Pokes, Musoo and Fall

Wow, can you tell how busy I've been with school; I haven't written in about a month! Since I mentioned school, I'll start with that. It's been going well. I'm learning how to just enjoy the kids' presence and not be so focused on the curriculum. I'm thankful for God for allowing me to turn from my frustrated feelings and not lash out. It's so neat because I believe I'm finally seeing the fruit of my prayers: that I would be free from that. The kids are doing an amazing job spelling by sounding out. This is much earlier than most years! The new math curriculum is fun! The kids made their own calendar pieces: spiders and ladybugs and figured out a way to make patterns and then they chose which one they wanted. The only downfall to to this curriculum is that it takes a lot of time to plan and make the materials. I also have to the curriculum I had already first then I can do the new one. This doesn't make sense to me because the same concepts are taught but just in a different way. The kids recently loved the Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle. It was neat to hear how much they remembered from reading it, I think in Head Start. So the last thing about school is the pokes. That is what the kids refer to when they get shots. So we went to get TB shots, iron, weight, height, vision. We brought our classroom puppet to help too. The kids loved this. As I sat next to them explaining what was going to happen at each step and told them to look at KinderRoo and sing stupid songs about KinderRoo and each student, they did spectacular! They had to bravest class I ever had!

Musoo...Eskimo word for wild potoato. I know most of you are thinking of small round brown vegetables but nope. I was invited to go musoo picking up the beach a couple of Sundays ago. We traveled by Honda on beautiful Fall day. We got to Coal Creek and used a handmade boat that brothers made a few years back to get across the other side. It was extremely tippy so thank goodness my dad taught me how to get in and out of a canoe. As the little boat filled up with water as each person went across with Tom paddling it was a thrilling adventure! We made jokes about how each one would fall and how that would be funny! Luckily, that didn't happen. We got across and got a quick mini-lesson on how to dig for musoo with a large pick ax from the Native that was with us (same woman I went fishing and boating with this summer). So Elvina showed us what the plant looked like, how to just dig and pry the tundra up and look for the twig like potatoes. It was like picking for berries; you didn't want to stop. It was quite the work out too because the ground was getting hard from the freezes we have had. It's really whitle inside and has a skin like a "white" potato does but it has a sweet taste. Yummy and all natural! We stayed out for four hours and got to see two swans, an eagle, and the reindeer being herded. What a day! I can't wait to order myself a musoo digger for the spring time!

Fall has been beautiful! The tundra has turned orange-brownish. The fireweed leaves turn bright crimson, others are orange, willows, alders, and currant leaves turn yellow and orange. The insects are gone! The mornings are crisp and the days have been sunny! Just this week the bay and the river froze over completely, but melted in the middle because of the warmer days and after the high winds left. I'm wearing my down coat already and starting to wear sweaters. I think it's going to snow tonight because of the way the sky looks or it might rain, but others don't agree. As Berry and I go for our daily walk, her run, she is disappointed to find her once "cool off dipping places" frozen over. She also got into this funny habit of going through one drainage pipe and coming out the other. It's cute to watch! Along with Fall comes spruce hen hunting, crane, geese, swan, moose, beluga, seal, and ducks. Kim's dog caught her a birthday spuce hen. Berry is going to have to take lessons. She did come face to face with a stupid spruce hen (like our grouse) in the drive way. The dumb bird actually was moving towards her! She loved chasing it and was bummed I couldn't shoot it. She also met up with it a second time. We scared it out the grasses. Yes, it really did scare me!

Three long paragraphs later and you have an update. Another post is next.