Our family's life in New Zealand
Elijah bought a house! He put an offer on it in early December, and signed the final papers the end of January. Then, we all started working together to help him get it ready for renting. Here are the pictures I got the day he took possession.
Just over a week ago I took a video of a walk through the garden. We hadn’t had rain, at that point, for about a month and a half, but a few days later, we got 2 1/2 inches over the course of 2-3 days, and everything is a lot happier! We’re bringing in bushels of food; yesterday Esther picked 46 kg (2 banana boxes) of tomatoes. Yum!
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.
The Sunday afternoon just before Christmas, the boys who were at church decided to boat down the Ahaura River from Jim’s Hut, just at the end of the Ahaura Gorge, to here, near the confluence of the Ahaura and the Grey Rivers. The girls decided to go along to drive the vehicle back, and do some hiking while they were in the area. So, they saw the boys off and then drove up the track a short way. They walked down another track to an old hut, and when they were coming back, some of the boys popped out of the bush! Just after launching the boat and kayaks, the barrel boat got swamped by big waves in the rapids. It sank–and the boys who were in it were glad to have life jackets on! After a brief conference, three boys decided to walk back to catch up with the girls and get a ride out to civilization, while the rest of the party continued down the river with the kayaks. (The boat has never been seen again. It had no flotation devices, and sank in a deep spot. James is unhappy that he lost his water bottle, which he had tied to the boat so he wouldn’t lose it in the river.) About five hours later, the kayakers reached Ahaura and demolished several large homemade pizzas!
Mr. Imagination ready for takeoff.
Little Miss
There is our last glimpse of the barrel boat!
Elijah turned 21 a few months ago, and also completed his floor-laying apprenticeship. We decided to have a party to celebrate, and Saturday night about 60 people gathered in our local park to spend the evening together. Here are the few pictures I took, mostly of where people took refuge during the brief rain. There were a number of little girls crowded into the back of Elijah’s ute, behind Simon and a couple of girls who were sitting on the tailgate.
I put together a slideshow of pictures of Elijah’s life. Enjoy!
The last two days of November and the first of December, Elijah took his two youngest brothers on a tramp in the mountains. I’m not going to add commentary because I don’t know where these pictures were taken, but I’ll add a story that Mr. Imagination wrote a few days later, at the end.
Another picture for Grandma! He thinks of you while he’s out in the wilderness.
OUR TRAMP
Last Saturday, two of my brothers, Elijah and Joe, and I went on a tramp. The first day, we started just on the Bell Hill road by Rotomanu. We tramped to the Jacko Flat hut, following the Crooked River, and then up to the Top Crooked Hut. We saw a lot of 1080 on the way. It was a fairly easy track, although since it was the first day I did get pretty sore. The river was really blue as we walked along. At the Top Crooked Hut, it was about as small as Orwell Creek usually is. We had a swim and then dinner. We had sausages and mashed potatoes. When Elijah cooked the sausages, he had a full pot of water and dropped the whole pack in. The pot was too full and water went all over the floor. We had to wipe it up with Joe’s socks. The meal was very good. Just as we were going to bed an older lady arrived, and spent the night with us there.
The next day, we climbed over the mountains up to Lake Morgan Hut. On the way there we saw a chamois and a lot of grasshoppers. Climbing up some mountain ranges, we got up to 1,400 meters. Since we were up on the tops, there weren’t any trees so the views were very good. There was lots of porcupine scrub and turpentine bush. Elijah looked at the map and decided we should start going down to the lake, but he had seen the map wrong and we accidentally went to the wrong set of valleys. After we figured out that it was the wrong one then we had to walk around to the next mountain range and there, we dropped down to Lake Morgan. After we got to the bottom of the valley by the lake we climbed down we saw a tarn with lots of tadpoles in it. We stopped by the Morgan River for lunch and then went around to Lake Morgan Hut. The hut didn’t have a fireplace, so that was quite annoying. We got there about 1:00 and had a swim. Then the rest of the afternoon we played card games and read magazines that were in the hut. We had some very nice rice risotto for dinner. We slept well that night.
On the third day, we had just walked out of the hut when a kea flew overhead and off into the distance. It was quite misty, but it cleared up pretty well. The mist was cool because we could see it blowing up past us as the wind cleared it. We followed the river and about halfway down the boulders got about as big as our guest cabin. We decided it was easier to bush bash than climb down the big rocks. I managed to destroy my pants falling down one rock, so that helped make the decision, too. When we got to the Cone Creek track we had lunch and then filtered some more water. We found a couple of dead birds going out, probably from 1080. We did not have time to stop and have a soak at the hot pools, so we decided we would do that next time. Where Cone Creek track joins up with Elizabeth Hut track Elijah let a friend know that we would be about two hours out by texting him with the InReach. We got out at 6:00 and were picked up by a friend. We got back to the car and drove home. It was a very fun tramp.
We had to wait a couple of days this year for our annual family Christmas excursion. Simon had to work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and it rained on Christmas Day anyway, so we waited until the 27th. We had decided to visit the Hokitika Gorge, which we had never been to. It was a bad time to go there, since it is the peak of tourist season and there were hundreds of people, but the scenery was amazing. First, here is a glimpse of what we enjoyed on our way to the gorge.
When we arrived, the first order of business was to eat lunch. Elijah grilled burgers and we enjoyed delicious sandwiches.
Then, we walked the gorge track. The water was incredibly blue! That is caused by minute bits of rock ground off the mountains by glaciers, which is suspended in the water and reflects the blue of the sky.
This little girl got carried the entire way by big brothers. She felt like a queen!
James couldn’t resist crawling through this culvert. It was a tight enough squeeze that he had to keep his arms out in front of his head.
Think she likes the service she receives?
After we finished walking around the gorge, we decided to find some water so those who wanted to could go swimming. We checked out a beach along the sea, but it was open to the sun and those of us who didn’t want to swim decided we wanted shade to sit in, so we found a way down to the Taramakau River. The bridge in the background of some of these pictures used to be a rail/road bridge (see this post), but a new bridge was built beside it about six years ago, for cars, so the original bridge is for trains only. Several of the children went swimming…
…while Simon collected logs for firewood and got his caveman fix by teaching Elijah how to break them up into the right size for a bonfire without using a hatchet. It was pretty funny to watch that process! (No one got hurt.)
They made a very satisfying fire that burned down into a nice bed of coals for roasting sausages and marshmallows. While the fire was burning down, James requested that Esther read aloud to us. She hadn’t brought the book she is reading, but found it in an online library and downloaded it so we could read the next chapter.
Our family Christmas outing was very satisfying! Simon said at the end of the day that it had been “epic”–his highest praise!
Once a month, Simon has a three-day weekend off from work. On his weekend in November, he and some friends came up with the idea of climbing a mountain early in the morning to see the sun rise. They left here at 3:30 on the Saturday morning and drove about 20 minutes to a track that goes up into the Paparoa Mountains, a low range between us and the Tasman Sea. They were at the top in time for sunrise, but clouds came up with the sun and they didn’t see much of that. They had great fun, though, and the scenery they did get to enjoy was amazing! This is the town just below the mountain.
One of the boys found this bottle in a tree.
Elijah took this picture for Grandma, for obvious reasons.
Simon in silhouette.
The track goes to this group of cell towers, which are visible from our house if you know where to look.
They found some sort of vine that they could swing on. I enjoyed these video clips, so thought I’d share them.
We finally finished planting the garden–although, to be honest, that is a job that never really finishes, since I keep planting little bits throughout the year. The most of it is done, though, and to celebrate, and as a way of keeping a record, I took a video as I walked through. So, if you want to see what we’re doing right now, have a look!
Here are the rest of my pictures from October! I took this first picture one rainy day near the beginning of the month when we were in Greymouth. The annual Bookarama opened that day, and we were waiting in line when the doors opened. An hour and a half later we walked out with around 80 books between six of us, and went out to the breakwall to eat our lunch. The waves were quite impressive as they rolled in in front of us!
A picture of Miss Joy taking a picture!
This was our third lot of chicks for the year. For this hatch, I bought two dozen Barred Rock eggs, and then filled the incubator with about a dozen Black Orpington eggs from our pair of those chickens and a couple of dozen of our mongrels. During the night about three days before hatching, Gayle found the incubator unplugged! He quickly plugged it in again and within minutes it was back up to only about 5*C below what it should have been. We wondered if we would get any babies. The next day, we left for the weekend, and arrived home that Sunday afternoon to find no chicks yet, on the day they were due to hatch. We wondered…. and an hour or so later the first chick emerged! We ended up with 32 babies out of 39 or 40 that had candled fertile, and only lost 1 or 2 that died just before hatching–one of our best hatches yet! (Only one of the 13 Black Orpington eggs was fertile.)
I came into the kitchen one morning to find my monthly meal plan in tatters. It looked like a mouse had gotten it, but no mouse could have clung to the glass backsplash to nibble on that! Then, I saw a bit of snail poo behind it. A few days later, I found an enormous snail in the vicinity. The chickens enjoyed eating our culprit!
We spent several evenings in October observing the sky. We tried to find the comet that should have been visible, but couldn’t find it. There is a mountain range only a few miles to the west of us, behind which the sun sets early but the sky stays light for a long time. I took this picture of the moon one of those nights. We did get to see the International Space Station go over one night!
We did a couple of interesting demonstrations for science in October. One day, we made a scale model of the distances between the planets by marking them out on a roll of toilet paper. To see the whole distance, we took it outside so we could see the whole length at once.
Another day, we made a model of the relative sizes of the planets. Elijah was home that week, unable to work because he had bursitis in his knee, so I assigned him to help the girls make the clay balls and blow up the balloons to the proper sizes.
Sunday afternoon naps! Simon asleep on one couch, Elijah reading something…
…and James asleep on the couch on the other side of the room! This boy has two speeds: either full-steam ahead, or crashed.
