Our family's life in New Zealand
We were very thankful, a few weeks ago, when Mr. Diligence requested baptism. He had committed his life to the Lord over two years ago, and we have been watching him grow in his walk with God since then. We set the date for the baptism for the 4th of August. We were thankful to have a number of friends present for the occasion. One of these friends shared the photos she took so I could share them here—thank you!
Here is a video of the baptism.
It’s not every day you can actually see your laundry drying before your eyes. I ran outside to grab something, though, and when I glanced at the clothesline I could see a cloud of steam rising. Five minutes later, that effect was gone. In this picture, the haze is steam! It’s a brilliant, sunny day here, now that the morning fog has dissipated. I happen to be home alone for a few hours; Gayle took the boys to Greymouth to watch a friend try out his longline in the ocean at high tide (they’re hoping he catches lots of fish!), and Esther went along to do some shopping. Maybe later today I’ll have time to put together a post about Mr. Diligence’s baptism; for now I’m making granola and soap and working on a batch of beef broth—as well as doing laundry!
Oops! Here we are in August, and I just realized I haven’t shared the last few miscellaneous photos from June!
When we were in Cheviot in May, a lady we visited gave Little Miss a packet of heart-shaped beads she had bought and saved to give to some little girl. I helped her get them strung one day, and she’s been wearing her bead string around her neck a lot.
I asked Mr. Sweetie one day to get a picture of our cow. The house directly across the road, on the right of the picture, is ours.
For two months I have been taking Esther and Simon to town to practice driving. Esther successfully got her driver license about a month ago, and Simon this week, so we don’t have to do that anymore! One of those days, we drove out on the north breakwater at the mouth of the Grey River. The mountains were so clear that day—it was gorgeous! I zoomed in with my camera, hoping to capture the scene, but this comes nowhere close to showing the real beauty of it. The car in the picture is on the south breakwall.
We see a lot of rainbows here! This was out the bay window in our living room one morning.
I love seeing my boys working with their daddy! This is Simon helping Gayle cut firewood to length.
Mr. Sweetie and Little Miss visiting the cow. Unfortunately, we discovered about the time this picture was taken that she had slipped her calf, and as a result we had to give her up. We don’t have feed for a pet this size. One of those hard things in life….
We can’t take visitors to Gore Bay now—but we have Pancake Rocks only an hour’s drive away! When some friends came to visit us a couple of weeks ago, we took them to the famous place with its amazing layers of rocks stacked up like pancakes.
Do you see who is driving? Gayle and I rarely drive anymore!
We were standing on this bridge, telling our friend the story of how one time Simon lured people to stand here long enough to get them wet when the blowhole beside it erupted. She said, “If only we could see it blow just once—” and it did! We had thought there wouldn’t be any action that day, since the sea was so calm. There were several eruptions in a row, and then it was quiet again—what a gift, though!
We ate lunch at the visitor’s centre, where there were hardly any people. We enjoyed the peace and quiet, and the beautiful sunshine! Mr. Imagination and his friend reconnected quickly and were inseparable for the whole weekend—so cute! Here, they are playing in a tiny grove of palm trees.
I’m afraid you might see more pictures of Pancake Rocks—just like you used to see a lot of Gore Bay! If you come to visit, we’ll take you there and you can see it in person.
For a month now, my boys have been working on clearing land across the road from us. We need grazing land for our cow, and were offered the use of a hillside that was covered with gorse and broom. The boys are enjoying the hard work, and making good progress.
The hillside between where our cow is in this picture, and the base of the pine trees, is where the boys are clearing. You can see a lot of gorse and broom in the middle of the picture. This was before they started.
The beginning of the job—they cleared a strip along the bottom of the hill first. They are hauling the brush to a “green dump” down the hill from town.
I went up the hill one sunny day to see what the boys are up to. Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence are doing most of the work, spending an hour or two a day after school, before dark, working on cutting brush. On Saturdays, Gayle helps them haul it all away.
This is what I can see from the kitchen now. Can you see the difference? The boys are hoping that another 2-4 weeks will see the end of the project.
I’m grateful, not only for the land to use, but also for work for my energetic boys to do.
Here are the rest of my pictures from May. The little boys built this castle in the sandbox one day. Mr. Sweetie found his Ecuadoran flag (from Let’s Go Geography) and flew it from the top turret.
One Tuesday evening near the beginning of May, a car crashed in the paddock across the road from us after a 6-hour high-speed chase. The boys (and some of the rest of us) spent a lot of the next two hours watching the police tracking down the driver, who had taken off on foot, and the tow truck loading up the car, which was escorted by the police back to town. The really amazing thing about this crash was how the fence of the paddock was flung up and over our cow who was standing just inside the fence; the car passed a meter behind her.
On a sunny day, we can see these mountains, the Paparoas, from the girls’ bedroom window. This was a rare clear sunrise, with snow on the mountains.
We find Goofball sleeping in the most contorted postitions!
Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligent rebuilding the fence destroyed by the car.
Esther likes to raise bread in front of the stove in the living room. Goofball paid no attention, but Grizzly was very suspicious of it—maybe she could hear the yeast working in the bowl?
Simon bought another car in May, a Suzuki. When the neighbor asked about it, I said, “My son is a mechanic. Need I say more?”
We see a lot of rainbows here! This was one I could see one afternoon from my kitchen window. The end of the rainbow is at the edge of the paddock we use for our cow, where the car crashed.
We spent a weekend in late May in Canterbury, and one of our days over there I took the children to Kaikoura. We enjoyed watching abseilers at work on the cliff faces.
This house surprised us. During a cyclone a couple of weeks after we moved, a new slip came down and filled the house with rocks and dirt! Some of the walls were bulging out.
We also spent a few minutes at Gore Bay, where the boys tried to move a log into the water.
We played on the playground for a few minutes, and Mr. Sweetie climbed his favorite net.
Ok, time to finish cleaning out the folder of pictures from April. This first set was taken on our way home from Timaru over Easter. We came home via Arthur’s Pass, and I couldn’t believe the colors on this mountain side, which was, I believe, somewhere near Porter’s Pass on the way to Arthur’s. I know we’ve driven past this mountain a number of times, but somehow the light conditions made it just glow, even though the sun wasn’t hitting it.
This was a cloud front we saw. The upper part of the sky is actually a thick cloud, even if it doesn’t quite look like it here.
A few minutes later, it started raining, and poured the rest of our way home!
I often make a batch of “fudge”, with peanut butter, carob powder, coconut oil, and flake coconut. Mr. Diligence loves to cut it up for me so that he can eat some of it, and this time he was clowning around pretending he would eat the whole thing!
Little Miss refused to take her nap this day, and for about the first time in her life she just fell asleep on the couch when she was looking at a book!
Mr. Imagination loves the cats!
This is what I saw in the living room one morning. She told me afterward, “Mommy, I was enjoying that book.”
When some friends from Canterbury came to visit on weekend, we walked down to the river. The boys, of course, had to throw stones.
The girls moved back into their bedroom a week ago, after only a week and a half out of it. They are really enjoying having a beautiful new room, rather than than the old room with its horrible pink and purple walls. It now looks quite beautiful! Here are a few pictures of the process of building. This first one was taken by one of my boys, who said, “Safety first!”
By Saturday night, the room was painted!
Little Miss got into some glue, and our friend had just finished cleaning her up when I grabbed my camera. That hat!
Sunday afternoon the boys took advantage of an empty room to play games. It was also warm; since we insulated it, it’s probably the warmest room in the house.
The girls moved back in Tuesday afternoon, after Esther finished painting the trim. In case you wonder what it looked like before, there is a picture in this post.
<p>Esther found the wardrobe in the corner out in the carport when we moved in here. She needed a closet, so decided to strip and refinish it. The project took a lot more time than she anticipated, but she’s happy with the result.
We have a lot of cloudy, rainy days here on the West Coast. Wednesday, however, was bright and sunny all day (today is, too—yay!), so at lunch time we decided to take the afternoon off from working on the girls’ room and take our friend to Pancake Rocks. It turns out that the world-famous geological formation is only about an hour from here, so if anyone comes to visit us, we may well take you there.
Just going to Pancake Rocks is quite the scenic adventure! The road winds along the coast; here, I took a picture out the side window of the van at the part of the road we would be on in less than a minute after going across a small river.
The swells were pretty high that day because of an air mass that had come across from Australia.
Because we had someone along with us, we decided to try to get a family picture. I’m not real happy with the shadows on our faces; any of you have an opinion as to whether we should get prints made for family in America, or try for a better one?
There was some action in the blowholes already at 4:00. High tide was just before 6:00, so we decided to drive just a short distance to a track that takes you down to the beach, then come back here and walk around the blowholes again later, when there would hopefully be more water spraying up through the rocks.
The Truman Track goes through some amazing ecosystems. This was two trees or more, grown together.
When we came out onto the beach, we could look south from the viewing platform and see this:
or north, and see this:
Part of our happy crew. This is, from left to right, Simon, Little Miss, Mr. Imagination, Mr. Sweetie, and Mr. Intellectual.
Gayle wanted to get a closer look at a small waterfall shooting out of the cliff, so he, Simon, and our friend who was with us raced the waves across the beach. The tide was coming in, so the waves were coming in farther and farther. The rest of us stayed on the viewing platform and watched.
Here are two pictures Gayle took with his phone.
As we went back to the van, we noticed this pool with a perfect reflection.
Back to Pancake Rocks. I admired the silhouettes of the palms and cabbage trees.
There was a bit more action at the blowholes, but not as much as we saw another time we were there.
To top off a wonderful day, we got to see the sun set over the Tasman! And then, we hurried back and enjoyed a picnic as it got dark before we thankfully got into the warm van to go home.
One last rock formation as we took the trail back to the visitor’s centre.
A friend from Dunedin, who is a builder, offered to spend a week helping us work on the house. For two months we have been anticipating this week, and finally, he is here. We decided that, although the exterior of the house is badly in need of some help, we don’t have the money to work on that right now, so we decided to do the next most urgent project, redoing the girls’ room. We told Esther before we moved in here that we would do it up and get rid of the pink and purple walls. She hated them, even if Little Miss loved them. Saturday, Esther moved everything out of the room, and the boys began the demolition job. They had great fun ripping old wallpaper off, and then they began the task of taking down the boards that were underneath the wallpaper (five layers in places, with the top layer being painted). They also played hard in the room for a little while, since it was an open space!
Typical cat—as soon as the mattress was moved out of the room she was relaxed on the highest point!
We’re looking forward to seeing what the room looks like in a few days, when the gib board is finished and the walls are painted!