Feed My Starving Children

Kieran's faith formation class (and all the ages above him) went to Feed My Starving Children a few days ago to pack food that would be sent around the world.  It's a pretty cool place with a great mission, volunteers pack food that gets sent to many countries and put in the hands of people who need it.  I had done this a few times back when I taught in Fridley, this was Kieran's first time...it's actually a lot of fun.

You start with about 20 minutes of a background - that night they told the story (with pictures) of a nine year old boy in Africa who initially weighed 19 pounds.  After seven months of eating the food delivered by FMSC, he weighed 73 pounds...that story really got Kieran thinking....

The first requirement...you need to wear hairnets...which Kieran wasn't quite fond of at the beginning...

After the introduction, you get packing food for about an hour.  Vitamins, veggies, soy and rice are packed in a bag that is easily cooked at the destination.  Everyone has their own job.  Kieran's was to add the vitamins and veggies...

To Kieran's right Dar, a close friend of my mother's who also works at our local bank in Norwood.  She's always been great with the kids when we see her so Kieran wasn't concerned a bit about working by some strange adult.  The other two at our station where Dar's daughter and granddaughter.

My role was pretty simple...seal the bags after the other four packed them (and someone else boxed the completed bags up).  I wasn't too stressed...

The goal is to prevent as many spills as possible...we weren't too good at that (I even spilled one that was handed to me because I wasn't paying attention)...

After an hour of packing food, you get back together in the meeting area and get to sample the food being sent overseas.  They also tell you how many boxes of food were packed in that one hour.  In our case, it was 87 boxes which totals 18,792 meals.  Or put another way, in one hour, our everyone in our group boxed enough food to completely feed 51 kids for a year...not bad.

If you ever get the chance to volunteer at FMSC, do it...it's cool.  Or don't wait for a large group to volunteer...do it yourself or as a family, you'll have fun doing something good....

Science Museum

January 2nd, we went to the Science Museum again, which is always fun.  We're members at the museum again.  Our first membership was courtesy of Missy & Pete and this new membership is courtesy of Papa.  It's pretty cool, considering we'll go to the museum 4-5 times throughout the year and the kids always have fun....especially Luke (who loves the dinosaurs and fossils).

We did a lot things that we've always done, but some new things as well.  I don't remember any of the kids looking at and manipulating the T-Rex jaw, but they had fun that day...

Learned about an ocean that used to occupy our part of Minnesota...it was a long time ago...

But basically he just want to see the fossils...these are found in rocks deposited in that earlier ocean...

Several of us got our blood pressure and heart beat checked...Sarah's was by far the lowest...

We spent more time at the human body section that we have before....here the kids are looking through goggles that represent the vision of a baby at different time periods...basically, babies can't see well...

We looked through microscopes at things like bacteria, leeches, ticks, worms, fungi and other things that can be found living on or in a human body...

There were some pretty cool holograms of body parts (like brain, heart, etc.) that looked 3-D and rotated and cut-away as you moved...here the boys are trying to touch the hologram of the brain...

Here's the hologram of the heart...a picture doesn't do it justice...

Yes...we saw dinosaurs...like the Triceratops...

But we also played with the tornado again...

And played a game that demonstrates why antibiotics only work on bacteria and not viruses...

And we saw the Stegosaurus...

And the Glyptodont...a big armored mammal that lived during the Pleistocene (the most recent ice ages)...

We finished the day at the IMAX watching a movie on Humpback Whales...which everyone enjoyed...

It was a good day...

Luke & the Refrigerator

Maybe it was because we had been to the Science Museum earlier (pictures later), where you are to learn and discover new things.  Or maybe it was just Luke being Luke...but after dinner last night Luke set out to answer the question that many have wondered...what happens to the light in the refrigerator when you shut the door?

The rest of us were still eating when we saw Lukie doing this....light off...

Light on...

Light off...

Eventually, he figured out how the light switch is turned on and off...solving the problem...

Happy New Year

How do you ring in the new year?  We went sledding this afternoon for a couple of hours before the kids rested up (they're getting dropped off at Papas house tonight for a sleepover...good luck papa...).  These aren't the best pictures and I only had the phone out for a couple of runs, but oh well...

See...they actually do get along with each other sometimes...

Lex just giggles the whole way down the hill...doesn't matter if she falls out or not...

Kieran and Luke actually prefer to fall out...though with the three of them they had enough weight to go a long ways.  We went a couple of times with all four of us crammed onto that sled...we went a long ways...

There were a few people in the neighboring houses watching us...be interesting to see how many would watch after 4:00 or the work day...

Luke does sometimes take care of her...though he did push her off the sled a few times too...

Kieran prefers to be on his own though, this time pretending to be sleeping...

Downside of sledding is it can be a long walk back up the hill...

Lex did fall a few times and took a good shot to the eye once or twice.  We'll see if she gets any color with this one...

Thanks for bearing with this extra post...it finishes the year with 70 posts (nice, even number)...averaging one every 5-6 days or so.

Happy New Years to you all and good luck in 2016....I know 2016 is shaping up to be pretty interesting for us...

Frozen Minnehaha Falls

We went to Minnehaha Falls yesterday, it had been a while since we were there last (maybe April?).  We like being outside and active...waterfalls are bonus...

Being below freezing, the gorge really does a nice job showing groundwater movement.  The bedrock is comprised of sandstone, shale and limestone.  The limestone is the top layer, the waterfall forming rock, while the sandstone is the easily eroded bottom layer.  In between is a layer of shale, essentially impermeable clay.  As water soaks down from the surface, it encounters the shale and moves horizontally until falling out in the gorge.  Looking closely, you can see the icicles showing the upper limits of the shale...

Here's a picture from the bridge above the falls looking down into the gorge...all that color in the creek are coins people have thrown in...Luke wanted to go get them...

We walked all over the falls area, but not down into the gorge...the stairs were pretty icy and Lex would've had a hard time...

Upstream of the falls, the kids had more fun knocking snow off the rails...especially Lex...

Of course we had to take a selfie...

Lex felt left out, so we had to take another....not that they're any good...

Before we left, Lukie wanted one just with me, so we snuck away from Kieran and Lex for a quick minute...

Minnehaha is a pretty cool place to visit...all for $1 parking...

Quinzee

While we didn't get a lot of snow before Christmas, a couple of storms have come through leaving us with about 8 inches (just guessing here) of snow.  A perfect amount to make a quinzee...maybe we'd use it to sleep one night or at the very least, the kids would have a snow fort or shelter outside to use...

The first step is to pile up a lot of snow...large areas of the back yard currently look like it hasn't snowed...

The second step is to pack all that snow down...that's where the boys came in...I piled it up and they packed it down...Kieran complained that it was too hard to get to the top of the pile...

Luke...I just threw him up to the top so he could get to work...

After the pile was ready, we would've take sticks (10-15 inches long) and placed them all over the pile to give us a gauge on where the outside of the walls were when we dug it out...to bad the boys made the sticks 2-4 inches long...anyway...we were ready to let it sit for a couple of hours before the dig...

We were digging blind basically, but it worked out...

Lex came out at the end to reap the reward of having a snow shelter....

The air hole sure is nice, brings some nice cool air inside the quinzee...it gets pretty warm inside...

I did make one big mistake with it...when it was all dug out, I was adding more snow to the outside and top of the quinzee and accidentally broke through (the spot directly above Lex's head).  I patched it with a big chunk of snow and added loose snow all around the hole, figure it'll all come together and seal itself...at least that's the hope.

It's big...all four of us can lay down comfortably inside of the quinzee...we'll see what we do with it...

Christmas

 The second year in a row we had no snow on Christmas day....for the second year in a row, we had lots of snow on December 26...the top picture is Christmas and the bottom is 7:00 am on December 26...

Oh well...winter starts on Christmas I guess...here's the kids on Christmas Eve...

And just Lex...because she likes pictures of herself...

Christmas morning was interesting as it usually is...the boys are thrilled that they got a Playstation 4...it's been on pretty much every waking hour we've been home...

The really smiled once they figured out what it was...

Lex was happy with whatever...this case it was a scooter...

Look at last year's post about Christmas...see...no snow then either....