Lunch dilema

Every morning I deal with the struggle of finding something for my kids to take to school for lunch. I’m always looking for new ideas because having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich EVERY day, gets old fast. I mean, that’s what my mom used to send me to school with and I NEVER want to eat another peanut butter and jelly sandwich again. But I am getting really sick of sending my kids with a lunch, only to find that they didn’t eat it. Sometimes I don’t find it until much later and it’s a really nasty old lunch in a baggie at the bottom of their backpack or under a pile of their backpacks and jackets on the floor of the entry way. That is just extremely nasty. But here is another problem, if I don’t send my kids to school with a lunch, the school feeds them and then sends me a bill! Now we really can’t afford to be doing school lunch every day. A school lunch costs $1.75, and I’ve got three kids in school during lunch time. That’s $5.25 to get them all a school lunch for a day. $26.25 for a week. $105 per month. That’s a lot of money! But it’s just wasteful to send them with food that they are just going to try to hide from me because they didn’t eat it. So I’ve had some people suggest that I have my kids make their own lunches. I do like that idea. However, I think I need to go grocery shopping before I can start that so they actually have something to put in their lunches. 🙂 Then we will give it a try and see how it goes.

Bear Cub Ethan

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Ethan received his bear rank and his religious square knot tonight. The pack actually hasn’t passed out any awards for awhile, so in addition to the bear and square knot he also received his bicycling, fishing, art, map and compass and ultimate belt loops. He also received one gold and two silver arrows. So he had a pile of things to bring home for me to put on his uniform.

After the meeting, one of his leaders congratulated me and said “Yay! You’re all finished. You got him through.” What she doesn’t realize is that I don’t see us as all finished with scouting. We are just beginning. And the way I see it, Ethan still has LOTS of things to earn as a bear. He can earn more arrows, more belt loops, pins, the outdoor activity award, the leave no trace award and the world conservation award. So we will just have to keep working hard and see how far he can go. 🙂

The Creation of Snakes

Ethan had to write a story about one of Heavenly Father’s creations as one of his requirements to earn the cub scout religious square knot. This is what he wrote:

The Creation of Snakes

By Ethan Andelin

“Hiss,” said a snake one day. “Hiss!” it said again. “HISS!!” it screamed. A bunch of snakes came from hunting. Snakes are oviously awesome. I realy, realy love snakes. The snakes ate thear dilisiose dinner of, frogs and tuna fish at the pond. The End.

Brigham City Temple Dedication

Growing up in the Church, we would make the occasional drive down to the Los Angeles Temple and explore the grounds, including rolling down the steep grassy slope out front. Then, I remember when the San Diego Temple open house happened, and we had to dress up and drive down there to visit and actually walk through a temple. That felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was very beautiful inside and almost surreal.

On my mission, I got to have it as a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as the Manchester Temple open house happened whilst we were there, and our entire mission got permission to hop on buses and drive up to the temple for the day. Again, it was beautiful inside and much different from the limited number of temples I have been in.

Living in Utah, we have temples all over. It’s been really cool when we drove up to Yellowstone, as we passed a large number of temples (Mt Timpanogos, Jordan River, Draper, Oquirrh Mt, Salt Lake, Bountiful, Ogden, and some up in Idaho as well.) The Brigham City temple was under construction, but we still got out and walked around the area for about an hour.

Now, we had a chance to attend the dedication as the church was broadcasting it to local buildings. Even better, they allowed kids eight and up to attend, if they could get an interview to get a recommend. Since Ethan and Tyra were both over eight, they were able to get theirs and attend their very first temple dedication with me. They were really good at sitting through the talks, and both got to enjoy the overall experience.