Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Rotella's Bakery


Today we had the pleasure of touring Rotella's Bakery. The only one in the nation!

Once we all got our hairnets on we headed into the tour with about 20-25 other homeschoolers.
They wouldn't let us take pictures inside so I will leave that to your imagination. They had HUGE mixing bowls that held 1600 pounds of dough...you should have seen the dough hooks that thing had: ) They went through aprox. 3,000,000,000 pounds of flour in only one week!


Some fun bits of info;


- Rotella's Bakery caters and sells bread to all 50 states, Canada and they send bread to Iraq for all the troops.

-The oven that they used was 110 feet long, 25 feet wide and held about 3000 loaves of bread at one time...not to mention that they had four ovens.

-Their employee's love working there because, not only have they never "let someone go" in the history of the bakery (which started in 1921), but they also have individual air conditioners throughout the summer (it generally reaches 110˚-115˚in the summer).
The reason for that is, that it is way too expensive to air condition the whole building with all the ovens giving off continual heat.

It was a pretty amazing place!!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Brave Boy

Several weeks ago Steve brought an interesting tooth to mom's attention. It was...how shall we put it..a strange color, and starting to rot away. After a couple weeks of vainly trying to loosen it enough to pull it out, mom and dad decided to schedule an appointment with the Dentist. Much to Stephen's dismay the dreaded day finally arrived!

He soberly waited his turn...

The Dentist doing his job

It's done!!!
To Steve's great delight the procedure was practically painless...afterwards on the way home mom asked "so did the needle hurt when he numbed you"...his reply "what needle"?

Phillip

Happy 14th Birthday Phillip!


A couple bits of info...

- The warmness of our house is largely due to Phillip's diligence in chopping and hauling wood!
-He has fully taken over the dog boarding business when Dan moved away
-Faithful diligence and dependibility in his jobs has earned him the title "Faithful Phillip" from mom


To celebrate his birthday he had quite a few buddy's over to play snow football...brrr..



Happy Birthday Phillip, it's a joy having you in our lives!

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Family Christmas

This was the first Christmas where Grandma & Grandpa didn't come down from MN, like they always have. None of dad's siblings came either so we thoroughly enjoyed celebrating Christmas with our immediate family.


Reading the Christmas story


After singing a few songs, daddy announced that it was time to "rehash" the past and get out all our instruments...so amidst the billows of dust and honking we finally got everyone in tune...Caleb "conveniently" forgot his clarinet so he subbed in on the Recorder
Josh and Dan....
(I think Josh wishes he would have taken his trumpet with him so he could have "forgot" to bring it)
Alaina played the flute and mom and Abby sang and we complied a very interesting version of "Silent Night"
The result....Elise says it well: )
The rest of us tried to be optimistic but 2 trumpets, 1 clarinet, 1 flute, a recorder all of which hadn't been played in a long time...


It didn't take long for Elise, in the arms of her Uncle,
to become cheerful once again: )

Then we moved onto the gift opening part of the evening....


Elise loved her new swing




What a wonderful time of year to come together to celebrate Jesus coming into the world!

"For unto us a child is born..."