I’ve decided it’s time to document our days. What used to seem new and unfamiliar is quickly becoming regular and ordinary.
Since everyday we have to eat, I will begin with meals. I have a rotating weekly meal plan. I go to the market once a week for fresh produce. The kids pitch in and help cook too. Aaron makes breakfast (usually porridge of some kind-rice or oat, or fruit smoothies), Abigail makes lunch (usually tuna sandwiches and cucumbers or fresh fruit), and I make dinner. We eat a mix of cuisines. Basically I buy all the fresh veggies that will fit in my fridge and on my counter, and then I find recipes to use them in. Monday is eggplant, Tuesday is Okra, Wednesday is stir fry, a mix of whatever veggies I have on hand that need to get used up, Thursday is pumpkin, Friday is okra again (actually chicken gumbo soup is one of our favorites and I consistently make it more than anything else). Since Saturday is market day, it ends up being left over day, or salad, since I bring home lettuce from the market. Sunday is my easy day, I start black beans cooking in the morning in the crockpot, and we have fiesta bowls for dinner.
With meals comes chores of course, so I’ll dive into that next. Everyday each family member has about four family-care chores they do (in addition to their normal personal-care chores like making their bed and brushing their teeth). These mostly consist of the following: cleaning up after a meal, filling rain water bottles from the rain tank (used for cooking and cleaning), hanging clothes on the line, bringing clothes in from the line, sorting clothes to be put away, dumping the compost bucket, dumping the “rubbish” bucket, feeding the sourdough starter, making sourdough bread, making yogurt, and “scratching” coconut (used for making coconut milk which we use in smoothies and cooking “soup soup”).
Then we have school, a huge part of our day. We try to start by 8 am, and we aim to finish by 3. We begin with Bible time all together at the table, if we can stay focused. Then I move my personal focus on to science with Anna and Asher and the older three move on to their individual schoolwork, which, praise the Lord, they can mostly do on their own! Then we have Tea Break and practice our Pijin when we join the SITAG team (missionaries and staff) down at the training center. After Tea Break I work with Asher, teaching him how to read and write. Then we break for lunch and I read to the kids for an hour. We do other things through out the week not mentioned here, but that’s the basics.
We were able to purchase a keyboard from a missionary family that was moving back to Germany when we first arrived here, and even Asher practices on it regularly. This has been a wonderful blessing!
We are also blessed to have access to a cozy little homeschool library here at SITAG. There are so many resources, and so many books for the kids to read. This is another thing I am extremely thankful for.
Lastly, the family that plays together stays together! With the few hours we have left we are either participating in events around SITAG (Tea Break, Bible dedications, helping with projects), or events at church (youth group, Sunday school, cell group), or playing at home (inside and outside). Another of our SITAG missionary families recently moved to a different island and asked us to “babysit” some of their board games. The kids have enjoyed learning new games. And of course there is just the general goofiness of a bunch of fun loving homeschooled kids.
