August 2009 – Page 3 – Andelin Adventures

Farmers Market

Our stake has a garden plot, and each ward has a portion of it to plant vegetables. So now that it’s time to be harvesting from our gardens, every Saturday morning there is a farmers market at our stake center. We were a bit late this morning but there was still plenty of squash to be had, and since Kyle and the kids hadn’t seen where our ward’s plot is I took them over and showed it to them. I had been there before, for an enrichment mini-class where we planted the garden. Things are looking ok at the garden. Some plants aren’t doing so well, others are doing just fine. Nobody went back and thinned the carrots so they are mostly small and some of them are looking funny, but the kids say they taste good. 🙂 The kids were excited to see our ward’s and they were excited to taste some of the fresh peas growing there. And they were excited to see how carrots grow too.

The carrots and peas are from our wards garden, the rest is from the farmers market this morning.

(There is another picture in the photo gallery that shows a rather large zucchini that we harvested from our ward’s garden too.)

Stargazing

Last night was the final day to catch some of the meteor shower from the annual Perseid shower. I heard about it on the radio and went out the night before to watch for it, but I didn’t know what to look for. So I decided to make more of a date of it with Rebecca, and after the kids went to bed, I grabbed some blankets and went out to our back yard, and we simply laid down on the blanket in our dark yard, and watched up in the sky. The weather was really nice for it; there was a slight breeze, but it was relatively warm for 11:00 at night. Only a few of our neighbours left their porch lights on, so it was pretty dark.

When we first watched the sky, Rebecca pointed out the hazy area, which I explained was the Milky Way. I’m more used to staring at the stars than she is, since I go out at nights and walk Chewy. Then we looked around at the stars and realised that we didn’t know enough about the constellations to really appreciate those thousand points of sparkling light. We saw our first shooting star (how exciting) and watched the stars, taking advantage of a chance to talk a bit as well.

Rebecca saw 17 different meteors, of which I saw around 12 of them (what can I say, between star-gazing and Rebecca-gazing, I wasn’t always looking up) but I saw two that she didn’t see, so all within around 40 minutes, we saw 19 of them. It was really fun!

Chloe’s Growing :)

Well I’m happy to report that Chloe is growing. After a couple of weight checks in the first few weeks we discovered that breastfeeding just wasn’t enough, 🙁 so now we are supplementing with formula and she’s growing. I’m just glad we discovered the problem before she was ‘starving to death’ (as in the case with Dinah). So Chloe had her 2 month check-up on Monday and she weighs 8 lbs 3 oz now (exactly what Ethan weighed when he was born!) It’s wierd to look at Chloe and think “you’re as big as Ethan was when he was born, and you’re two months old.” She has also graduated to size 1 diapers. 🙂 My mom and Kyle both felt like the upgrade in diaper size could have happened about a week or so ago, but I insisted on her using the rest of the newborn diapers in the open pack (like I need a bunch of random newborn diapers hanging around). SO she used the last newborn diaper and I got to open up a pack of size ones. 🙂 They grow up so fast.

Surprise

Kyle and I have been working on something for my family since before we found out we were pregnant with Chloe. I had hoped that we would have it ready to be able to give it to them for Christmas, but alas, that’s not what happened. We kept hitting road block after road block. We would fix the problem at hand then we would hit another wall, and wouldn’t make any progress for awhile. Then Kyle had a buddy from work do it for us, and it came back just awful. I was just in tears when I saw his buddy’s finished product. Well after many late nights and lots of frustration with trying to figure things out I am so excited that I got to reveal what we have been working on to my family while they are here.

Surprise! I am pleased to announce “The New Family Home Video” on dvd for the first time EVER!

The box actually looks better in person. We have tried hard, for a long time now to make this project look as professional as possible. With Kyle doing the graphic design and the computer side of it, and me coming up with the ideas of how it should look, and I told Kyle which pictures I wanted to include and I got to oversee everything. I wanted it to be perfect (or as perfect as we could get it) so that it would be cherished by my parents, my brothers and sisters, and my grandparent for a very long time.

When I was announcing to my family that Kyle and I had been working on something for a really long time for all of them, both my dad and Jennifer asked me if I was pregnant again. NO! I am not pregnant again, I just got done being pregnant. But then I whipped the stack of DVD boxes out and started passing them out, and my dad cried, just looking at the box. He so very rarely shows his true emotions that to get him by surprise and have his true emotions surface like that, was so special.

SO! Now it’s time to work on the next tape. I hope we remember what we did to make this one turn out good……

Chloe’s blessing

We had Chloe’s baby blessing at church today. That’s the main reason my family is visiting right now. Chloe is so beautiful in her blessing dress.

In addition to my family coming up from California, Liesl & Ian came up too. Roine brought his kids out for the blessing. Karen came with her good friends the Hasenjagers (who actually are from my home stake in California). My mom’s good friend Joyce came over from the Ranches. And Debby brought her fiance, Jeff out for the blessing.

Chloe’s was the first of 4 baby blessings (3 of which were baby girls), and then there was a confirmation. So after that and all the announcements and business there wasn’t much time left over for testimonies. After Sunday school & Relief Society/Priesthood, we came home and had a nice lunch of deli meats and some yummy watermelon, and I made 4 quarts of blueberry ice cream and 4 quarts of banana ice cream for dessert. Yumm. It was so nice to get together and and have our family and good friends with us for the afternoon.