October 23, 2016

This week

First, pics from Ben.
He's started several programs on the base already.  This is from "Holy Smokes" (i.e. come smoke a cigar with the chaps and have some good conversations).


And these are the "cans" that they sleep in.  There are 3 rooms per can; officers have their own rooms but every one else shares.
 


From us:
Temps are in the 90's, which means we eat outside!
Lunch at Kneaders:

 
 


When you give Colin stickers from Target:


I love that this little boy still asks me to snuggle with him daily.  It will end soon, so I just have to document the days that I get to sit with him in my lap.
 

This is how little boys play in the desert:
 
 

Holes in our yard.  If it's not the boys, it's the dog.  Colin is showing you his muscles.  P.S. I'm pretty sure there are countless toys buried throughout our yard now.

We worked on planting a garden this week.  The boys would get decked out to be "workers".


 Highlight of the week:
We were getting ready to leave the house when I looked in the living room and saw something strange on the floor.  I thought it was part of a stuffed animal and made a comment about Maya being naughty.  I stepped closer and realized it was a head of a bird.  In my living room.  I was pretty sure I was going to barf.  Long story short, I paid Eli $1.00 to clean it up.  Praise the Lord for having sons!  I still haven't found the rest of the body, but there are bird feathers all over our yard. 


This is how you pick pumpkins in the desert.
 

Thank you Walmart.  
They are weirdly really light.
 

The Y has been a huge blessing to me.  Twice a month, they have a parent's time out and while Ben is deployed, everything is FREE.  I get eight hours of free childcare a month and they do fun activities with them, which means they are really excited to go.  This morning, I went for a run, got a haircut, grabbed a giant coffee and cleaned the floors, all by myself!


The kids have been working on chores.  Colin grabbed Ben's earmuffs to vacuum today because was too loud for him.



October 22, 2016

Deployment and homeschooling

So, let's be honest.  Homeschooling and deployment are no joke. 

This week, we took some time to get some projects done.

Eli, checked out a cookbook from the library and has asked for weeks to make cupcakes out of it.  As luck would have it, Colin was learning about the letter C, so it worked out perfectly to finally make them.  I'm pretty sure he's getting too old to sit on the counter...




We also worked on planting a garden.  Eli is supposed to learn about plant life this year and deployment brain made me think we could grow a giant garden.  Why?  Why do I always bite off more than I can chew?  Hello.  Just mowing the lawn is a chore.



The kids were really excited to have their own spot and picked what they wanted to grow.  Eli is growing basil and carrots.


Alison is growing cotton (she got seeds from a cotton gin field trip), tomatoes and peppermint.


This project definitely took much longer than I anticipated, but I have learned a lot and the kids are really enjoying the work and I'm praying that something grows!


Can you see Alison in the tree in this picture?


I had to sneak a picture through my kitchen window.  A lot of learning happened in this tree this week.  She started writing a book about Maya up there and she memorized countless math facts.  That was our school focus this week.  It's been a long road of rebuilding her math foundation, but this week was a turning point.  Y'all, I bribed her.  And it worked.  Maybe bribed is a bad word...gave her incentive.  I told her for every stack of math facts and set of skip counting she memorizes, I'll pay her $1.  She spent hours working hard on memorizing and was SO excited to be working on it.  It gave her a boost of confidence and she said, "Thank you for making math fun!".  Best money I ever spent.

Eli wanted to earn money just like Alison and has also worked hard on memorizing.  Why is he jumping?  Alison had to try different ways to memorize to figure out what worked best for her.  I would have her write the facts she struggled with and say it 3 times, but it wasn't clicking.  In college, I learned the best reading while walking to class, so we tried moving and learning.  I found Eli practicing skip counting on the trampoline one evening, way after school was over.

October 16, 2016

Last Day of School

While everyone is going back to school, we're just finishing up our year and boy, oh boy, were we ready!

Books closed.  Notebooks filed away.  Kindergarten and 3rd grade complete.



I would make an excuse for my sons not having clothes on, but it's 118° outside and I don't blame them one bit.




Also had to document our last day of working on our bodies for biology.  It only took us a year and we didn't get as much done as I wanted, but we learned a little something.




P.S. I got the most amazing app for our iPad for learning about the body and I would highly recommend it.  It's called 'My Incredible Body'.  Check it out!

October 13, 2016

Catching up

My phone updated and wouldn't upload pictures to my computer like I've been doing for the last 2 years.  I am not liking this update at all.  BUT guess who figured it out all on her own without Ben Shear's help...that's right...me!  It took me awhile and now I'm behind on sharing pictures, but better late than never, right?

So here a gazillion random things.

We went to "Lego club" at the base library.


We walked in and all of Ben's office was there with their families.  It was nice to have some familiar faces to talk to while the kids built.


Our tradition of ruining the grill while Ben is gone has begun.



Eli's favorite breakfast is blueberry muffins...except he calls them "sugar muffins" because of the topping.


Colin has fallen asleep on the red chair pretty much every day for the last week.  One day he asked if I would snuggle with him and was out in just a few minutes.


Eli built himself a fort one day and I found him with a stack of books.  He is doing such a great job reading!


I cleaned out closets this past weekend and sadly we are at the end of our hand-me-down stash.  Alison and Eli have both grown in the last month and now only have 1 pair of pajamas.  We've looked at several stores and can only find fleece pajamas and it's still close to 100°.  A friend told me that Yuma is weird like that and the stores still follow all the seasons.  Eli couldn't resist these spiderman pj's and wants to wear them all the time now.  I had to turn down the air conditioning one night just so he wouldn't overheat.


Colin discovered a dress jacket in his closet after I reorganized things.  He was in love and kept saying, "Oh, I'm going to be SO handsome!".





Some pictures from Ben.

He has his own car to drive around base:


This is his office:


I was teasing him about being really spoiled there (they cook breakfast for him and do his laundry) but he said it has more of a Camp Barnabas feel to it.  This picture of his office gave me a better understanding of what it's really like there.  I still think he's a little spoiled...the Chaplain before him left a cappuccino maker!


What he looks like when we Facetime:


This week, a friend took Alison and Eli on a field trip to the cotton gin with HEY (home educators of Yuma).  They had a blast and brought home cotton seeds for us to grow at home.  Now the question is, what do you do with cotton you grow at home???

Eli is in tan shorts, blue and orange shirt and Alison is in the teal shirt/shorts
Colin and I went to the park and bible study while they were gone.


We brought home Maddie with us after the field trip.  I am so thankful that Alison has homeschool friends.  Maddie did school with us and they were both encouraged by knowing there's other kids who learn just like they do. 


Yesterday was a wonderfully quiet, productive day at home.  I did school with each of the kids individually and got some great organization done in the schoolroom.  I was a happy teacher.  While I worked on my desk, the boys made police cars.  They worked for probably 2 hours on them, tearing of duct tape and drawing on the tape, making lights and license plates and sirens.



I love seeing their creativity and how much they love playing together. 
 
Alison has been really into creating necklaces.   She so sweetly made a necklace and note for her cousin...I loved how she packaged it.


School today:


Maya took a nap while we worked on math and Eli took 5,000 pictures of her because she was just too cute.


Shew.  That was too many random things.

October 12, 2016

1906

The coolest thing happened last week, as we started our new school year.  Eli is beginning history and last week was an intro into "what is history?" and "how do we learn about history?" and we talked about how we can talk to our grandparents to learn our own history.  That very morning I got an email from my dad about the history of my great grandpa Eli Yoder (who Eli is name after).  His cousin had found this rare picture of him from 1906 and then my dad met with my grandpa to get more stories about great grandpa Eli.  The kids LOVED hearing these stories and I want to have them documented in our history, so I'm excited to share my dad's stories on here.  Maybe I'll start "Family history Fridays" or something catchy.

-- Eli Thomas Yoder.
          Born in Sept, 1885 in Missouri.  Died in Sept, 1972... at almost 87 years old.  He died 11 days short of his birthday, of a heart attack.
          When Grandpa Eli was growing up many kids only went to school during part of the year, because during the spring and fall they had to help with farming.  So it took longer to complete your course-work and it wasn't until age 20 that he went to Goshen Academy for High School.  It's a Mennonite school in Indiana.  But during high school, his Dad (Samuel K Yoder) had a stroke so Eli had to come home to run the farm.
          He married his first wife at age 23.  She died at a young age and they had no children. 
          He then married Grandma Ida in 1919.  Ida Plank, a young school teacher.  She was 12 years younger than Eli.
Their first child, Arnold was born in 1925.  Then Mary.  Then my Dad was born in 1928 when Eli was 43 years old.
          In the picture below, this was how he looked and dressed for church.  He had 2 suits, that were very nice dress clothes.  The picture may have been a church picture.  Grandpa always wore a suit and tie to church.  Also, to weddings and funerals.  At the time of the picture he would have been living at home, helping with the farm.  They were proud people, and each of them had at least one good outfit.  They also had a good buggy, and a good horse.
          By the time he married Grandma Ida, he was a little older and he had a car.  A model-T Ford.  When they got married, he got a car for Ida with a starter.  Otherwise you had to crank the car to start it. 
          They used horses to farm.  But when my Dad was 4 years old they moved to Hesston and Grandpa got a tractor.
          Then, in 1932, in the midst of the depression, Grandpa couldn't make his farm payment so the bank took the farm away from him.  It was called:  he lost the farm.  Many people had their farms repossessed in the 1930's.  So they had to move.  They rented a farm a few miles west of Hesston from Maggie Prouty, and were able to make the rent payment.  They were poor, but they never went without food and clothes.  Each Fall, grandpa would take the kids to town and buy each one a new pair of shoes for school.  By then, their kids went to school the full year and he wanted them to have good shoes because they walked to school.  That was it.  They had one pair of shoes and one pair of jeans to last them the year.
          Then in the early 1940's things got better and Eli bought a farm near Walton.  That's where Dad grew up and he went to school in Walton.  In High School my Dad drove the school bus, and kids no longer had to walk to school.

          If you go back to Eli's childhood family, it's like this:
- His dad was Samuel K. Yoder.  Samuel K was born in 1833.  He had 17 kids.
- His first wife died.  But they had 7 kids, six of which were boys.
- Then he married Barbara S. Yoder.  Her original name was also Yoder.
- When Barbara married Samuel K, she helped raise the kids.
- And, she had 10 of their own... but only 4 of them lived.  Six of hers died at childbirth.
- The 4 that lived were:  Delus, Ida, Eli, and Amanda.  So Eli had a sister named Ida, and then a wife named Ida.


Stories from my dad:
 
When I was a youngster... your kid's age... Grandpa Eli didn't have combine to cut the wheat like you see today.  He had what was called a "Thrasher."  It was a very small early version of a combine but you pulled it behind a tractor.  Someone had to ride on the thrasher to steer it and control the height of the cutting blade.  So Grandpa drove the tractor and my Dad rode on the thrasher.  We kids sat in the pickup and watched them go around the field.  Then they'd empty the grain into the back of the pickup to take to the grain elevator in Walton.  The pickup bed had sideboards on it so they could carry more grain.
          I got to ride along to the grain elevator one time, when I was in 1st grade.  When we got there, the pickup drove the front tires onto a hoist with a strap, and they opened the tailgait in the back.  They slowly lifted up the hoist and the whole front end of the pickup came up off the ground.  This was so the wheat would pour out the back of the pickup bed.  They kept lifting the front end of the pickup until it was 3-4 feet off the ground... which was terrifying to a 1st grader.  However, later when I was safely back on the ground I decided it was pretty cool.  But on the next load, I didn't want to go to the elevator.  I let my brother Sam go!
          Usually the wife would bring lunch or a snack out to the field when the men were working or harvesting.  Particularly during harvest, because you didn't have time to stop and go home to eat lunch or supper.  Once they started cutting the wheat, they needed to get it done and to the elevator before a hail storm or rain came in.  If it rained, that could delay your cutting by a week or 2.  And if there was a hailstorm it could ruin your entire crop.  If that happened, you were sunk.
          Occasionally, but not very often someone's wheat field would catch on fire.  Particularly after they had tractors, and trucks and other equipment that would get hot.  If someone parked a truck in the wheat stubble and the engine was still hot, it could catch the wheat on fire.  Or, back in those days when you started a tractor, or pickup, it would sometimes "backfire" or create a spark.  If you were sitting in the wheat stubble, it could catch the field on fire.  Once they learned this, they were very careful not to park in the wheat stubble.  But that was tough because a pickup, or a larger grain truck was needed to unload the combine and take the grain to the elevator.  They had to drive out in the wheat stubble to off-load the grain from the combine.
          When a field caught on fire, everyone around would quickly see the smoke, and everyone ran to help.  That farmer could lose whatever grain hadn't yet been cut... and usually did.  But more important, it could catch the neighboring fields on fire as well.  You don't hear of wheatfield fires much anymore, but I've seen one of 2 of them from a distance.  Never up close, thankfully.
          Grandpa's wife was Grandma Ida.  Ida Plank.  She went by Ida Plank Yoder.
          Grandma had a sister named Ella.  They grew up in Harper, which is west of Newton about 40-50 miles.  Grandma Ida was a school teacher.  I think Ella was too.  They lived with their Dad, who I think was Saul Plank.  We just called him grandpa Plank... even though he was our great-grandpa.  If you get any materials from Duane, he will have alot better information about g-grandpa Plank.  We never heard anything, or knew anything about his wife.  No idea who she was, and she had died long before we were born.
          We also called Ella, Aunt Ella, even though she was my Dad's aunt.  She never married, and lived with grandpa Plank her whole life... in Harper.  They never moved from the original house that Ella and Ida were born in. 
          And it was a terrible house.  Located on the very edge of town, it was literally the smallest house you've ever seen.  You walked in the front door to a small living room.  On one side of the living room was a kitchen that was no bigger than 10 feet.  On the other side of the living room were 2 bedrooms and a bathroom.  That was it.  They had what was called a floor furnace, and no air conditioning.  We (us kids) hated to go visit there.  When we did go visit, we pretty much stayed outside.  There was a train track running right beside the house... literally 20 feet from the house... so that was fun.  We'd go play on the train track.  It made Mom a little nervous, but they kept on ear out for trains.  When a train did come by, it was going fairly slow (maybe 20-30 mph) because it was going through a little town, and we'd stand as close as Mom would let us.  It was both exciting, and a little scary to be that close to those great big train cars going by.  And they're really great big when you're in the 3rd grade.
          We always wanted to put something on the track to see what would happen when the train ran over it.  But Mom wouldn't let us, because she heard that trains sometimes derailed when people did that.  And for that reason, it was illegal.
          So, back to Grandma Ida... she never brought lunch or snacks out to the field.  After marrying Grandpa Eli, she became a writer.  She wasn't much of a cook nor a farm wife, so she just didn't do those fieldwork type things.  She was a more educated type person, and wrote a column for the Mennonite Weekly Review, which was a fairly prominent newspaper/periodical back when I was a kid.  Not so much today anymore.  But it was circulated across the country to Mennonite churches, their church members, and Missions organizations.  There were alot of Mennonite churches in central and western Kansas, and Grandma Ida was quite well know in Kansas and some parts of the Midwest.  Many people read her column every week, and thought it was the best part of the "Weekly Review."


more to come...

October 8, 2016

Blessings

Before this deployment, I really wanted to focus on the positive and be thankful each day for what I could, but I really wasn't sure that could be a reality.  It's only been less than 2 weeks, but I already have seen so many blessings.

                                    First of all, I have been spoiled at how much we get to hear from Ben.  Most days, I at least get a text twice a day.  We've facedtimed multiple times and it's really helped the kids feel like they are still connected to him.  Alison even said the other day that deployment really wasn't that bad; she just missed daddy at dinner time but she gets a "daddy kiss" (aka hersey kiss) so that makes up for it.

Second, huge one, I have felt remarkably not-stressed.  The morning Ben left, I had a brief freak-out because I started to feel "stress belly" coming on.  I felt sick to my stomach every single day Ben was gone last deployment and the stress made me physically and emotionally not well.  I knew I wouldn't make it 6 months this way and when that feeling came back, I panicked.  Ben said right then that he would pray specifically that I didn't have stress belly and I haven't felt it once!

Also, I have seen or talked to someone from our church every single day this week.  Our church is really small, so that basically means that our entire church has reached out to me in one week.  We had dinner with one family on our first day of school, which was SO crazy nice to not have to worry about cooking.  Another morning, a family invited us over for lunch/play to break up the school day.  Laurel is one of the few people I know that teaches like I do and has kids my kids age and while we talked shop, the kids played.  I guess we got carried away talking because look what they did:           


Yes, that's a giant hole they dug in their yard.  Thankfully, they are totally cool with this happening and it's a "normal" occurrence.

Oh, AND nothing has broken or fallen apart yet!

October 5, 2016

Melt my heart

This morning, we were taking a little walk around the block, when Alison said, "This sure is a great morning."  I asked her why she thought so because it really wasn't anything exciting.  What she said I just had to write down so I will always remember it.

"These kind of days are my favorite.  When I wake up to the sound of the boys playing and you have the windows open.  We don't have to be anywhere and can play outside and you cook lunch."


It just melted my heart and I was so thankful for her words.  It may not seem like much, but just knowing that she is enjoying our life made me happy.

Alison wearing my shirt and eating my lunch


It's cooled off some this week; mornings in the 70's and gets into the 90's by afternoon.  We are loving it and I'm having a hard time keeping the kids inside.  Soon we'll be able to do school outside on the picnic table and I'm really looking forward to that.

 

The small fact that they can go outside is a huge blessing to me.  People keep asking me how I'm getting a break, and this is it!  I love it that they love going outside and will play out there together for hours.  I realized how much more remarkable it is today.  There isn't a trampoline or playground or sandbox or sports equipment or even bubbles and we don't have comfy furniture, a fire pit or fancy lights.  Yet, we are out there all the time and the kids play for hours with rocks and sticks and run races and play with the dog and search for lizards.  It was a reminder to me that life can be fantastic without all the things the world tells us we need.

WARNING TO BEN SHEAR...STOP READING HERE.




The kids built this fort on the side of the house.  It's not the safest, I'll give you that, and I probably should have made them use a tarp instead of blankets, but I decided the memory of making a fort in the yard trumped those factors.