a typical day for our family in Maliyali...

We have spent almost half of a year living in Maliyali!  We can honestly say that we love our home there.  It has taken some time to develop a good routine that works well for our family, but we all feel very settled and content there!  If you are wondering what we spend our days doing...here ya go!

Our mornings begin with quiet time, sweatshirts, blankets, and the kids cuddling our two cats.  Maliyali is chilly, a welcome change to the heat and humidity we had in Wewak!  We LOVE the weather in Maliyali.  It is a gift from the Lord!

Nathan makes plans almost every single day to go and work with a Maliyali man.  We call these "culture events"--or CEs...and what it means is that he works with a man (Jeremai pictured below)--and learns all kinds of nouns, verbs, phrases, etc that go along with that CE.  For example, if he is helping Jeremai build a garden fence, he might learn phrases like "I am cutting the tree", "I am putting the fence post in the ground", "give me the ax"...etc, etc, etc.  The things we can learn from a CE are endless.  Nathan does a CE most days.

While Nathan is gone in the mornings, the kids and I eat breakfast, do a devo, and then we start school!  Overall, homeschool is going well!

At around 10:00, I send the kids out for a break.  While they are outside, I do things like, hang laundry, talk to Emily, or talk to any Maliyali ladies who are outside.

The girls sometimes play "house" underneath our house...and that big red thing behind them is called a water bladder.  Our rainwater fills it up, and that is the water our family uses!

Most days during 10:00 break, Kaine plays with boys--either soccer or ultimate frisbee (frisbee is something we introduced...they all love it!  Also...a sidenote--see the rain coming in the background?  This happens many days...I LOVE how we can see the rain coming!)

After the 10:00 break, we come in and finish school, eat lunch, etc.

However, on some mornings every once in awhile, Nathan homeschools the kids and lets me go on a CE!  It is huge for me to be able to get out and work with a lady sometimes...I so appreciate Nathan helping me out with that!  I probably do this once a week or maybe every other week...

Kali taught me and Emily one day how to harvest peanuts! 

My friend Rachel and I planting sweet potatoes...

And SOMETIMES, we do a "family field trip"...we skip school on these days and go on a family hike to a nearby village.  The kids are always glad to skip school, but these are long days for them, too.  We know it's so good for them to get out and experience these things with us.

sidenote:  this is someone's new garden!  Their gardens are just huge areas of jungle that they cut down and burn...I think they look like a barren wasteland lol.  But they are so good at what they do!  They burn these massive gardens and plant SO MUCH food in them!  It's pretty amazing.

On this day, we went to the funeral of an old lady who died...it was very sobering for our kids to see this.  So, so sad :( 

Okay, so those are typical mornings.  The MOST typical, being Nathan out working with language, and me homeschooling the kiddos.  The vast majority of our mornings look like that.

Okay, then the afternoons...Nathan spends HOURS in his office underneath our house.  He spends time taking the language recordings that he got that morning, and "processing" them...putting them into the computer, making the information usable for us so that we can learn from it, study it, etc.  He also spends lots of time practicing language--going over hundreds and hundreds of nouns, practical expressions, etc etc.  

Some afternoons, Nathan brings in a Maliyali man to do a language session (this is Rambo, probably Nathan's main language helper).

I also try to spend an hour or two most afternoons studying language.  Let's be honest...some days this goes great, and I can diligently study while my kids do a sweet quiet time...but sometimes, it just doesn't happen!  I try to make it happen, though!

Mid afternoon, me and the kids go outside.  We spend a lot of the afternoon outside...our kids playing with Calvin and Louise...

Hanging out with Maliyali kids...

Me and Em spend lots of time together...she is such a gift to me!  I'll blog more about her later! 

 

Kaine likes to spend time playing soccer with the boys...

We take lots and lots of walks around our place...

We usually come in to eat dinner around 6:00.  And then, we shower, and either play games with our kids, I read to the kids, we do a family lego night, or a family movie night (on Saturday nights)...just spending time with our kids!  We love our evenings!

The kids go to bed around 8:30, and many nights I don't last much longer than that!  Nathan and I spend lots of evenings working on language learning, but lots of nights that tends to put me to sleep lol...We are usually in bed by 10-10:30.  

And that's pretty much what our typical day in Maliyali looks like!  More to come!