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Leaf Fun

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When the leaves fell off the peach trees in May, the three youngest had great fun raking them up and playing in them. I remember loving maple trees when I was young, because of the wonderful leaf piles! This isn’t as good, but as close as our children are likely to get to that. While they were playing with the leaves, they got the idea of making a movie about it. I’m not sure what the plot was supposed to be, if any, but I put together the clips they got. You might want to turn it off when it starts getting crazy–when all three are tumbling together in the pile.

April 2024 Photos

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Here are the rest of April’s photos! A few days after Easter, our new cow, Maple, finally calved–three weeks after we thought she would, based on what the previous owner told us. I had started to wonder if something was wrong! No, just a late calf. Elijah took this picture when he went down to take care of the chickens and discovered a new calf, which another boy had overlooked when he went down an hour or so earlier. The calf is a bull, a Jersey/Dexter cross. These first two pictures are from the first evening; the third picture was a week or two later, after we started bottle-feeding him and he decided that people were all right. His name is Clifford, as in Clifford the Big Red…Calf!

Remember how much fun we had earlier this year hatching chicks? Well, we ended up with a lot of them. The roosters from the first two batches have moved into the freezer by now, and we sold the pullets. These are some of the pictures we took to advertise them.

We went to Reefton for church one Sunday, and before coming home, drove around to check out the project that has been ongoing for several years: rebuilding the hydroelectric plant. Reefton was the first town in the Southern Hemisphere to be lit with electric lights, but the electric plant fell into disrepair a long time ago. They got a grant recently to rebuild it as a museum. This is the water race, looking toward the building that will house the turbine.

What happens when a four-year-old hurts her foot? She gets to sit on the couch with her blankie, a big stack of books, and the recordings that Grandma made of those books! She spent a couple of hours listening to those stories after cutting her foot badly.

I don’t normally take my phone with me when I go down to milk the cows in the morning, but one day I did. On the way up the hill, I looked up the valley to the east, and saw this breathtaking sight.

Here were our record-breaking vegetables in April–a potato and a tomato. The weights are in grams.

I was surprised one day when the children showed up with a pukeko chick. I had them take it right back down the hill and try to give it back to the parents–hope it survived!

Ahaura River/Lake Ahaura

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One Sunday afternoon in April, our boys organized a kayak trip with friends from church down the Ahaura River. I got roped into driving the vehicle back after they unloaded the boats, which meant that I got to enjoy a scenic part of the river that I don’t normally get to see.

Another Sunday afternoon, they decided to go on a four wheel drive trip. They ended up at Lake Ahaura, up near the farm on which Simon lives. Elijah shared these pictures with me; the one of the mushroom was taken especially to share with his grandma. There were actually at least a dozen people on each of these trips, but because a lot of them are not our family, I didn’t want to post their pictures.

March 2024 Photos

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And here are the rest of our photos from March! First, some pictures of the animals. I bought a new cow; she is behind Little Miss’s head in this first picture. She gives the type of milk we need, and was due to calve soon, so we needed to sell a couple of our other cows who don’t have the genetics we want. I took this picture to upload in an advertisement for Poppy, our old faithful cow. The girls were delighted to pat her while I was taking pictures–but there were a lot of tears the day we loaded her into a truck to go to her new home. We also sold her daughter Rosie, the one at the far left of this picture. Both have good homes, which I’m happy for.

These are the pullets from the first lot we hatched. We sold a few, but we need to sell the rest.

These are the turkeys. They are quite curious about everything! I took this picture the day Poppy went to her new home, while I was waiting for the truck to arrive.

And these are the house pets!

The garden has been outdoing itself this year, with bumper crops of almost everything. I’ve sent several boxfuls of zucchini we weren’t getting used down to the the cows. Here, the little children are cutting them up, having fun carving before the squash got eaten.

Mr. Imagination found this rutabaga in the garden. He wanted to know what it tasted like, so I cooked part of it. We didn’t like it, though (probably too old), so the cows got that, too. It didn’t go to waste!

This was one day’s harvest of tomatoes and beetroot. Since, we’ve had much larger harvests of tomatoes. We’re getting a bit tired of dealing with them.

Mr. Imagination turned 12 in March. He requested kebabs for his birthday meal, so the children had great fun assembling them, and then he got to help grill them.

Miss Joy wanted me to take a picture of her tower.

We saw this across the road one day. It’s apparently a hotel on wheels!

These four pictures were taken by Mr. Sweetie. He was intrigued by the artistry created by a foggy morning and steamy windows.

We went to Timaru for Easter Conference as usual. On Sunday afternoon I supervised our four youngest, and several children from another family, for an hour or so at a park across the street from the hall. This was a game of tag in which they couldn’t touch the ground. If they did, they were automatically it!

I got cold after awhile, so I suggested that the girls use the colored pencils an older lady had just given Miss Joy, and draw pictures. They spent the next half hour or hour, until the next meeting, drawing, while the older young people sang next to them.

Riding a Horse

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A friend of ours bought a horse recently for his children, and a couple of times in March the horse was brought to the Nelson Creek park by someone else, with the owner’s permission. He’s a good-natured horse, and let the children ride him for quite awhile each time.

What this picture doesn’t show is the time Elijah fell off! He’s never had the opportunity to learn to ride a horse.

January 2024 Photos

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I’ve finally finished posting the pictures from our North Island trip! Now to catch up on the photos from around home. Here are the rest from January.

After a couple of four wheel drive trips, the boys’ trucks were in need of a wash. Miss Joy happily helped operate the power washer!

James spent more time working on his sleepout. This was the day he started cladding the outside.

The boys cleaned the carport and garage. They decided it was time to get rid of this old stationary engine that had been sitting there for about three years. Simon wanted to restore it and get it working again, but finally gave up. Elijah listed it on Trade Me for a $1 reserve auction, and it went up over $250! The next challenge was to load it on the buyer’s truck. This was the test run with the tractor-mounted crane that Simon and James built to hoist cattle they are butchering. It worked, so when the buyer came to get the engine, that’s how they lifted it! The engine had wheels under it, so it was easy to get it out of the carport, but too heavy to lift by hand.

We went to Nelson Creek for a baptism one Sunday afternoon, and of course the children wanted to swim.

See what James has on his feet to go swimming? They were actually very light-weight boots, full of holes so they didn’t fill up with water.

I think this was taken down at the river.

Little Miss wanted to make braided bread, so Esther helped her.

Part of the second hatch of chicks. It’s so fun to see them hatching!

Four Wheel Drive Trip

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Some friends came to visit over New Year’s, and they and our boys went on a couple of four wheel drive trips. Here they are taking off on the first one, somewhere around Reefton.

A few days later they went up Napoleon Hill. Simon was able to go along on that one, and Esther rode with him and documented it.

I put several video clips together. The first is from the first trip; the rest are from the other. The last two show Elijah stuck in the mud and pulling himself out with his winch.

Christmas 2023

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For Christmas this year, we decided to go to Punakaiki and walk the Porariro River track. Some people wanted to go to the beach, but more of us wanted to do a bush walk, and this is the one that was chosen. We got there in time to eat our picnic lunch. Because it had been raining, the ground was quite wet, and of course we had forgotten our camping chairs, so we sat on the inner tubes the boys had taken along. That got pretty funny; the four boys who sat on one figured out that they could bounce in rhythm! I tried to get a video of it, but they always stopped as soon as I picked up the camera!

This is a twig that one of the children brought me.

Have a close look at how Simon parked. He was “trying to park beside us.”

The river was in flood; Esther said it was about two feet higher than the other time she walked this track. It was gorgeous!

I saw grooves on the underside of this rock from when they blasted it to form the track.

I’ve never noticed a bud on a Nikau Palm before. It’s huge!

I think this was a tree that fell over and an arch was formed for the track to go through. Gayle wanted a picture of me inside it!

The children all reached the swing bridge ahead of Gayle and I. Of course, James was bored and had to find ways to entertain himself and everyone else. This is what we saw!

We missed this. Esther captured this shot before we got there.

He quickly scooted down when we arrived–the same way he got up!

On the way back, Esther and I walked together. Gayle must have caught this picture of us going across the bridge. Everyone except the three of us walked back on a different track; we returned to the vehicles and drove around to pick them up.

I got a picture of this weka while it very busily searched for worms among the dead leaves.

As always, we enjoyed our day, and headed home quite tired. However, the boys dove right in to working on the barrel boat again!

Kayaking

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It all started the day we went to a baptism in Waipara. After the baptism and a shared picnic, someone brought a trailer load full of kayaks. The boys played in them all afternoon. That triggered a renewed interest in boating.

As soon as James had a rainy day for an excuse not to work on building his sleepout, he started building a barrel boat. It happened to be the day Simon came home before breakfast for his days off, and without even coming in the house to say hello to me he was busy cutting barrels open! Several days of work later, with the help of a friend who came over several times, they had the project finished!

Of course, the boat had to be tried out! They only had time that evening to float a short distance on the river, and it rained so much overnight that the river wasn’t safe the next day. However, Nelson Creek was in flood, so they decided to try the boat out on that! Nelson Creek is too shallow normally to get the boat down, but in flood there is enough water. So, they went from church back to our house to load up the boat, our boys’ two kayaks and James’s boss’s kayak, and came back to get another friend’s kayak, and headed to Nelson Creek to jump off.

Several days later, they took the barrel boat and several canoes down the Grey River from the Ahaura Bridge to Ngahere. Esther walked down to the river with them to bring our ute home; they had left a vehicle and trailer at the point where they planned to pull out. They packed a lunch to eat along the way, and had a great time–although two people who normally wear long pants got very sunburned legs!

Today, some of the boys stopped at a yard sale and bought two more kayaks! This will be the summer of boating, I have a feeling.

Cross Country

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On the first Thursday of December, one of the moms in our homeschool group organized a cross country meet. Quite a few families from the region came, some driving 45 minutes from one direction and others coming an hour from the opposite direction. The children were divided into age groups; the youngest ran one kilometer, the middles (including Little Miss) ran two, and the older ones (including my two school-age boys) ran three kilometers. Part of their route ran through the bush, and I was stationed, with Miss Joy, at a fork in the trail just at the bottom of these steps, at the end of the swing bridge. Miss Joy was quite bored for awhile as we waited for the runners to reach us.

Then they came! Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination stuck together through the race.

I had given my camera to a friend who stayed at the finish line, and she got pictures of my children completing the race.

After the races there were athletic events. The only one I got a picture of was the shot-put, but they also got to throw a discus, do a long jump, and do sprints. This is Little Miss doing the shot-put. All the children had great fun that day!