So Many Cute MK's...Life in Oklahoma Post #2

Something else we are loving here in Oklahoma, is all of the other kids ("MK" stands for Missionary Kids, just in case you didn't know that acronym).  Layla and Daisy love playing with them, because the other kids are younger (like, even younger than Daisy).  But also for Kaine and Halle, because something that Nathan and I reeeeeally want for our kids is for them to play with and help out with younger kids.  

When Nathan and I were houseparents at Gateway, there were some other houseparent families there who had older kids.  And those older kids loved on, paid attention to, and played so well with our kids (Kaine and Halle would have been under 5 at that time).  Nathan and I so appreciated that, and ever since then we have really wanted to cultivate that in our kids as they get older.

Well, this living situation is pretty much perfect for that cultivation!  Kaine and Halle (and Layla and Daisy) have multiple opportunities to be blessings to the younger kids here!  It is really neat to watch, and it makes my mom heart very happy :)

Ashea is the sweet little girl who lives in our building.  So our kids get to have a lot of time with her!  She is so adorable, and I could just listen to her sweet little voice talk all day long.  Such a cutie!  Oh, and her family is also headed to Papua New Guinea!

Daisy and Ashea helped me take out the trash the other day...talk about melting my heart!  So sweet.

One of Ashea's favorite things to do with my kids is to "Watch Sofia?"  She looooves watching Princess Sofia on the ipad!  Our kids love it when I let them, too :)

Little Judah...oh my goodness.  I wish you could all meet this cutie!  Layla and Daisy get along super well with him!  He is headed to Africa with his family...

Judah and his brother are half German, and they happen to have matching German soccer jerseys with Kaine!  I just love this picture!

A picture of all the girls (including Ruby, who I haven't mentioned yet)... Layla got hurt right before this picture, if you can't tell by her super sad face:) 

I mentioned this at the end of my last post, but here are the kids doing their worship song with John.  This was so awesome!  We love our worship nights with everyone!

Looking at all of their "pets"--aka, frogs, lizards and crawdads :)

All of these sweet kids will be scattered around the world as their families take the Gospel to the Unreached.  Pray for them!  Their future will not be easy, but it will definitely be such a blessing.  These kids are priviliged to be able to experience such a ministry!

14 Adults, 13 Kids, 6 Crawdads, 5 Toads and 2 Lizards...Life in Oklahoma Post #1

Aaaaaand...a bunch of scorpions :)

Yep, that describes our "family" right now!  

We call them our "Ling Family".  At least the humans.  The crawdads, toads, lizards and scorpions don't really count in my book (but they would probably count in my kids' books!  So we will include them!)

We are living a very interesting life right now!  It is a lot of fun, as well as challenging at times.  And it is great preparation for being overseas.  We are living among many other people, adjusting to a new "culture", and just living a very different life than we are used to!  Very good preparation for Papua New Guinea, that's for sure!  I have so many pictures to share with you all, it's hard to know where to start!  So...here we go!

Post #1:  We love our Ling classmates!

What a great group of people we get to live with right now.  We are so thankful for the many ways that our classmates love and serve each other in this phase of training.  We realize that this is God's grace poured out on us, that He would bless us with these fun, godly, like-minded brothers and sisters!

We have gone on walks with them...

Me and my friend Sara :)

The guys and Kaine blow things up with firecrackers...

We go swimming in creeks...(or I should say, we watch our kids swim in the creek!) :)

Some classmates even go on late night walks to hunt for scorpions!  

We have MANY meals together!  We do all of our lunches/suppers as a group, and cook and clean as teams.  Good times :)

 After dinner one night, we spotted our first scorpion since arriving!  

We also cannot say enough how much of a blessing these friends are to our kids.  It is pretty rare for kids to have lots of adults (who aren't their parents or family members)--just pouring into them in a living situation like this.  What a blessing!  So many godly influences!  Such as...

One night after dinner, our kids put on a "gymnastics show" for everyone!  I was super proud of our kids for being brave enough to do something like this in front of everyone--and super thankful to our classmates for being such good spectators!  Our kids loved it!

This is where they performed.  Nathan has made a "gymnastics area" in our room, since the room tour blogpost.  He is one creative daddy!

They also allow our kids to help in the kitchen...

...the dads played "daddy-kid football" the other evening.  It was so fun to watch!

They give our kids so much attention...

Our kids just adore Miss Kaylee!  We have been in training with her for a long time--she was Kaine's preschool teacher when we first moved to Michigan 4 years ago!

We have a very talented friend (Sara!) who has painted the kids' faces many times.  They always look sooo cute!

On top of all that...

• Kaine learned to make paracord bracelets from one dad.
• Another dad taught the kids motions to a praise song, and Kaine and Halle even played the "drums"!
• 4 days a week, our kids are babysat (for 2 hours each morning, while Nathan and I go to our language sessions).  John and Sara switch off days--we are forever grateful to them!
• Kaine and Halle are learning some karate moves from another classmate! (or maybe it's tae kwan do...or judo...something like that!)
• Some of the guys took Kaine out scorpion hunting one night...and Nathan didn't even go!  Kaine loved that!

I could go on and on.  We are feeling blessed by our classmates, if you can't tell :)  And we hope we are blessing them by pouring into their kids' lives as well!

More to come!  Love you all!

what in the world are we doin' down here in Oklahoma??

I would imagine that many of you are confused by our schedule.  And for good reason!  We are in Michigan, then Indiana, then Missouri, then back to Indiana, then back to Missouri, then Indiana...etc etc etc.  And now...we are in Oklahoma?  Phew!  I feel bad for anyone who might be trying to keep track of us!

So I want to explain a bit more clearly (hopefully) what exactly we are doing in Oklahoma.

Most of you know that Nathan and I spent this past Spring semester at our Missionary Training Center in MO taking an intensive linguistics course.  That was in a classroom setting.  Well now, we are putting that whole semester of training into PRACTICE.  Here in Oklahoma, we are doing a Linguistics Practicum--on the Cherokee language!  

Basically, we are practicing what we will soon be doing for real.  When we move into an unreached people group in Papua New Guinea, we are going to learn their language--which has never ever ever been learned before, by any outsiders.  So we will have to learn it by living with them, doing countless sessions with language helpers...using all of our training to learn their language from scratch.  It will be no easy task!  But this practicum in Oklahoma will help us immensely!

Nathan and I are doing this practicum as a team.  We were assigned to a Cherokee language helper (a super sweet older lady--we are really enjoying getting to know her!)  Every day, we go to her house to do a two hour language session.  So far, we have been eliciting many words and phrases from her, writing them down phonetically, coming back to our "camp" and doing all kinds of processing with the data.  Things such as:  figuring out what sounds she is making, which vowels, whether or not the vowels are oral or nasal, lengthened or not--etc, etc.  Eventually we will also take all of our data that we get each day, and analyze the grammar and structure of the Cherokee language.  

We view this training as a privilege, one that we do NOT take lightly!  This will be such a help to us when we get to our tribe in PNG--and we want to put all that we can into it now.  Thank you for all of you who are praying for us, and thinking of us!

Nathan and our classmate/friend, Craig--listening intently to Cherokee words that Craig recorded from his language helper.

A very common sight late into the night.  Nathan listening to recordings from our language helper, entering them into the computer, and doing all kinds of stuff to the data that is super hard to explain :)

These late nights require big cups of coffee!!

We are so thankful and blessed to be able to do this training together.  The Linguistics training has turned us into true nerds--we can talk about Ling late into the night :)  And we know what each other is talking about!  Lol!  

We are also so thankful to have awesome friends/classmates who are helping us with our kids each day.  We don't take our kids to our language sessions (but today we actually did take them and it went really well!!)  But most days, we have classmates who babysit our kids, and we are so grateful.  We are all in this together!

During our time in Oklahoma we will attend the church that our language helper attends.  It is a Cherokee church--they do the service in English, but they do sing some Cherokee songs!  And many of the people who go there are Cherokee.  It is such a good experience for us and our kids!

I will have to do the next blogpost about how it is to live communally with 25 other people :)  We love our group!  But it is definitely a unique living situation!

settling in to our oklahoma home!

Our 8 weeks of living here in Oklahoma will certainly be interesting!  We arrived on Friday afternoon, and we were shown to our "room"--actually, instead of a room,  picture a boys dorm at church camp :) That is what our family is living in for the next 8 weeks!  Some of you may have seen this picture (when we first arrived) that I posted on Instagram on Friday:

Lots of bunk bed, huh??  Basically, we have a ton of beds but there wasn't much floor space!  Lol.  So anyway, thankfully I married a very handy and creative guy, and he has turned our family dorm into a great living space!  Here is a little tour:

of course, our kids quickly turned our room into their own personal playground :)  So many beds to jump on!  Praying for no broken bones!

With the help of some of our fellow classmates--aka, more creative dads--Nathan got our room looking good!!

Now, this is how our room looks when you walk in.  More floor space, and separated into different "spaces".  Such as...

a "pantry" :)

A Lego area (definitely a must with these kids!)...

A "fort" area...

A coloring area/homeschooling area!

This is our "junk drawer"--actually more of a "junk shelf" :)

The kids' "bedroom"--Nathan pushed four bunk beds together and the kids sleep in the four bottom bunks.  They all sleep with their heads in the middle--which is actually turning out to be a pretty hyper way for them to go to bed :)  We may have to rethink it!  They do gymnastics on the bars above their beds :)

in their beds...

Here is the door to our "bedroom".  The black curtain is our "door":

You can see the corner of our bed, Nathan's desk, and our "closet" :)

Our bathroom is great for the kids' teeth brushing!  

And we have 6 showers!  Also notice the bunk bed that we shoved in our shower room--haha!  One less bunk bed in our dorm!  We had to put them anywhere we could!

As you can see, it's a bit dusty around here :)  The kids have been using our van as a canvas!  They sure are creative!

Thanks for your prayers!  We are settled in and ready to dive into this Cherokee language.  I will post more about that next.  Love ya'll!  (can you tell we've been living in the South?) ;)