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Christmas 2024–Hokitka Gorge

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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!

Mountain Climb

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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.

The Garden in December

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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!

October 2024 Photos

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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.

Flood!

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The last Saturday in October, we had four inches of rain in 24 hours–and there was a lot more upstream in the hills and mountains. That afternoon, I had to go down to the paddock where our cows live to work with them, and we discovered that the creek had flooded! We had to lead a cow through about eight inches of fast-flowing, muddy water; I discovered that I quickly get dizzy and disoriented with those conditions. I was thankful for a son who steadied me as we went through!

Water was backing up the small creek from the large one that is going through the center of this photo.

James is walking toward the water we had to lead the cow through. It was overflowing the banks of the small creek and going into the drainage ditch that runs through the length of the paddock.

This is the drainage ditch. It normally has a little trickle in the bottom!

This is a close-up of the flooding. The boys picked up the fence at this point, so it wouldn’t wash away.

This was the big creek, just upstream from our paddock, where it goes under the highway. There was a large log caught under the bridge, which is partly why we had a problem; you can see water being diverted to the right, where it went into the small creek and under the highway into our paddock.

I decided to walk down to the river at that point to see what it looked like. Quite impressive! By the next morning, though, the floodwaters had gone down.

Repiling the House

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Elijah got started renovating the boys’ bedroom this winter. The project is moving slowly because he works five days a week, but he’s making progress. About the time he started putting the new closet together in a corner of the room, James decided that the piles under that side of the house should be replaced before Elijah went any farther, so that the house would be level! So, the boys devoted a Saturday to replacing nine or ten of them.

The first order of business was to put a jack beside each original pile, and then adjust it until the house was level with whatever point was highest. James borrowed his boss’s jacks and laser level for this part of the job (sure is handy that his boss lives right across the street and is happy to let James use the tools!). Then, they cut off the old piles some of which were supported by the house instead of the other way around, and jiggled them loose. When they had the old piles out of the ground, they dug the holes out a little bit. You can see here how much headspace there was. Rather challenging! I did not go under the house.

To get the dirt out, they used a square 5-gallon oil jug cut in half, with a rope tied to each end. One person stayed outside, pulled the full tubs out, and dumped them, and then they were pulled back under.

When all the holes were dug, they put the new piles in the holes and fastened them to the underside of the house. Then, they borrowed James’s boss’s cement mixer and poured concrete around the new piles. They got the concrete under the house the same way they got the dirt out, with those little tubs. The grass beside the house got torn up pretty badly, especially since it started raining halfway through the afternoon, but that side of the house is now level!

September 2024 Photos

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Here are the rest of the pictures we took in September! This was the one picture I took when I went to the HEART retreat for homeschool moms near Christchurch. The view over Lyttleton Harbour is so beautiful!

Bluebell had her calf while I was away that weekend–a little bull. He’s very healthy, unlike her calf last year.

When Gayle and I went to Christchurch, we had a little extra time, so we stopped to walk through a park. The flowers were beautiful!

Esther often reads aloud in the evenings. One evening I noticed how enthralled these boys were. They were both listening intently!

The older boys went hunting and got more venison for us.

The youngest three love playing and taking pictures of each other and what they are doing.

I always enjoy seeing and hearing the tuis when they come in the spring. One morning while I was hanging laundry I got to see these two.

Around the Garden in Early Spring

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Mr. Sweetie took my camera outside one morning in September to take pictures of the snow-topped mountains to the west of us across the Grey River. While he was out there, he took a lot of pictures around the garden and the house. I picked out my favorites to share here. Goofball likes attention, although she doesn’t demand it like her sister does. The chickens are Little Miss’s pets.

The chook house, where we brood babies, is in the middle of the garden. This was the first batch we hatched this year, at about three weeks old.

A fly on the new raspberry leaves!

Our back yard.

Miss Joy

The frame for a go-kart that Mr. Imagination is trying to build.

Snowy Mountains

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We were privileged to see a lot of snow on mountains late this winter. I took these first five pictures as Gayle and I drove to Christchurch one Saturday morning for an appointment. The drive over Arthurs Pass and through the mountains was spectacular!

Mr. Sweetie took these pictures one morning when the Paparoa Range, to the west of us, had a lot of snow on it.

And, to wrap this up, here are a few other pictures I took of mountains as we traveled home from North Canterbury in early September. This is heading toward Lewis Pass.

I was intrigued by this cloud formation and the rain coming down ahead of us.

This was a scene we enjoyed as we neared home that day.

Siblings Day!

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One weekend in September, Gayle and I had to go to Christchurch for an appointment on a Saturday morning. We stayed that night with friends, went to church over there, and came home Sunday afternoon. All eight of our children were at home that weekend, and they went to Hokitika for church on Sunday morning, then spent the rest of the day doing things together. Esther took a lot of pictures, but said she wouldn’t be posting them on her blog, so I decided to share their day here. They started out by walking along the beach for a little way. The “boat” is just poured concrete, a picnic area. (There have been a lot of shipwrecks there; in the early days there was a wreck about every 10 days, many of which were just groundings on the bar at the mouth of the river.)

Then, they went out to eat at an Indian restaurant.

The final activity was to visit the National Kiwi Centre. We were there once before, years ago, but the younger ones either didn’t remember it or weren’t born yet.

There is a large tank of eels, some of which are about 6 feet long and 6 inches in diameter, and around 100 years old.

At feeding time, visitors are allowed to help feed them. Eels grow up in fresh-water creeks and rivers, and when they are ready to mate and lay eggs, they swim out to sea and to tropical islands near the equator. There, they lay eggs, then die. The eggs hatch and make their way back to New Zealand, where they grow to maturity–often a hundred years! The people who run the aquarium know their eels are ready to make their way to the sea when they come in in the morning and find an eel on the floor; at that point they release them into the river to swim to the sea.

The highlight of the day was catching crayfish. There is a clip on the end of a string tied to a pole. To catch a crayfish, they picked up a piece of meat with the clip and dangled it in the water; when a crayfish grabbed it, they would lift it up then catch it in a net. Apparently, our crew spent 45 minutes catching and releasing crayfish! A week later, the older boys took the younger children to catch crayfish in a river near here because they had so much fun at the aquarium.