grandpa and grandma came to town!!

I can't believe our weekend with my parents is already over.  We have looked forward to it for weeks!  And now they are back in IN, but it's okay...we enjoyed our weekend with them soooo much.

Our kids were anticipating the arrival of Grandpa Jim and Grandma Jan...and they arrived last Thursday night!  Happy day :)  It was so so so wonderful to see them!

Can you tell that we were happy they visited?  :)

So anyway, the weather was perfect all weekend.  It was warm enough to go down to the lake...

And it was perfect weather for a walk to the creek...

Kaine's highlight of the weekend was spending time in the creek with my dad, catching crawdads and turtles.

My parents took our kids to Ozark Land (an overpriced souvenir store), which they were thrilled about!  They always beg us to go to Ozark Land, and we always tell them: "wait until your grandparents visit."  Haha :)  Sorry, mom and dad!

We went to a very cool restaurant, which we have never been to before.  It was a kids' paradise, complete with a beach, playground and a bouncy house!

We attempted a family picture, which didn't turn out great because of the lighting.  But I thought this one was pretty hilarious of Kaine :)

Here's another of my favorites...haha!  Love the funny faces :)

Mom and Dad, thanks so much for coming to visit.  We had such a great time with you guys--it went way too fast!  Love you and appreciate you!

highlights from the past week...

We did a family picnic at the local state park...so much fun!  I guess that was on Labor Day, so technically that wasn't in the past week.  Nathan and Kaine had the "manly" job of grilling the meat...don't they look manly??

We have been supremely blessed by this amazing young lady...Aubry is a staff kid here at the mtc, and she loooooooves kids!  Which works out really nice for us!  :)  She has been babysitting for our kids, and just loving on them in general.  Thanks Aubry Joy!  We appreciate you!

This was kind of a joke...we went on a "family date" to Buffalo Wild Wings...um NOT the best date place.  We should have known!  Not only were there a bazillion tv's in the place, but they brought EACH of our kids their very own tablet, filled with games!  Ha...as you can see in the picture, there wasn't a lot of family interaction...but don't worry, we didn't let them play them for too long :)

I have recently been asked a few times if Layla and Daisy are twins!  They are really about the same size...I just think they are really cute together :)

Daisy wanted to "cut the grass" for us the other day :)

We had a fun time playing Extreme Croquet the other night with our small group leader, Larry...I will have to blog about our amazing small group sometime :)  And by the way, Extreme Croquet is just basically an awesome croquet course in the middle of the woods.  Larry engineered the whole thing...thanks Larry!

 A classmate of ours, Craig, taught Kaine how to juggle last night.  Craig is a pretty amazing juggler...like, he can juggle three flaming torches!  Wow.

See?  Bad quality picture, but you get the idea.  Our kids were in awe :)

We had our first official "hot chocolate day".  Wow, yesterday fall weather hit us with a vengeance!  Thankfully, it warmed up today.  Phew.  I wasn't quite ready for that yet!

Today, we went to a couple of Mennonite bulk food stores, and had lunch with this amazing family (and our small group leaders, Larry and Carol.  I am so bummed I didn't get a picture with them too!)  But anyway, David and Emily and their sweet kids are such a blessing to us.  Love these guys!

Can't believe how fast these weeks are flying by!  Craziness.  Love ya all!

learning to create an alphabet.

When we think about the ministry we are being trained to do, parts of it seem a bit overwhelming.  Or I should say very overwhelming!

Learning an unwritten language (no one else in the world speaks it) and then figuring out how that language works, creating an alphabet and teaching the people how to read and write it are some of those overwhelming tasks.

Phew.  If I think abour it too much, I start to feel stressed and (you guessed it)...overwhelmed!

The training we are receiving here at the mtc is so good though.

We recently finished a Phonemics class.  In a (very small) nutshell, phonemics is basically creating an alphabet.

However, it isn't as easy as it sounds!  In creating an alphabet, we will have to analyze all the sounds that the tribal people make when they speak, and figure out which sounds are significant to them.  And then, figure out which of those sounds need a letter in the alphabet.  This is kind of confusing to explain, so here is an English example:

Check out the English letter /t/.  Here are some English words that contain the letter /t/:

top

stop

letter

kitten

hit

To the average English speaker, in all of these words we are saying the same letter--/t/.  But in reality, we are actually saying FIVE separate sounds.  Try it!  Say the words out loud to see the differences.  The sounds we are making are actually: aspirated t, unaspirated t, flapped r, glottal, and an unreleased t.  But to our minds, we are saying the letter /t/ and we don't hear or notice the difference!  Therefore, most of these sounds are not significant to English speakers--in the alphabet, we just use the letter /t/ for them all.

Another piece of this Phonemics puzzle is the fact that an alphabet should be consistent.  The English language is a terrible example of this.  I will show you why: check out how many ways the [u] sound (as in too) can be spelled in English:

too

to

two

through

you

shoe

blue

flute

suit

new

flu

How confusing is that???  I pity the poor people who have to learn English as a second language.  It would be brutal.  The principle here is: ONE and ONLY ONE symbol for EACH SOUND!  

Hopefully that all makes some sense!  Nathan and I think it is really fascinating.  We are so thankful to get this training, otherwise we wouldn't know what in the world we are doing someday!

We also had a Literacy class, in which we learned how to develop a literacy program for our tribe.  Nathan and I even created our very own Literacy primer!  It was fun--it was great to prove to ourselves that we are capable of this stuff!

There ya have it.  Just a small glimpse into what we are learning.  Thanks for your prayers and support!

encouragement from home.

It was so awesome to have our very good friends visit us last weekend!  Michael and Jane have been wanting to get out here to see where we are at in MO...and we were so excited to host them and show them around!  Our kids were so glad to have friends visiting--what a fun couple of days.

The kids really all got along so well!  They spent a lot of time outside with sticks and pretend guns, playing "army".  It was pretty cute to watch :)

It was so great to introduce Michael and Jane to our friends here at the mtc!  Here I am with Jane and my good friend Emily...and her sweet baby Louise :)  

Our campus is amazing, so there was a lot to do for the kiddos!  We went on an adventure to the creek...

Finn enjoyed the human spider web...

The dads had a good idea to take the kids on a boat ride.  Unfortunately, it started pouring down rain right when they got out to open water...the kids didn't love that too much :)

Scout sure didn't mind the rain though!  We decided that New Tribes should pay Scout for cleaning up the beach...he threw stones from the beach into the lake for so long!

Thankfully, the next day was bright and sunny...so the dads tried another boat ride.  This time it was a success :)

Deacon enjoyed watching Kaine play the ipad... (and I think Kaine enjoyed playing the ipad :)

Oh these two...such kindred spirits!  Finn and Layla really hit it off...they have similar personalities, and they really had fun together!  Let me tell you, they are a couple of crazy kiddos :)

Daisy loved Scout...I think she enjoyed the role of "taking care" of him.  It was precious.

We had some fun meals together...

Of course, we had to take them to Ha Ha Tonka...remember that place?  It is pretty cool.  Here is a group pic of the kids.

Michael and Jane brought gifts for our kids, and one thing they brought was firecrackers for Kaine.  So...our evening entertainment involved Nathan blowing up random objects with firecrackers.  It was a hit with the kids, of course!  Some favorites included a chicken nugget, a pop can, and a banana piece :)

Not the best quality, but oh well.  Love these friends!

Thanks so much for traveling all that way to see us, M and J!  We appreciate and love you guys so much!