• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Lots of Helpers

Our family's life in New Zealand

  • Home
  • Our Library
  • Math Freebie
  • Contact Us
  • Legal Policies
    • Disclosure and Disclaimer
    • Privacy Policy
You are here: Home / Archives for West Coast

West Coast

March 2024 Photos

May 19, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Activities at Home, Away From Home Tagged With: Animals, Timaru, West Coast

Riding a Horse

May 12, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Away From Home Tagged With: Horse, Nelson Creek, West Coast

January 2024 Photos

April 28, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: Activities at Home, Away From Home Tagged With: Nelson Creek, Random Photos, Video, West Coast

Four Wheel Drive Trip

January 24, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Away From Home Tagged With: Four Wheel Driving, West Coast

Christmas 2023

January 21, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: Away From Home Tagged With: Christmas, Punakaiki, West Coast

Kayaking

January 14, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Away From Home Tagged With: Ahaura River, Boating, West Coast

Cross Country

January 7, 2024 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: Away From Home Tagged With: Homeschooling, Nelson Creek, West Coast

November 2023 Photos

December 31, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Random Photos, Video, West Coast

Garden–November

December 24, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Ahaura, Garden, Homesteading, West Coast

Mount George

December 13, 2023 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

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!

Filed Under: Away From Home Tagged With: Mountain Climbing, Mountains, West Coast

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Page 6
  • Page 7
  • Page 8
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 12
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

  • RSS Feed
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Goodreads

Recent Posts

  • Book Review–God Storys
  • Church Picnic and Coal Mine
  • Napoleon Hill
  • New in the Library! March 2026
  • Arthurs Pass

Archives

Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links.

Subscribe to the Blog

/* real people should not fill this in and expect good things - do not remove this or risk form bot signups */

Intuit Mailchimp

The Family:


Dad and Mom (Gayle and Emma)

Girl #1, Esther, my right hand

Boy #1, Seth (Mr. Handyman)

Boy #2, Simon (Mr. Inventor)

Boy #3, Mr. Intellectual

Boy #4, Mr. Diligence

Boy #5, Mr. Sweetie

Boy #6, Mr. Imagination

Girl #2, Little Miss

Girl #3, Miss Joy

Book Reviews Website

IgniteLit

COPYRIGHT © 2026 · TWENTY SEVEN PRO ON GENESIS FRAMEWORK · DISCLOSURE & DISCLAIMER · PRIVACY POLICY