March 4th through March 12th

Thursday, March 5th

Kelcy goes to class with Miss Springer today! Miss Springer is teaching Kelcy the alphabet and the phonetics of the letters. Kelcy really enjoys getting to go to school with the other kids. She gets her backpack and heads right out on Thursday mornings to sit at her desk and learn. Miss Springer says that Kelcy also repeats the numbers with the Kindergarten when they are counting. The Kindergarten class recites their numbers from 10-100 by tens, and Kelcy does it too. She is three, going on six.

My art class is beginning to work on their projects for the art show. The school art show will be March 27th. We have worked on colors and value, pencil drawing, pencil shading, charcoal drawing, charcoal shading, pastel chalk drawing, and next week we work on watercolor painting. My kids are very artistically talented and it is so fun to help them practice and learn just how good they are!

Sunday, March 8th

The church service went well today. I have a steady class that includes at least 4 children each week, between the classes of first grade and 7th grade. They enjoy a challenge and I have to work hard to keep them busy sometimes. They all like to read the Bible scriptures and will volunteer to do so very quickly. We are finishing up a lesson set on Paul and will begin a new set in two weeks.

Mr. Bill and I created a bulletin for the church service today. He gave me his sermon notes and the song service order and I used Publisher to create a Bulletin and added in the prayer request and praise pages. It was fun. Jerry said that he needed to be my editor from now on. He thought that the font was not large enough!

Monday, March 9th

Music class is going very well. Nate is doing great on the drums and Merritza is doing great on the piano and guitar. Adam just passed his keyboard test and now is beginning to learn the guitar. The smaller children are all learning the keyboard and how to read music. It is amazing how quickly they can pick it up! The Navajo children seem to have a special affinity for the musical expression.

Tuesday, March 10th

We got rain today! I mention this, because the last time I remember getting rain at the mission was at the end of November.

Thursday, March 12th

We learned about watercolor painting in art class today. Nate did really well in the new medium. He is a little hesitant at expressing himself artistically, probably because he is a teenage young man and afraid to be ostracized by his peers. When he does work with the color, he does really well. Kelcy did pretty good too. I painted a tree trunk for her and she added some green leaves, a blue sky and some orange around the base (I think she was going for the sunset). It turned out really well.

After school today, Jerry decided we should go for a drive. He has been asking me to get him a Indian Country Map so that we can go exploring on the reservation for several months now. I have failed to obtain this for him and now he has given up. He said that we may get lost, but it would be my fault! He was kidding, I think. So, after school we set off. We drove down onto the reservation for a few miles, then turned off on Route 2. It is a washboard dirt road. If you any of you are not familiar with a washboard, it was/is used to wash clothes. The process was to get your clothes wet and soaped up, then scrub them on the washboard, then rinse. A washboard is not level and flat. It has grooves for scrubbing. This road was like that. Abby & Kelcy were making noises and hearing the sound vibrate with the vibrations of the vehicle. We discovered the Navajo reservation as Tony Hillerman describes it in his popular detective novels. There were small roads that went off into the desert where we could not see any habitation. There were also roads that led off into the desert where we COULD see the hogan that was FAR off the road. The sand changed as we traveled from hard baked earth with cracks in it to light sand that had blown into sand dunes. Next, there were rocky/sandy hills of the Painted Desert. Kelcy fell asleep on the washboard road. Perhaps it was the hum of the tires on the bumpy road, or the vibrations lulled her to sleep. Either way, I looked back to see her head leaning over to the side, asleep. Abby was worried, because she knew that we didn't know exactly where the road led. She kept asking if we were lost.

We saw lots of empty liquor bottles and beer bottles lying on the side of the road, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There were stripped cars and bags of garbage on the side of the road as well. At one point, there were large trees, just out of nowhere. I think they ran along the dry river bed where the Little Colorado runs at some times of the year. It was neat to see tall trees. I was delighted to see that a couple of houses had solar panels for electricity. There were no electric lines to these houses. They either had a windmill for water and electricity or they had solar panels, or they had no water or electricity. We came to a fork in the road, where the washboard continued on left and to the right was an asphalt highway. I chose the asphalt highway. We headed on this road at a faster pace. We were on the washboard for right at an hour. We soon reached Winslow. Jerry was right, the road did lead to Winslow eventually. When we go there, the weather turned violent. The truck was battered with first sleet, and then pretty large hail. That was an amazing sight! We drove on back home to find that there was no precipitation at the mission. Although, it did end up raining some later that evening.