Eating Healthy or Well?

Aliece came home from school today. Upon asking her what she learned in class, she exclaimed that they learned about eating good food. She ran to her back pack to pull out a poster that they made in class. As she was bringing it over, she explained that they were supposed to cut out things that represented good food.

I responded, "So you learned how to eat healthy things?" Amber responded, "No, I think Aliece was thinking about 'Good' things to eat."

Aliece opened her poster...

Notice her title is indeed, "I like to eat good food".

I wonder what her grade was on the poster?

BYU Video of President Hinckley

Amber came across this cool video regarding President Hinckley. It was created by BYU. There are two versions:

Low Resolution

and

High Resolution

Brad

Just wanted to let everyone know that Brad turned 14 on the 24th and Kyle ordained him a teacher on Sunday! He is growing so fast! Congrats Brad!

School

I would blame this on a school project...but I can't. This is Brad!

My Little Man!

Isn't Joey just the cutest?!!
I know he is...hehe!

Joey's First Day of School

I have to admit, it has really been a long time since I have been able to sit down and blog! I have really missed it! I am going to try to get caught up some tonight.

Joey started pre-school on his 3rd Birthday (Jan 22). I had a really hard time with this. And I thought he would also. He started his morning screaming, but by time we got to the school he was so excited. He ran in, said "bye mom" and that was that. Let's just say I drove all the way to work bawling! His teacher called me at work after school that day and wanted to know if Joey went to primary or not. I had to ask why first, to see if I was in trouble...haha. She said that every time they had to walk somewhere he would walk with his arms folded like he was walking to his primary class. I thought that was really neat. I am trying to adjust to Joey going to school. It has been easier with me working, than I think it would've been with me at home. He gets on the bus at 7am and gets dropped off at daycare at 11:45 four days a week. This is hard for me to imagine because the poor kid rides the bus for an hour each way. His pre-school and Jenna's are in different school districts (different cities too). They are about 20 miles apart. Jenna is 2 years ahead of him, and she only goes to school 3 days a week from 9:30 to noon.

Farewell, President Hinckley

Last night I went to my Missionary Correlation meeting about 8:20pm and walking in to the foyer of the church. President Packer's son is one of our ward mission leaders. He was on the phone when I got in there. When he got off, he asked if I had heard the news. I said I had not. He then told me that President Hinckley had passed away the previous hour.

I figured I had inside information on the situation because of Brother Packer's family connections, but while we were speaking, some members of my ward walked by from attending a "New Beginnings" event and asked us if we had heard.

I guess while I was at the meeting, about the same time, Amber's parents called to tell her. I can't believe how fast the news flies.

President Hinckley will definitely be missed by all. We told the kids this morning and then mentioned that he is the only Prophet they have had in their lifetime.

You've Got Mail!

Yesterday, Aylee helped Alayna make her very own mailbox out of yellow paper. Amber said that Alayna kept checking her personal mailbox all day long for some mail.

This morning, Amber drew a quick little picture and wrote an "I love Alayna" note and put it in her mailbox.

Needless to say, Alayna was pretty darn excited!

25 Below zero

25 Below

I know this picture looks a lot like the last picture I sent, but it is
different. This is a sunny day, the other was a blizzard.
Same picture, different weather.


Hello everyone,
Just wanted to let you know how things are going here.
Tues. morning we woke up to a whopping 25 BELOW ZERO.
Wow it was cold.
It has always been so interesting to me that after a rip roaring blizzard, the sun would shine brilliantly. That is what happened in this case as well. After the -25, it warmed up, well maybe 15 - 20 degrees but, it was the most beautiful day. The sun shone as if it were 70 degrees.
This morning it was only 18 below.
Yesterday Lynn, Ken Campbell & Stew Adams loaded up their horse trailers with our calves & hauled them off to Blackfoot to a buyer we have been working with there.
The steers averaged 800 lbs. & the heifers 750 lbs. We did pretty good.
The buyer dropped down the price per pound, but you still make more because they weigh more. ?We're HAPPY.
We love you all. MOM

This was about Tuesday's storm, It goes before the blog on the flying roof.



All last week we had one blizzard after another. I never made it to town once.
Yesterday was finally a beautiful day and I got to town and got some groceries.
Early this morning we woke up to another blizzard. A good old west blizzard.
They called school off here in the valley and the Malad bus was stuck up on Shawn's lane so I guess they had school off also. they have called the marriage class off once again for tonight.
2nd Tuesday in a row. I guess it's more important for us married couples to stay home, snowed in together where neither of us can get away from the other...
There was a break in the wind and I went out and took a picture. Should have taken a picture earlier today.
The break didn't last long, but all is well.

FLYING ROOF

Flying Roof

I snapped a picture of Lynn as he came by carrying the roof of the well house.
It had blown off during our west blizzard on Tuesday.
I'm glad that I wasn't out in that storm as it blew by.

Once there was a Snowman

This morning we woke up to about three or four inches of snow. By the end of the day we had about six new inches of snow blanketing our neighborhood.

Amber and Alayna took advantage of the snow and the absence of the older kids by tumbling in the snow and making a Snowman. They decorated it all nice and fancy.

Alayna says the snowman has "hugging arms".

When I drove home for lunch, I was greeted by Mr. Snowman. It was a fun sight to see.

The 43,800 Hour Kit

For the last little while Amber has been begging me to work with her on updating our 72-hour kit. It didn't seem like a long time ago since we last did the kits, so, since I have had school, I have kept putting her off.

However, with my Christmas break from school, and also with a disaster experience from my friends, the Moss family (see: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, & Aftermath blog entries from moss-grove.blogspot.com) I relented and we worked on our food storage this week.

Well, when we dove into the dusty old suit cases that contained our disaster supplies, we found some very interesting things. First of all, where I thought we had recently updated our kits, I realized that time flies faster that I expected. Everything in the kit had expiration dates of 2005, 2006, and some lucky items expired early 2007. Our fruit cups had brown fruit in a milky juice. The fruit snacks were as hard (and about as large) as popcorn kernels. The cup of noodles were pretty tasteless and bland. Although they had expired a year earlier, I made the kids eat them for lunch thinking that dried cup of noodles didn't really go bad. Note to self, cup of noodles do go bad. The kids and I couldn't stomach the aged noodly lunch and so our sink got piled up with five containers of Lipton Cup O' Noodle Soup.


My favorite find in the 72 hour kit was a decayed and petrified (another sign of the age of the kits) mouse corpse halfway inside a chewed up bag of now-hardened moldy Jerky. (Note: this is a doctored picture as I couldn't get Amber to hold the real bag for the camera!)

The emergency candle we packed had melted all over the bag that it was stored in. There were even some items for which we couldn't remember their purpose - like a baggy full of bullion cubes.

I really can't imagine what are faces would have looked like if we truly had an emergency and we grabbed our 72 hour kits and went to a refuge with the children. Hungry and thirsty from trekking over flooded roads or broken power poles, we would sit down and open our bags for our first emergency meal to find...THAT. Hmm...pretty sobering.

We only had two 2-liter bottles of water in the kit. That would hardly sustain 7 people - let alone hydrate our 200 calorie cups of noodles and our 20 packages of hot cocoa mix. (I still have no clue what we would have prepared and consumed our hot-cocoa with as there were no cups or containers for the drink).

One comforting thing is that we would had plenty of candy as we had 15 large king-sized Spree Candy sticks and a baggie full of hard candy - that never goes bad!