August 2011 – Page 3 – Andelin Adventures

Family Adventure

Thanksgiving Point is doing their $2 Tuesdays special again this August, and Kyle decided he would take a Tuesday off from work so we could all go. But I was feeling like we should do something else. Something we hadn’t done before. Last time we went to Farm Country and the Museum of Ancient life at Thanksgiving Point, Chloe was just a couple months old, and now Lydia is just a few months old. Personally, I’m thinking that maybe we should go back next year or something when Lydia is a bit older too. I still wanted to go do something with my family since Kyle had the day off. 🙂

I had a dentist appointment first thing this morning, which meant that my face was hurting all day. 🙁 But we decided to load all the kids up in the car and see if we could go somewhere to look for birds, so we could work on some of the bird electives in Ethan’s scout book. So Kyle decided to drive into Provo Canyon, and we stopped to take a short easy hike to the base of Bridal Veil Falls.

The falls were beautiful. And the roaring sound of the water, in the river rushing by, was loud.

It was crazy to see that people had climbed all the way up to stand at the top of the falls. And there was another group partway up. Personally I’m content to stand and the bottom and just look at the pretty waterfall. 🙂

We actually only saw two birds while we were there. We heard some chirping in the trees, but didn’t see any of them.

Kyle decided he wanted to take the kids to drive around the BYU campus. Some of them just weren’t understanding that BYU is a school for adults. It was rather funny and frustrating (hey remember that my face was hurting) trying to explain it so they could understand.

Then we were on our way back into Orem, going nowhere in particular and Kyle remembered spur of the moment that he had a gift card for Red Lobster. So we went there for dinner. 🙂 Funny that we go to this nice fancy restaurant and most of the kids ordered mac & cheese. But most of them actually finished their food too, so I guess I can’t really complain about that. 🙂 After dinner we decided to go over to the mall to get some dessert: See’s BABY! Kyle ran into the mall by himself to go to See’s to get us some chocolate, and he decided to go to the candy barrel and get rock candy for the kids dessert. While we sat in the parking lot waiting for him, I saw some birds so I pointed them out to Ethan and we started looking for others.

We saw sparrows, and seagulls while we were waiting for Kyle. Then I remembered that there was a pond by Blue Host (where Kyle used to work) and ducks were frequently in that pond. So we decided to head back down to Provo to go see what ducks and what other birds we could see down there. We saw some black ducks in the pond and some geese. I’m not sure what kinds of ducks and geese they are, but that’s ok. Then we saw some black birds and as we were heading back to the freeway I spotted a small flock of quail in a parking lot. So Kyle slowed down and we pulled over so the kids could see them too, and there was a HUGE flock of them on the grass on the side of the building.

It’s been a bit of an adventure. We didn’t have anything planned really and we really did drive back and forth going all over town to see what we got to see today, but that’s ok. It was all spontaneous and we got to spend the day together going on a drive to wherever we felt we wanted to go. 🙂

Mooching from Mommy

The kids had been put to bed. Some of them had actually fallen asleep too. And I decided to come out to the living room and have some ice cream before going to bed myself. Little did I know that Chloe was one of the kiddos still awake and she doesn’t like to ask for a bite, she just came out and tried to take one:

At least in this one she is waiting for me to put the ice cream in her mouth:

Little Helpers

Every month home depot has a workshop for kids where they get to make a project from start to finish. We’ve never actually been for one reason or another, but this morning we remembered about it ahead of time and planned on it. So Kyle took Ethan, Tyra and Jeremy and they each got to make a pencil box. At home depot they were also each given an orange home depot apron, to help protect their clothes while they were working on their projects. And they got a pin to represent their project to pin on their apron, and when they finished they received certificates for a free kids meal at Del Taco. They had LOADS of fun, and they have been carrying their pencil boxes, and the skateboard toys that they got in their kids meals around all day today.

This afternoon Kyle was putting together a new video cabinet so we can lock away the rest of the movies so little hands don’t hurt them. I was working on cleaning the kitchen and rearanging stuff in the storage room, but at one point I turned around and saw that Kyle had a bunch of little helpers in orange aprons:

I thought that was just so cute. 🙂

Golden Apricots

A couple weeks ago, Kyle’s mom called to say that there were apricots on her tree and they were ‘very ripe’. I told her that I would talk to Kyle about when we could get over there and have him call her back when he got home. Well we decided that if they were very ripe we had better get over there the very next day, but when Kyle called his mom back and said we could come ‘tomorrow’ she said that she had plans. He reminded her that she said they were very ripe, and she said ‘not that ripe’ then she said she would go out and check and call us back. She called back and said they would be ripe maybe by the weekend. Saturday we had plans so we decided to go pick the apricots on Friday.

I brought several buckets, all ready to get to work, but when I got outside and saw the tree, I saw that MOST of the apricots were still rather green. I know that the ripest fruit is always at the very top of the tree, because that’s the fruit that the sun can kiss, but really the majority of the apricots were GREEN. We decided that since we were there that I would climb up in the tree and we would pick the ripest fruit and maybe thin out the green fruit a bit so that the rest of the tree could finish ripening, and then we would be back the next week to finish.

Last week we went and finished picking the apricots. I asked Kyle if the 3 buckets that I had brought the last week would be enough or if I needed to hunt down some more buckets. He said he thought the 3 buckets would be plenty. I thought he was crazy and found a fourth bucket just in case. We picked the apricots and FILLED all of our buckets and there was still tons of fruit on the tree. Kyle asked his mom if she had any boxes lying around that we could use, and she gave him a long, wide shallow box and then another box comparable to the size of the buckets that I brought. We filled those in no time and still left a whole bunch of not quite ripe apricots on the tree. We left the shallow box of apricots for his mom, and came home to get to work on these apricots.

Kyle decided to weigh the apricots. I tried that last year by putting a bunch in my food scale and writing down the number, until I had weighed them all then I added up all the numbers to get the final weight. But then I realized that that wasn’t very accurate since if I put too much fruit in the scale it wouldn’t register it because it only recognized the weight up to a certain limit….Anyways Kyle decided to just bring out our people scale and put each bucket on it in turn to get a general idea of how much fruit we brought home. In the end it was about 150 lbs. And I realize that may not be quite accurate, since we weighed the buckets too, and a couple of the buckets didn’t sit on the scale right so I had to weigh myself holding the bucket, then subtract the weight of just me to find out how much the bucket weighed. But a hundred and fifty pounds a fruit is still a LOT. I have spent all week canning, freezing and drying the fruit and I’m finally DONE.

I made apricot halves in light syrup for serving with dinner. I made apricot pie filling for serving on crepes. I wish it had turned out a little thicker though, I’ll have to try again next time I get a whole bunch of apricots. Kyle made apricot crem (apricot puree). He likes to pour this on top of ice cream, but I’m thinking I can just open up a jar add a little sugar to taste and then turn it into fruit leather in the dehydrator later. 😉 I made apricot syrup to pour on pancakes, and apricot jam.

I froze enough apricot pieces to fill 2 gallon size bags, for smoothies later. I made apricot ice cream and apricot sorbet. I dehydrated enough apricots to fill a quart size bag, but Kyle and the kids ate about half of them before I took this picture. And I made several rolls of fruit leather (and I have another 2 rolls in the dehydrator right now). I don’t think we are going to get back to pick the rest of the apricots that we left on the tree, but that’s ok because we have PLENTY of goodies from last weeks pickings. 🙂

My New Toy

I have been working on preserving a whole bunch of apricots that we picked off Kyle’s mom’s tree (around 150lbs worth), and in addition to canning and freezing the apricots I dried to dehydrate some as well. But the dehydrator that I had just wasn’t doing the job. It was an old dehydrator that we got from Kyle’s Nana years ago. It has a heating element at the bottom, but no fan and there are no switches on it, it’s just either plugged in and on or it’s not. But since it didn’t have a fan to blow the heat around, and since the heating element was at the bottom, only the bottom tray of fruit was having any changes. I had it on for about a day and a half and none of the apricots were anywhere near done, so I decided that we just needed to get a nice new dehydrator. And since I was going to go out and spend money on one, I wanted one with a fan AND temperature controls. This is what I got:

Nice huh? It came with 4 trays, and one fruit roll sheet for making jerky or fruit leather. I already had one fruit roll sheet that went with the other dehydrator but it fits in this one too, so I can make two fruit leathers at a time. This dehydrator works SO much better than the other one we had, and it’s lots faster. I just love it! 🙂