Our family's life in New Zealand
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
