2011 – Page 12 – Andelin Adventures

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! 🙂

Beautiful rain

Yesterday when church was over it was raining. Right after we got home and got everyone inside it started POURING!

I LOVE the rain. It’s so beautiful. It’s a nice break from hot weather. Rain waters my garden so I don’t have to. I love the pitter patter sound that rain makes on the roof (snow doesn’t make that sound so it’s just not as cool to me).

We got so much rain though, that the boys across the street from us were out jumping in the rain puddling in the street and it went up to at least their ankles. Later a friend shared a picture of what her end of the street looked like:

Ya, so like I said we got a LOT of rain. 🙂

Cub Scout Day Camp

Ethan got to go to his very first day camp for cub scouts, yesterday and today. He had so much fun. He got to make a small catapult and some blue slime and he got to whittle a bar of soap (he’s not advanced enough to whittle wood 😉 ), and he got to make a glooba:

It’s really a small bagpipe made with a latex glove and it has a deep sound like a tuba, so the boys decided to call it a glooba. Yesterday he got to participate in some archery, and today he learned about and practiced shooting a bb gun. He got to bring home his target paper that he had to shoot and it’s actually got a few holes in it. 🙂

He had loads of fun at his first camp and he is really loving being in scouts.

Bridging to Brownies

Tyra’s troop has finished daisies, and that means it’s time to cross the bridge to brownies! They had a little ceremony to celebrate, and each of the girls got to actually cross a bridge:

Here is her whole troop:

After all the girls crossed the bridge we had hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner, then the rain stopped and the kids got to go out and play with water balloons, and hit the pinata. Tyra has had lots of fun in girl scouts these past two years, and is really looking forward to being a brownie next year.

Check out all the patches for all the fun things Tyra did while she was in daisies:

Service

Yesterday at church a paper was passed around asking for help weeding the ward garden. So this morning when flipping through Ethan’s scout book and I saw that one of the requirements on the wolf trail was “Find out how you can help your church, synagogue, mosque, temple or religious fellowship” I decided that we could go spend an hour or so weeding the ward garden and then I could sign him off on that. So I took my mom, and Ethan and Tyra with me to the ward garden, leaving my dad to watch my other munchkins.

Great service opportunity. We’ll be back to weed some more in a few weeks since Kyle signed our family up to help with the weeding, so it was good to go today and show the older kids where our ward’s plot is and to teach them how to look for the weeds. 🙂