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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!

November 2023 Photos

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Here are the last of the pictures we took in November! We went to Canterbury to visit friends early in the month, and Mr. Imagination and his friend went hunting. They were pretty pleased with themselves!

Miss Joy was worn out on the way home. She fell asleep a few minutes after leaving, and slept most of the three hours home. Little Miss pretended to be asleep, but she never actually dropped off.

The children found this toy truck at the dump, their favorite “shop.” They got their big brothers to help bring it home, and then Mr. Imagination replaced the motor with one from a lawn mower, and got it running. They had great fun driving it around for a couple of weeks, and then broke something. Simon took it up to his house to do something with it.

Simon and Elijah went hunting one night and Mr. Imagination went with them. They were pretty excited to get this deer! It was a young hind, so very tender.

While Esther and I were cutting up the deer, I asked Miss Joy to peel some carrots for the next day’s soup. She got one or two peeled, then got distracted eating them!

One Sunday afternoon, Miss Joy was having fun spinning around. She wanted me to get a picture of her dress swirling out, so I did, and took a few seconds of video footage, too.

We got to go on a field trip to Shantytown, a historical village close to us. We had a short lesson about using native plants for food and medicine, then went on a brief bush walk, collecting leaves. Then, we investigated the leaves, learning what we could from observing them.

We also got to watch a demonstration of sluicing, a method for mining gold that was used in the Gold Rush days.

We put 56 eggs in our new incubator.

We found the cat cuddled up to the incubator one evening!

Garden–November

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We got most of the garden planted in November. We also got a water tank to collect rainwater from the garage roof to use in dry times! It is enormous; we estimate it holds about 15,000 liters (that’s in the neighborhood of 3,000 gallons). It took a couple of tries to get a HIAB truck (crane) to get the job done, and even then we were holding our breath to see if the truck would get back out of the garden after setting the tank down! It worked–praise God–and now we’re hoping for enough rain to fill the tank.

Our pitcher plant is blooming this year. Such an interesting plant!

We got a truckload of 10 cubic meters of compost delivered, and spread it through the garden. The children did part of the job, and Gayle finished it.

Remember my story about the tomatoes that didn’t grow? A friend in Canterbury mailed me her extra seedlings, and I potted them. A month later, they were looking like this, and now they are growing fast in the ground!

These are the ones I started in early October. This is seven weeks after seeding them. They grew fast!

After setting out the tomatoes we spread newspapers on the ground in between them, and then rotten silage that a local farmer gave us. We’re hoping for few weeds! This thick mulch is certainly keeping the soil moist. Other places have gotten rather dry already, but it’s very wet under those layers of paper and hay.

Mount George

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I don’t have a physical bucket list, but one thing that has been on my mental bucket list for a long time is climbing a mountain. A week ago, we had a regional holiday on the Monday, and a friend told Gayle that he was taking his children to climb a low but challenging mountain on the coast north of Greymouth, Mount George. Gayle decided to take the younger children, and when I said I would like to go, too, the older ones (except Esther who didn’t want to get muddy, and Simon who was working) went as well. It was pretty funny to see their faces when I said I would go! I haven’t been able to do that kind of thing, because I’ve always had a baby or been pregnant or recently pregnant. Now, I’m more free to go on adventures!

This was one of the tamer parts of the track. It was still fairly steep!

See someone holding onto a tree? It was necessary, much of the time, to climb by pulling oneself up that way! Miss Joy is visible just past Gayle. She walked up, and back down the mountain! What a trooper.

The view got more and more amazing, the higher we went.

We were headed up past that outcropping of rock.

This was the worst bit. It’s nearly straight up, and you have to climb by holding onto a knotted rope. A ladder has been bolted into the cliff, and then at the top of it you have to get across the crack to the other side of the wall, then keep going up. Miss Joy had no trouble navigating it–but coming back down it took me several minutes to work up the courage to step across and onto the ladder where you can see someone going across on the way up, here.

There’s the top! Most of the children were up there long before we made it. As you can see here, Miss Joy was way ahead of me by this point–she’s at the left of the picture wearing a light blue dress.

Here is proof that I made it to the top of the mountain! It was very bright up there.

I saw this flower on the way down–so beautiful!

Cape Foulwind

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Last year, when we went to Charleston for our anniversary getaway, we went to Cape Foulwind to walk to the lighthouse. It was raining, though, so after we sat in the car for awhile waiting for the shower to stop, we went on to where it wasn’t raining. This year, when we got there, the weather was dry and lovely, so we walked to the lighthouse and on beyond.

Most of the trees around the Cape are stunted from the constant wind and salt spray, but this larger one stands out.

The Cape Foulwind lighthouse.

Looking down from the base of the lighthouse. That concrete structure is apparently the base of an older lighthouse.

We walked along the top of the cliffs on a very nice, well-maintained track for a quarter of an hour or so. Then, my adventurous husband decided he wanted to get down to sea level and find the old railway bed that a sign had mentioned! So, he found a track down the cliff and we scrambled down. In most places, we couldn’t see where the railway had been, but we got to see this seal, who headed out to sea at sight of us.

We walked along the beach until our way was blocked by these huge boulders. I stayed on the ground, but Gayle climbed up to have a look at what lay beyond. Guess what? More sandy beach! The railway bed is visible just to the left, at the top of the rocks.

This rock, with its few brave bushes clinging on, is just offshore.

When we walked back toward the beginning of the track, we saw this place, where the railroad went through a cut. There was a quarry somewhere around here. We aren’t sure, but we’re guessing it was a granite quarry, because of the huge amounts of broken granite that line the shore.

This area seemed to be a dumping ground for rocks and dirt.

When we arrived back at the car, this cheeky weka wanted to get in with us, or mooch something.

We went on to Westport, and after turning around and backtracking, found our way to the south side of the mouth of the Buller River. This is the view looking south from there, and the lighthouse on the south breakwall.

October 2023 Photos

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Here are the rest of the photos from October. One of the younger children’s favorite places to go is the dump down the hill from our village. I was informed, “You don’t give us Christmas presents, so we have to come up with our own.” So, they drag home all sorts of “treasures.” These beams were among recent finds. One of the boys took pictures of them to send to Simon to see if he wanted them, and Goofball obviously wanted to be in the picture.

Our friends in Ngahere had a bonfire to get rid of Simon’s garage, which he dumped in their paddock (with their permission) to get rid of it.

We took some friends to Waiuta the beginning of October, and someone got this picture of Esther and Miss Joy.

Gayle often takes the children on a walk or to go swimming when he comes home from work. The day they begged him to take them swimming, they quickly decided it was much too cold, so they played in the warm, dry sand instead.

Another day they made a different kind of castles by the river.

My sister asked me how to make t-shirt dresses, so I sent her a picture of some I recently made for the girls.

This picture shows something amazing. That Jersey calf gave us a lot of trouble when he was born. He was born one afternoon, and by bedtime we could tell he hadn’t had a feed yet. I milked his mother and gave him a bottle, and he took it greedily. The next day, he wouldn’t suck at all. We tried him on a bottle a couple of times, and tried to get him to suck on his mother, but he absolutely refused. The next day, we forced a few cups of milk down him, but he was getting very weak. He struggled to stand up, and when he sucked it was very weak. Simon got us a tube feeder, and we tubed him twice. I asked for advice on a house cows group, and we prayed a lot for this calf. The third day, we followed the advice we got, and did something called the Madigan squeeze on him (google it). We did that twice, and the second time, he started making sucking motions. That evening when we put his mother in with him, he sucked on her for the first time! The next day, we went away for the weekend, so we left this calf with his mother. When we got home, he was bouncing around happily, acting perfectly normal and healthy. Two days after that, we had to move the cows to another location for grazing. Since that place isn’t calf-friendly, he had to stay behind with the beef-cross calf, so we gave him a bottle. The first time, he wouldn’t drink; the second time, he took nearly a whole bottle, and the third time, he was away. Since that day, he has greedily sucked down every bottle we give him, and wanted more. I took this picture to remind us of the miracle God did for us.

Little Miss had an assignment in her Language Arts book to write a poem about spring. She decided to illustrate it, too!

Sand art. This kept them busy while Gayle and I were away, and then the sand went in the trash.

This also happened while we were away. The girls made bouquets to sell to Esther!

This quad bike went up to the farm with Simon, so he can fix it.

Garden–October 2023

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My first attempt at starting tomatoes this year was a complete failure. We planted the seeds in the ground in the greenhouse, as I did a few years ago when I was not able to buy potting mix because of the lockdown. When they germinated, we pricked them out and put them in a mixture of potting soil and compost that I bought from a department store in town–as I have done every year for five years. This year, they didn’t grow. After about five weeks, when I realized they had barely grown since transplanting, I transplanted them again, into larger pots. Two or three weeks later, they still hadn’t grown at all. By then, I had started some new seeds. When a friend mailed me her extra starts, I sadly dumped every one of the nearly 300 tomato plants that refused to grow and were, in fact, dying. This is what they looked like at that point, two months nearly to the day after sowing the seeds.

This is the new ones that I started the second week of October. By the third week of November, they were nearly all about 5 inches tall, growing fast and ready to put in the ground. Our tomato crop will be late this year, but hopefully we’ll get one.

I started a lot of beetroot! Quite a few of them got covered up with the mulch they were transplanted into in the garden, though. We have a resident weka who spends its nights throwing mulch around, probably searching for slugs and such underneath. What a nuisance!

When James rented the digger to work at Simon’s house, he took advantage of having it to do a couple of jobs here. This was the first; he had Elijah dig a hole for a septic tank for the garden sink. They dug the hole and then James dropped in a barrel which he had cut both ends off of. He covered it with plywood and some boards and ran the drain into it, then covered it again. It is wonderful to be able to use that sink without getting my feet wet and without having a perpetual mud puddle there.

This was the other job, and it was a sad one. Our gorgeous tulip magnolia died, so he dug it out. Now, instead of a beautiful tree with branches perfect for the children to climb in, we have an ugly hole. We’re planning to plant grass there, and eventually build a swing. I won’t miss the shade on my garden, but we do miss the tree.

Charleston, Again

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Gayle and I decided to get away for a night to celebrate our 26th anniversary in October. We went to Charleston for a night last year, and enjoyed it so much that we decided to go to the same place again. When we booked into the campground, they gave us the same room we had last year, too! After we paid for our room and put our things into it, we went on a walk. Twice last year, once by ourselves and once with the family, we explored around Constant Bay, so this time we checked out a track that went south of it. We started out on this tame track, and enjoyed the quiet and the green.

Then, we reached this sign. If you know my husband, you will know that he considers a sign like this to be a challenge. Of course, we went through the gate. I kept my eyes open for hazardous spots! We concluded that, most likely, the sign was put up so that the track didn’t have to be kept up and so that DOC wouldn’t be liable if anyone got hurt.

We were treated to spectacular scenes along that track! First was this view of the mouth of Constant Bay, with waves rolling in one after another.

Then, we walked out to one little inlet after another, each one spectacular in its own way.

One area of dense bush we walked through had deep mining trenches like the ones we see at Nelson Creek.

We sat out near the end of one of the rocks and talked for awhile. Here’s the man I love!

Looking back toward Charleston from one of the higher points. You can see the Paparoa Mountains off in the distance; we live on the other side of them.

These hardy flowers grow in a crack in the rocks.

After awhile, the track got so rough that I was ready to turn back. By then, we were scrambling up and down steep areas, holding onto the trees alongside for support. We returned to the track that was kept up, and were treated to more gorgeous views! After enjoying them, and talking for awhile on a bench overlooking this bay, we returned to the campground, cooked some food, and took it up the coast a little ways to eat it at another beach while we watched the sun set. What a delightful evening!

Concrete Work

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Simon took a week off work in late October to work on his house. His renters moved out, and he has another family wanting to move in, so he needed to build a deck. James figured they should rebuild the garage at the same time, so they tore that down and then started working on the concrete that was needed. First, they spent an entire day excavating… and then another day… and then a third day before the job was completely finished! Part of that was necessary because when he tapped the old retaining wall with the digger, it crumbled.

This was after the first day of digging. The garage used to stand just at the end of these tracks.

A few days later, the new retaining wall was formed up and the posts to support the roof over the deck were braced in their holes, waiting for the concrete.

Then, the truck came and it was all go! James worked on pushing the deck piles down into the wet concrete while other people wheelbarrowed it to the farther holes and it was run down the chute directly into the places the truck could reach. Several little neighbor boys came to “help.”

They poured the footer for the retaining wall that day, but had to let that set before pouring the upper part a few days later.

After another week of hard work, the third pour was complete, the pad to build the new garage on.

Elijah climbed a pole to watch what was happening one evening when he was there helping.

Now, whenever Simon or James has a day off, they are working on building the deck and the roof over it.

Helicopter Flight

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Last year, Elijah signed on to Land Search and Rescue. Since then, he has been doing training for searching for people, mostly in the wilderness but occasionally in urban settings. He has only had the opportunity to go on two searches so far, both in the last two months. The second of them turned out to be a false alarm, but he got a helicopter ride over beautiful terrain on a bright, sunny day, and got to spend time in the bush on that same bright, sunny day. I can’t identify the location or give any details about the incident, but I am allowed to share these scenery photos. Suffice it to say, the location is not too far from us, and the helicopter he rode in is one operated by a company based near us, which we see flying over frequently.

This is Elijah all decked out in his searching gear. He had just walked home after the helicopter ride back from the search and hadn’t taken it off yet. He was explaining here how they measure footprints and stride lengths with that stick to make sure they are still following the trail they think they are.

Here is a quick video of a little of what he saw from the helicopter. Wow!