton balls and eyes after painting part of the picture. They love projects like this!

When I cut open the first of the three giant cheeses I made in June, Mr. Imagination thought the moment needed to be documented. The cheeses are delicious! We’re nearly through the second one.

Simon has been fixing a car for Esther. It needed a new heater core, which he had to order from the States. When it came, he had to change the hoses to make it work. We took a couple of pictures to document this for his apprenticeship.This picture is for the apprenticeship, as well. He had to take the head off the engine and replace all the valves; they got bent when the timing belt broke. That meant he was able to buy the car for very little, and hopefully Esther will have reliable transportation again! (Her car broke down in June and wasn’t worth fixing, so she’s been borrowing since then.) He just finished fixing up the car today; hopefully, it will get the new Warrant of Fitness sticker Monday, and Esther can start using it!

The power went out one evening just as I finished cooking tea. We ate by candlelight—something that delighted the children! It turned out that our neighbor had been driving a tractor back here, which he does practically every day, since they are agricultural contractors, and a car that was passing him hit the rear wheel. The tractor turned over a couple of times and landed against an electric pole. The tractor ended up supporting the pole. The power was turned back on after about 45 minutes, but it took several hours to get the pole replaced. Thankfully, our neighbor wasn’t hurt too badly. He had a large bandage on his head, was limping, and had a lot of bruises, but he wasn’t thrown out of the cab, which we’re thankful for. The car turned over, too, but apparently the driver wasn’t hurt. The tractor had all its lights on, which means it would have been extremely visible—obviously the driver of the car made a big mistake.

Here are the last of the photos from July!

We bought a set of books from Creation Ministries, five books whose titles all begin with Untold Mysteries. They have been very popular—especially the Monumental Monsters one, about giant animals from the past. That book has been thoroughly studied!

Mr. Imagination loves to make cardboard and paper creatures.

We get a lot of cream when the cow is in milk! She’s dry at the moment, but I was finding myself with up to three gallons of cream a week to make into butter. Through the winter, it was taking long enough to make butter in the food processor that I started brainstorming with the boys about how to build a butter churn that would do it all at once. Simon got started building a mechanical one, but in the meantime we tried this system. We strapped the bucket full of cream into the barrel section and rocked it back and forth. Unfortunately, we wore out long before butter was made. After 2-3 hours of rocking it, all we had was whipped cream. Oh, well. Not all our inventions work!

One of the many pieces of heavy machinery that go past our house.

Mr. Diligence is raising chicks again this year. He hasn’t had as good success as last year, when he only lost 1 out of the 100; this year, he has lost 9. They’re growing well, though! This picture was taken when they were a week or two old; now they’re about six weeks old.I heard a call of distress one evening and found this. She had gotten onto the couch, then climbed onto a wooden crate behind my chair and lost her balance as she knocked the lamp over. She was desperately holding on to the swivel chair and the sliding pile of books, wanting rescue.

Doesn’t that look delicious? It’s a leg of lamb that a friend here gave us.

We have a beautiful crop of purple broccoli and green cauliflower. I’m not sure which this is, but it almost looks like a cross between the two! I loved the colors on this head.

I forgot to post this last weekend! Sorry, if anyone noticed. I’m still trying to catch up from being away from home six days in a row, including two days on the other side of the island visiting Esther for her birthday. I’m feeling a bit more caught up now. Esther came home for three days this week, and it was great to have her home for a little while. We’re hoping she’ll be home for a longer time soon; she’s helping a family from the homeschool group we used to be part of.

This is a very busy little girl. She must have found the paints that day!

We enjoyed watching these ponies graze in front of our house for two years. Now, this section has sold, so the ponies graze somewhere else. Nothing has been done here yet, so we’re enjoying having open space in front of us still.

Mr. Imagination, my artistic son, made this creation.

Little Miss Busy worked and worked to get into this box of jars. Her feet are several inches off the floor here. Once she had figured out what was inside the box, she gave me the grin in the next photo.

We were given a lot of milk the last couple of weeks of June. One Saturday, I made three cheeses. See the three presses? The two on the table hold the cheese from 2 gallons (8 liters) and 5 gallons (20 liters). The one on the floor, with the buckets stacked on top for weight, holds the cheese from 60 liters (15 gallons). I made that cheese in 6 pots. I heated two pots, added the starter and moved them off the stove, heated the next two…. I did the same for the stirring and cooking step. It took a lot of concentration, but was fun. We’re eating that cheese now, and it turned out deliciously creamy. These are all Colby cheeses, and the smallest one, which we haven’t cut into yet, has chili peppers in it.

Here are the three cheeses after we took them out of the press the next day. That’s 15 kilos (maybe 35 pounds?) of cheese right there.

She was delighted, one day, to be able to chew on her toes!

Gayle turned 50 the end of June. Esther was coming home from helping a family for six weeks, that day, so Gayle went to the top of one of the mountain passes to meet her and bring her home. That got him away from home for three hours, and the boys got busy cutting down trees as soon as he left. There were several trees around our yard that we didn’t want anymore, including this ornamental plum, the tall one behind the sleepout in the second picture, and the camelia in the third picture. I took off for town and bought two apple trees and a cherry tree, and the boys got them planted before Gayle got home, as a birthday surprise.

There were several loads of brush to take to the dump down the hill, as well as some firewood. Mr. Intellectual is using the plum wood for smoking hams.

These wood pigeons were apparently living in the plum tree. They were quite upset by the loss of their home. We saw five at once! They soon adjusted to the new look, though.

I have a lot of random photos from June that I don’t know how to group together well, so I’ll just post them this way.

Mr. Imagination badly wanted to make a braided loaf, so one day when we made bread we allowed him to. This is the result.

We were given a whole sheep when we went to visit some friends—what a gift! The boys and Gayle got it cut up as soon as we arrived home, and we’ve been enjoying ribs, chops and roasts. Yum!

Mr. Sweetie took this picture so that he could paint a picture of the tree and the treehut for Grandma.

We spent one Friday morning making cards for Grandma’s birthday. They loved doing it!

Miss Joy was thrilled the day she figured out how to climb on the stool and stand up! She’s pretty daring.

She was also thrilled to be able to play in the toybox.

Daddy and his two little girls.

A new bridge is being built beside our village. We can see the cranes from our house; it’s only half a mile or less from us. One day, we saw a pilot vehicle stopping traffic on the highway in front of our house. Nothing came past, and when the pilot vehicle moved away, we looked out the window to the next street over, and saw this. It was an enormous pipe for the bridge. These are being pounded deep into the riverbed to fill with concrete to form the piles for the new bridge. It was as long as a long semi trailer.

A couple of days later, we saw this load: the reinforcing mesh to go inside the pipes! It’s always interesting to see what has changed when we go past the bridge site. The old bridge is a one-lane wooden bridge, built in the 1930s. There is asphalt over the wood, but it requires a lot of upkeep. The new bridge will be two lanes. It will likely feel safer—but I think I’ll miss the old one!