Hi

Sorry for the lack of updates.   I don’t think many people were reading this, so I am now just sending group emails instead.  Let me know if you did read this and I will start again!

Sorry these photos are a little old - I need to get some recent ones!

Nana and Grandad Doel.  Braedyn was amazing for our 2 day, 1 night visit to Hikurangi (Northland for the geographically challenged).  He was so patient with all the time in the car, only a wee bit grumpy that night, and full of smiles the second day.  It was great to catch up with Uncle Chris and Aunty Leonie, Uncle Colin and Aunty Carol, Aiya and Ed, and Tim for dinner that night.

Braedyn seems to have made a habit of sleeping through!  But before I speak too soon – we are in Whangarei at the moment visiting Gene’s grandparents, so he may behave a little differently for his first night away from home!

 I will post some photos of Braedyn with his great-grandparents when we get home.

We had a great pot-luck dinner at Dylan & Mitch’s last night, with Mike &Neen, Karl & Nikki.  But for the first of all our evening outings, Braedyn decided not to settle.  He stayed awake, staring at the curtains (his latest point of interest).  When he started to tell everyone how tired he was, we high-tailed it for home.  He went to bed at about 11:30pm, and made it until 6:30am!  

Now that I have told everyone they have to read our blog, I’d better get my A into G and update it!  Thanks for the reminder Neen

 We’ve been really busy on the farm and with Braedyn.  Gene’s done a lot more fencing, and has increased the shock at the front of the farm from 1.2 to 8.1!  So you can certainly hear the moos moo if they touch the fence. 

Environment Waikato visited last week.  Before those of you who are farming start swearing about them, they were INVITED.  Yes, you heard right, invited!  We asked them to assess our river boundary for funding for fencing and planting (to keep stock out of waterways, prevent nitrates & phosphate getting in the river, and  stop erosion of the banks).  Fencing means our cows won’t visit Pete and Skin over the river, saving us paying a truck to go and pick them.  And it saves anyone seeing the scary sight of Gene in the river.  EW may use us as a pilot study for the lower Puniu catchment too, which would be quite good.  

We started planting the riverbank with the flax the “digger-man” pulled out of the effluent ponds.  Gene carted them down to the river, and it took us both 2 hours to plant about 30m x 5m.  We have approx 850m of riverbank to do, varying from 1m to 5m wide.  So it is going to take a long time, and a LOT of flax.  We barely made a start on the flax plant we started splitting, so at least they go a long way!

The cowshed work has continued with trenching  in a powerline on the tanker track and removing the overhead line.  It was a $3K exercise, but had to be done as we are putting the vat where the power pole was.  The other option was to relocate the pole, but that was only slightly less price-wise, and you could see that the overhead lines had already been hit by trucks before.

Braedyn has been a delight – I’m only getting up once during the night.  He is giving us lots of amazing smiles now.  Plunket are useless, and we miss Michelle and Lasa our midwives!  Apparently Michelle misses us too and is going to call in sometime.

Tazz is our 9 year old Mini Foxy.  The twins are Tia and Bailey, 5 year old Burmese.  All 3 of them came to Australia with us, and back again.  The new addition is Tabitha, a “wild” tabby who we inherited with the farm.  She is very friendly, and looking great after being spayed, de-flea’d, wormed and fed.  She lives at the cowshed at the moment.  We have started to feel sorry for her being all alone, but don’t know that we can integrate her into our menagerie.  She is pretty feisty and we don’t want her to drive all 3 of our other animals away (Tazz already knows not to mess with her).  Tazz has been very naughty lately, and has figured out she can get in the cat door and sit by the fire when she hasn’t been invited to.

…and all over the farm, every creature was stirring…except Braedyn.

The digger came today, so we now have nice clean effluent ponds, and he has started the extension to the yard at the cowshed.  Gene has been kept busy for the last couple of weeks starting to fix up the fences.  And the rest of the photos are just to show off the farm!

Wow, it’s our 10th wedding anniversary today!  I can’t believe it has been that long (or how old that makes us feel LOL).  We are planning to have dinner out tonight, depending how Braedyn settles as he is a bit feverish and irritable after his jabs today.

There must be some annoyed teens after we dobbed them in.  This was in our local rag the Te Awamutu Courier yesterday: