Our Family – Page 26 – Andelin Adventures

Dinah’s Lost Tooth

Dinah literally lost her tooth tonight. We were downstairs watching the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Danny Kaye, and Dinah kept fiddling with her tooth. Kyle and I kept telling her to stop messing with it, since it was dark and we were watching a movie and we didn’t want her to pull it out until we were back upstairs and getting ready to go to bed. She didn’t listen, and popped it out, and then she dropped it. We spent quite a bit of time after the movie was over searching the room for the missing tooth, but we didn’t find it. Now Dinah is one very sad little girl. We know she popped it out because she was excited about having the tooth fairy leave her a dollar, but now she has no tooth to leave under her pillow because she didn’t wait until after the movie to pull it out like we asked her to. 🙁

World Thinking Day

Today I got to go with the girls to world thinking day. Our troop learned about Lichtenstein this year.

I feel silly that I didn’t even notice that the girls had misspelled Lichtenstein on our troop poster, until I was looking at these pictures.

The girls got to paint masks at Australia, make flowers at Mexico, go fishing at Canada, and make teacups at England. They also got to eat pretzels at Germany, and dreikoenigskuchen (three kings cake) at Lichtenstein, and drink horchata at Mexico.

I love this picture of the girls in a friendship circle with the banner of flags in the background.

Topaz Mountain

Today we went on an adventure to Topaz Mountain. We drove quite a way to get there, and ended up needing to do some backtracking and circling around to try to find it because the GPS was giving us directions that weren’t quite accurate, then we noticed signs on the road pointing in another direction.

It was quite windy when we got there. I think the weather would have been plenty warm enough if the wind would have only stopped blowing. I ended up keeping Seth in the van the whole time. We had a picnic lunch in the van before we let the kids out to explore (we figured we would make them eat before they went out and got all dirty).

Adam heard that he was supposed to get out and go try to find some rocks. He didn’t realize we were talking about small yellow rocks. He was so excited to find this big rock:

The rock was surprisingly light for its size, but that is because it is volcanic rock.

I think the kids found it difficult to sit down and focus on searching one place for some topaz. They spend most of their time wandering around and searching the surface instead of digging. Which means we didn’t really find anything.

These last few pictures I took from the comfort of the van, while I fed Seth. I love that I have a mega lens that I can put on my camera to capture things close up despite their being so far away from me. 🙂

The kids didn’t want to explore very long because it was so windy, so we decided that we would get going, but we decided that we would have to come back when the weather is a little warmer.

Hanging with Cousins

We had dinner at cousin’s house tonight and while we were there, all the kids disappeared. Laurel went downstairs to check up on them and found most of them all lined up thoroughly engrossed in watching Pippi Longstocking.

State Capitol Building

Ethan is working on the Citizenship in the Nation merit badge for boy scouts and Tyra is working on the Inside Government badge for girl scouts so we thought we would go check out the Utah state capitol building and get a couple of requirements signed off. There weren’t any guided tours happening today, so we got to just walk around at our own pace. We decided to start on the top floor and work our way down from there.

The murals up around the dome show some of the history of the state of Utah.

Last we saw the exhibits they had on the main floor. The kids were really impressed with the replica of the Liberty bell.

I really liked the chunk of Bertrandite. It is that white rock with veins of purple going through it:

Getting a picture of all of the kids in front of the capitol building didn’t work so well. They were all complaining of the sun being in their faces, and none were willing to just open their eyes and look somewhere else long enough for me to get a decent picture.