Sweet Potato Digging with Pension mother and Grandmother

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Pension mother was THE ABSOLUTE BEST, if you haven't already deduced that. Although she spoke limited English, she was always thinking of ways to make our lives better, and things to entertain the boys. During harvest time in early October, she asked me using a mixture of words and hand gestures if I wanted to go sweet potato picking. I was not sure what to expect, but at the appointed day and time, house mother and grandmother piled into our car with the boys and we drove inland for a few miles. When I was putting the boys in their car seats, both mother and grandmother wanted to just hold Owen, but I made sure to put him in his car seat even though he was screaming like crazy.

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Beloved house mother!
House grandmother sat in the front seat, pointing the way I should go. It was a little nerve-wracking trying to figure out the way, but we made it. When we got there, house grandmother's husband was in the field digging, but they soon left us to our digging. In order to get the sweet potatoes out of the ground, we dug down on the side of the furrows with the shovel and lifted them up, then we used small hoes to find the potatoes in the mound. Landon was very interested in digging out the potatoes for a few minutes, but it was pretty tricky to get them out sometimes, so he started moving the dirt like a dump truck. Once we got a bunch of sweet potatoes out, Owen loved putting them in buckets.


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Picking up potatoes
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Putting them in the bowl
Pension mother gave us gloves for digging in the dirt. She and house grandmother are so strong! I'm not sure how old grandmother is, but she manned the shovel for quite awhile after her long day of cleaning the pension. The boys were totally in their element in the dirt. It was actually pretty difficult to find all the sweet potatoes and get them separated from each other and the deep roots. We ended up accidentally breaking a bunch of them open. House grandmother was so nice and took all the broken ones and gave us a huge bag of all the others. These sweet potatoes were purple sweet potatoes with white insides. Very cool!  After we finished digging a few rows, house grandmother invited us back to her house. I was kind of worried because Koreans are so clean and we were filthy with dirt but she was so hospitable. She got out a bunch of different fruits and a knife to cut them up. When we left, she gave me a ziploc bag of frozen crushed up garlic and chestnuts. Koreans are so kind and giving. I love them so much!
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Dirty sweet potato digging boys
P.S. House grandmother and pension mother are not actually related. That's just what we call them because I have no idea how to say or spell their names :)

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