Yay we got the Camera back!

Silly camera... flash-bulb blew and it took about 3 weeks to get it fixed. Oh well, now all our memories don't need to look like we are all sitting in a dark room.

Today we visited with friends who live on a lifestyle block. They had a few chickens who had not been laying and they were bullying the younger chickens and wanted to get rid of them so Tane volunteered to get rid of them. Well... the kids were ever so fascinated and wanted to watch them have their necks broken, but it was too gruesome for me.

Here are a few pics of the kids since we can now take pics again yay!. Ella is slowly getting better at playing with Lily. Probably 70 percent of the time with supervision she is manageable. It's just if she discovers Lily unprotected, then she's in trouble.

We have been learning about the stars and moon lately. So as a fun project the kids made the phases of the moon out of oreos. So the kids had to separate oreos and then make the phases of the moon using the remaining sides. I think I distributed far too many oreos each and Joshua spent the first 10 minutes eating all the extra sides.

I think Ella Had more fun eating them...

Joshua explains his phases of the moon.

Joseph talks about his moon phases.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone. Today was one of the best Easter's we have ever had. Last night, Tane and I stayed up late and made resurrection eggs. We got little plastic eggs, and placed scorched almonds in them. There were about 20 of them, but in 12 there were pictures of items that represented part of the Easter story.

Resurrection eggs Courtesy of Scrapping Suzie QTT

Tane got up early and hid them in various locations around the garden, along with one larger egg for each child and a few marshmallow eggs.

The kids were up at 6.30 am and came running into our rooms pretty disappointed that there was no Easter eggs on their beds. We suggested  maybe they were in the garden as maybe the Easter bunny was too busy to come inside. The kids went outside and just kind of stood there for a while... there were no Easter eggs in sight.

All of a sudden Anna-Maria bolted to an upside down bucket and flipped it over. Sure enough, underneath were 2 little plastic eggs... And the game was now on... all of a sudden 4 children sprung into action, running all over the front lawn trying to locate more eggs.

Anna-Maria looked in the mail-box and to her surprise there was the first large egg. She was so excited, but the others became discouraged. We suggested that maybe there was more than just one large egg... so they carried on looking, finding the other large eggs in the bushes, the pumpkin patch and the woodpile.

 Ella was fascinated. Even when the bigger kids had enough of searching, she went back outside with a mouth full of chocolate in search for more eggs.

When the kids had gathered up their stash, they proceeded to divvy it up and opened all the plastic eggs to reveal the scorched almonds and the little pictures. As each picture was numbered and had a scripture reference, we could share the Easter story with the children as they ate their Easter eggs.

After dinner... a yummy cold roast chicken and salad, we sat down together and watched 'To This End   was I Born'. Anna-Maria showed a rowing understanding of the gospel as we discussed the movie. She said it made her sad that Jesus died. But then she said, but if he didn't then we would not live again after we have died. Such simple truths from her little mouth.

Celebrating Easter... the Resurrection of our Saviour was really Special!

Little Gems

While walking down a friends driveway and having to step aside because a car was coming past, Anna-Maria exclaims with a big smile 'Great! I didn't get run over!'

I should think so!

Today was swimming sports. It was so much fun. Anna-Maria and Ella were in the 5 & under group. Anna-Maria was a little upset when she was swimming in her races, but the other kids were walking & therefore faster than her. However she did get first place in a few races. Ella had fun playing with the flutterboard until she had enough of the water.
Joseph came third in a few of his races. Josh struggles with speed but makes up for it in effort and enthusiasm. None of the boys wanted to get out at the end, even though the rest of us needed to eat as it was lunchtime.

Lily has been restarted on solids. Poor thing, she was really badly constipated and had to be put back on breastmilk only, but now things are fixed and she has her appetite back again. She gobbled up a small bowlful of stewed apple this evening.

Yesterday we went to the local library book-sale where they were selling off old books. We got some great books. Josh was straight to the bird section as he is wanting a lovebird. He found a book on lovebirds and one on budgies. I got a few travel books and and Italian cookbook for myself, and some war books for Tane. Ella-Rose got a book on the body and a Spot book (she really loves those at the moment). Anna-Maria found a really nice story about courage amid adversity (for kids - very beautifully written). Joseph got a dinosaur book and one about George and the Dragon. All-in all I think we bought about 40 books.

Random Videos

This video is from when we first moved to Australia last year... in fact the first few pics are from the airport. However unfortunately I only just figured out how to get it online so sorry its a wee bit late. It also has some pics from Ella-Rose's first birthday.

How cute xx

Random Pics

Ella-Rose having her own kind of fun!

She has all of a sudden developed a love of books... I think it relates to the fact that we have stories together each day for at least an hour and longer if the kids can convince me otherwise. So she always wants to be the first in line to have stories read to her. She also runs round the house finding the narnia books and running up to me chanting 'narnia, narnia'. She knows it is something cool, even if she doesn't understand. She even jumped on Joshua's knee today with Dr Seuss and requested 'read me', which he did as I was pre-occupied with Lily.

At the moment we are reading 'Cheaper by the Dozen' as well as 'The Silver Chair'. The kids are splitting their sides... it is extremely funny, and also interesting as we are learning lot about another time and another place (USA early 1900s).

Ella-Rose loves swings and the park. She is also even getting a little better each week at going to nursery. So far she lasted 30 mins without needing to be brought to me. Slowly we are getting there and she is realising nursery is much more fun than mummy's class.

Lily loves kisses, she laughs a lot. I laugh too. She is gorgeous. She is such a great baby. I think she's going to be a thumb sucker. She just sucks her fingers and is off to sleep pretty quick, she barely cries - yay. She loves food... she took to food more readily than any of the other children.

Wild Turkeys and Butterflies

We drove over to Thames to Butterfly house for a trip with the local homeschool group. We were off to a late start... waking up at 8am, which was the time I had sorted in my mind when we needed to leave, however having 2 littlies keeping me up overnight, I just kept on sleeping till the kids woke me up. So we were already running an hour late and jumped in the car at 9am. So we would have arrived there sooner, had the Navman been playing fair... it decided to take us on a nice big loop in the middle of the countryside for no real apparent reason.

On the way we also had to make a few stops for the kids to take pics of the wild turkeys that were congregating on the roads and flying over the car.  And unfortunately the camera battery died after taking copious amounts of photos of the turkeys.

When we arrived we made our way straight into the butterfly house. now I had imagined this to be much like an reptile enclosure at the zoo, with different butterflies in separate displays behind glass, with nice labels as to which they were. Not this place, as soon as we walked in, it was like walking into a hot house, and there were butterflies everywhere... it was very cool. The kids loved it and tried picking up a variety of butterflies. There were monarchs, owl butterflies which were blue but when the wings were folded looked like a large eye. There was even one species from the Phillipines called the Mormon butterfly (cute).

One landed on my hand as I was holding a blue dummy. I held it close to Lily's face and she watched it intently as it opened and closed it's wings... that is until Ella-Rose decided to chase it away.

After the butterfly house we went to the beach at Te Puru... it began to rain as we pulled up, but the kids still had a short dip. As we were just down the road from Tane's parents we were able to call in and have dinner with Nana Noelene and Poppa Monty. They put on a lovely BBQ for us.

Blackberries and cows in the backyard... almost

It is really quite cool having a farm almost next door. The kids have discovered much to their delight, that the field is full of wild blackberry bushes. They want to go on an almost daily visit to pick the newly blackened blackberries. We could hear the cows mooing from the backyard so I took the kids over to see them, and they were not as close as I thought... a few paddocks over, but the kids still had fun looking at them through their binoculars. I love it because it reminds me of the trips to the woods we would take when I was younger growing up in Barnsley... and the blackberry picking and blackberry pies and blackberry jam my mum would make from the collection.

 The view from our front garden

 The girls looking at the cows

 Anna-Maria posing for the camera

 Ella-Rose following suit

 Little Lily trying to see whats going on too

 Four kids having fun

Picking and tasting blackberries... yum!

As for Narnia, we are 3 chapters away from finishing 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader'. I can't believe I didn't read these when I was a kid. There are some really great values in there - in addition to the awesome adventures of course.

The shopping trip - what a disaster. I had wanted to get a freezer before Tane went away so I could fill it up and not have to take all the kids shopping for a big shop... or even not at all. However we were pretty busy and that ended up not happening. So today we were running pretty short on supplies... we were down to our last carrot after morning tea... you know you're low when the kids have to have carrots for tutti fruiti time.
At first Joshua and Joseph decide to have some kind of crazy wrestling match in the supermarket. Talk about  embarrassing. However I managed to distract them by sending them on search and find missions to various regions of the supermarket looking for items on our list. Phew survived after an hour and a half... with poor Lily intact, but it is impossible to have her and Ella-Rose in the same shopping trolley. Ella just wants to bite, scratch and basically terrorise her sister.

In the evening after dinner, we had our family home evening and planted our winter garden. Joseph chose brussel sprouts (or little soccer balls - as he calls them), Anna-Maria chose cauliflower - her favourite thing for dinner, Josh chose broccoli and I got pak choy, spinach and leeks. Unfortunately as the older kids were transplanting their seedlings, Ella-Rose decided to pull all the leek seedling out... so only a very small fraction of them were planted in the garden. Also mental note to myself... to make this garden work we need to get a soak hose tomorrow - the gardern is so dry, even despite multiple trips to the tap with buckets, it remains as dry as ever.

Ella-Rose: Has been practising counting. We have a funny game she likes to play on the trampoline. She jumps and we count to 10 and then splat - she splats onto the trampoline, has a giggle and then gets back onto her feet to start again. She is learning her colours by gardening. She is learning not to pick the green tomatoes but to wait until they are orange. We have some strange orange tomato variety. They are simply delicious and taste almost a cross between a tomato and an apricot if that is even possible.

Joshua: Is reading 'Call of the Wild'. Although he only needed to read 1 chapter today... he of course became immersed and didn't come up for air until I suggested we go outside to look at the cows. He really likes animals, so is also reading a book all about horses, the different breeds, purposes and how to look after a horse.... He also likes to look at the horses available on Trademe... and is dropping hints to me such as 'we need a paddock to put a horse in'.

Joseph: Is enjoying practising the piano and committing his pieces to memory. He played 'Set' with Anna-Maria. It is a really great game for pattern spotting, he was teaching Anna-Maria how to identify a set. She was initially frustrated, but in the end she managed to put a few good sets together. His homeschool goals consisted of 'lots of PE every day'. So today that consisted of lots and lots of bouncing on the trampoline.

Anna-Maria: Is the most motivated child. She wrote in her journal, practised her spelling words and played 'Set". She also had a really unfortunate accident today :(  She was bouncing on the trampoline and moved back too far. As she came down she landed with each leg astride the bar and then fell onto the floor. Poor thing. She was beside herself, but after spending an hour in bed - doing paired reading with Joseph (Hansel and Gretel, & Bubbles) she was back to her normal self. She was happy because we put her new curtains up in her room. And I was happy to because they are much thicker and make the room much darker and hence it hopefully will be easier to convince the girls it really is bedtime even though the sun is still shining outside.

Lily: Had her first taste of solids today. She seemed to really enjoy it after the first 2 tsps of wondering what on earth is this new stuff. She had pear and banana with baby rice. She is also really enjoying trying to grab hanging toys and she is smiling and chuckling a lot.

L&P in Paeroa

Yesterday we went to Paeroa. Tane had to be dropped off with the army as he was going on an annual field exercise (which interpreted means 7 days of survival in the bush with not much to eat, no showers and sleeping under a tarpaulin which is  apparently called a hutchie, and then having to carry a 40kg pack and gun and ammo everywhere they trek, oh and dig their own toilets). Better him than me.

When we got to Paeroa I told the kids we had to buy some L&P. They were a little bewildered as they didn't know what this was and when we explained it stood for lemon and Paeroa, they wanted to know if it had actual dirt from Paeroa in it. Hopefully not! They all liked it and Josh stated "it is the only lemon soft drink that actually tastes like lemons".

Paeroa is where Tane's father Monty is from. I had never been before and it is such a magical little town, it would have been such a nice place to grow up. The kids had heaps of fun investigating all the antique shops... I have never seen so many antique shops along one little shopping strip... the kids loved looking at all the old-fashioned stuff - a mangle, a spindle, old fashioned sewing machines, record players, money, postcards, and best of all, old fashioned army relics like WWI metal helmets  and WWII German army berets, and a sword also caught their fancy.

We had lunch by the river, a beautiful spot. The kids collected drink cans for their scrap metal collection.

 If you are wondering what is wrong with Anna-Maria, she is enjoying being a tiger at the moment.

As we were sitting by the river having lunch, Ella-Rose says "stinky hot, stinky hot", her way of saying stinkin' hot. Her other funny thing she says is when she gets a prickle in her foot she complains, lifts her foot up saying 'spicy, spicy.'

We went to the cemetery to try and find Tane's grandparents grave. There is something sacred about walking through a cemetery  As I read the names of those who had passed on, it always makes me emotional to think of the pain on the passing of these loved ones. After searching for about half an hour we found the grave of Tane's grandparents Herbert Brunt and Lucy Brunt (nee Pakinga). We realised it was a week before the anniversary of his Grandfather's passing, and that he had passed away when Tane was 12 days old. What a sweet day it will be in the Resurrection when they will get to meet each other again.

We dropped Tane off to be taken down to Waiouru for another grueling week and drove back home. Joshua really made my day in the evening. We got home late, at twenty to eight. I fixed them dinner while the boys read, and the girls had their bath. We started eating dinner and Joshua was about to ask me something, then he said 'oh no you're feeding Lily". So I asked him what he wanted... a fork. I showed him I had already brought them to the table. Then he hugged me and said "oh mum you're a brick". It was so sweet.

If you're wondering why he would call me a brick... well after reading a number of classics with the kids... in particular 'The Railway Children' and 'Narnia', they have heard the word a few times, and now it seems it has worked it's way into his own vocabulary. The amazing thing to me is that they can remember the precise point in the story where and by whom this is said. I can't... must be showing my age.

A few other things that must be said. Thanks Mum and Dad (Grandma and Grandpa Key) for the trampoline. It is just the best present. I can't keep the kids off it.

Today I asked Josh to put the clean washing away... kids catch on quick..."I can't, it's Sunday'. Oh well will wait till Monday... its just 1 sleep away.

Pikelets for breakfast... Thanks boys

Today I had a lovely surprise. Joshua and Joseph decided they wanted to make pikelets for breakfast. Normally Tane does this most Sunday mornings and we alternate a variety of favourite toppings.

As the boys were getting the pancakes ready, Ella-Rose decided to be helpful (of course!) and cut up all the bananas and place them on he plates in anticipation. Although she left the rotten banana excluded but managed to squish it up a bit.

 The other kids all enjoyed them.

Yum, yum. Thanks boys :)

Beach fun!

Yesterday was a stunner of a day... and being a public holiday we went to the beach. We went to Raglan for a Stake activity. Anna-Maria was so surprised to see black sand "I have never seen back sand before!"

And she was full of questions about how it became black.

Ella-Rose was initially cold in the water so spent some of the afternoon snuggled up in my jacket.

Later on in the afternoon we couldn't pull her out of the water, she loved it.

The boys and Tane waited for high tide so they could jump off the bridge. Josh and Tane jumped a few times but Joseph thought he would wait till next time - (because by then he would be taller and the drop would therefore be less - according to him). But he still enjoyed hanging on the edge of the bridge with his Dad as and still felt pretty brave about that.

Joshua also had fun creating a sand dam on the beach to prevent water from high-tide returning back to the estuary.

I know it looks like they are playing in mud, but it is black sand honest!

I tried to keep little Lily in the shade as much as possible, but that didn't stop her from smiling a lot. But it is so difficult to catch her smiles on camera. She smiles, I point the camera, she thinks I've gone and stops smiling... and this just repeats itself over and over till I have about a hundred half smiling photos. So here are the best ones.

She is such a little cutie... and seems so much older than she was when she was born nearly 4 months ago.

After exhausting ourselves silly and working up a big appetite... we got wind of a rumour that there was a tsunami warning due to an earthquake in the Solomon Islands. Well, we had been at the beach for about 6 hours and our rumbling tummies were craving some junk food, so it was time to depart. But of course we had to take a detour to Manu Bay so Tane could goggle at the surf. After a while I asked him whether he wanted to come home with is or hitch a ride home... I think he got the message, as he was getting hungry too.

I think you could say, a good time was had by all.