July Update

Hello Everyone,                                                                                                                                                    5 July 2016

Today makes half way through 2016, and we’re over the ‘hump’ day and on the way to summer. We’re pretending to ourselves it’s a bit lighter in the mornings and evenings but it is really hard to tell with overcast skies. The rain, although late this year, is here now – along with the mud. It is better than last year, no horse hooves churning it up and we have some gravel tracks – but we really could do with a gravel storm, several hours of gravel rain – torrentially! It’s cold, woolly jersey and layers. It makes tourist spotting easy, they’re the ones in shorts and tee shirts as we were in July three years ago. Amazing how fast we’ve acclimatised. 

We have piglets; well Olga has piglets – eight of them, very cute and delicious looking. I reckon we should give her all the really soft kiwifruit, with any luck they’re a bit fermented and with eight kids she needs the booze. Boris has done a runner, escaping into the bush; perhaps we should’ve called him Crumpy. We’re hoping he’ll return when one of the sows goes into season again. It’s a bugger as we couldn’t put him in with the girls as the meat pigs are off to the butcher this month and we didn’t want to send them ‘full’, so now neither are Sausage and Ethyl. Silly Boris. Bloody animals!

We have a large crate (1.5x1.5x.75m) of kiwifruit in our old laundry, collected from the cast offs at the pack-houses, which we feed to the menagerie. The cats often sleep in there, in sheepskin lined boxes, and have been known to have the occasional ‘dust up’, (actually screeching, yowling full on cat fight), bashing about the place. But the bashing about without the vocals throughout the night, even knocking the feed buckets outside couldn’t be the cats… surely! It took almost a week before a convenient calling card was discovered. We knew we were feeding the bird life by day and now we’re feeding the possum population by night. I suggested to Kaarac that we chain him in the laundry with a rifle, he suggested he goes home.

Tony had a little incident with a mower. It seems he momentarily misunderstood that ride on means he rides them, not they ride him! A loading ramp slipped as he was riding onto the back of a customer’s ute, dumping Tony on the ground with the mower landing on top. He soldiered on. It took a whole day and a half of solid nagging to get him to the doctor, (and I had to come in and hold his hand). He’s lucky his pelvis took most of the impact and he just has, very pretty, deep bruising. After a couple of days off, a lot of pain meds he went back to work on light duties and although he himself spoke of revisiting the doctor, it seems he’s getting better. The problem of course was unsecureable ramps on strange utility vehicles, so the process has been changed and a ramp ‘holder’ person will be present in future.

Joe has teeth numbers nine and ten, (edit, and eleven and twelve) erupting. He’s allowed to brush his own teeth after breakfast but at night before bed mum or dad to do it to make sure they get a thorough clean. The secret to this access all areas ‘Hokianga smile’ preventative is bubbles. At teeth brush time, one parent blows clouds of bubbles, mesmerising Joe while parent two scrubs. The cool thing is the different coloured bubble wands actually have bubbles that are slightly tinted to match but that’s really only noticeable to the connoisseur. 

Joe has been climbing onto his ride on toys for several months now (well climbing everything), and for many weeks perambulating backwards, crashing into other toys, furniture and walls and expressing his frustration, loudly! This week, not only has he achieved forward motion but manuvereability too! Rather than lessen his frustrations, achieving these milestones has simply extended his goals. He wants to do everything NOW please. 

Joe still loves going to swimming lessons with Dad, and the warm humid pool environment while spectating poolside is delightful in winter. Everything breaks for school holidays, starting next week and Joe will miss Playcentre and swimming. Finding age and size appropriate stuff to keep him busy is quite a task.