Airplane Birthday Cake Frosting Recipe

8oz. cream cheese, 3/4 cup powder sugar, beat with electric beaters until smooth and creamy. Add 8oz, cool whip and mix till you can't resist the urge to lick the beaters. (about 1 min. MAYBE LESS!)

Final Bottling Party

Today was the final bottling party for our ward. While these parties have been fantastic and these woman have worked miracles, it has still been a long process, long days and I'm grateful that they are done for this year's bottling season.

This particular bottling party was focused on grapes! There are several families in our ward that have grape vines and wanted to learn how to bottle grape juice. While 2 different processes were used the steamer was the more efficient process and seemed to process the quickest.

Here Michelle is explaining the way to prepare the grapes for process. A quick rinse/wash and strip the grapes from the vines and put them in the strainers.

(This is a grape...)

This was the first wave of women to arrive at the party and they were put straight to work getting the grapes ready. We had some more apples as well so a second table was set up to prepare apples for bottled slices and applesauce.

We ended up with 6 stoves fired up simultaneously to process the grape juice as quickly as possible. (It certainly goes much faster with 6 stoves instead of just one!)

Once the juice was ready they drained the juice put it in bottles. The did the applesauce and slices processing on different stoves at the same time. It still took until after 5:00 pm to finish the processing and clean up the bottling tools and stoves.


After the three bottling parties these woman bottled over 300 quarts of fruit:

Apple Sauce - 64.5 quarts
Apple Slices - 46.75 quarts
Pears - 83 quarts
Nectarines - 55 quarts
Peach Jam - 12.75 quarts
Plum Jam - 2 quarts
Grape Jam - 3.75 quarts
Grape Juice - 42 quarts
White Grape Juice - 9 quarts

Total: about 320 quarts (80 gallons)!

General Conference Weekend

We had a wonderful conference weekend. Our boys were spectacular, beyond our best hopes and dreams. I'm not sure exactly how we did it but our boys sat through 3 1/2 sessions of conference and were nearly quiet and reverent the entire time!

While the boys weren't in the mood for a nice picture (we tried about 5, this was the best one) you can see our elaborate scheme for ultimate concentration during each conference session. We used conference bingo! In front of each boy is a bingo card with various gospel topics in random placements. Since each boy got to use money it really helped to keep their attention. Last conference we tried cheerios and jelly beans the boys lost interest after they at all of the food. It's a little harder to swallow pennies.


We set it up where the boys would get a treat for the first two bingos and then they had to clear their cards and try for a blackout in order to get the next treat (which was virtually impossible!). The boys really wanted those treats so they paid attention and would catch even the mention of a gospel topic listed on their cards. Aleky wasn't really interested but none of the boys would play with him so he just hung out with the family.

It was like magic! The boys finally ran out of enthusiasm for conference bingo during the middle of the 5th session on Sunday afternoon! We couldn't have been happier or felt more blessed than to have our 4 young children pay attention to the entire 2 days of general conference! With our boys focused on conference Michelle and I were able to concentrate as well and felt that this was a wonderful and much needed spiritual recharge. The talks were amazing and truly inspired. We are grateful to all of the Lord's servants who participated in the conference and have blessed our lives.

One Step Closer to a Working Bathroom

We are making progress on our bathroom sink. Grandpa Petersen has completed the steel frame (designed to hold up to our boys vigorous activities). He's also added the front and side panels. He came down to install the frame in our bathroom so we could finish adding the tile to the top and install the sink.

The next step was to add the counter-top. The boys were very excited to help add weight so that the counter-top could be secured to the frame. They were very patient and I worked in that small space to screw the frame and the counter-top together.

The next step is to determine exactly where the sink goes, cut out the sink hole and then tile the counter-top.

Kids at the Bottling Party

Today we had another bottling party for our ward. While the ladies worked their magic processing the fruit the kids had a blast too. Frequently you could find the kids trying to help with the fruit preparation like Rachel and Sarah Simmons.

But most we found playing inside and out...mostly out. Here Aleky is following Eleanor Anderson up the ladder.

Donovan has discovered how to swing on his own power and is having a blast.

David loves anything that goes fast. Here he is simply unwinding from a hectic day.

Michael has decided that ladders are for the little kids. He must climb up by some other way.

Tennison Anderson is just happy to be here. What a great kid, hardly noticed he was here because he was so content.

Eleanor Anderson going down the slide on her own.

Bottling Party (part 2)

Today was yet another day for bottling the fruit collected from within the ward boundaries; the second of 3 scheduled bottling parties. By the end of today we estimated that we have bottled nearly 500 pounds of fruit that would otherwise have simply been wasted but is now preserved and ready to be used by happy families through out the coming year.

In preparing for today we were able to use 7 stoves and they would all be in use for the majority of the day.
We had about a dozen different people come to participate in the activity to help prepare, slice, dice and in all other ways get the fruit ready for bottling and processing.

Today's emphasis was on apples. We did apple sauce and apple slices in great abundance.

It was really quite the production. Fortunately we had the use of Dad Petersen's wall tent frame and tarp to provide some shade from the summer sun.

Around lunch time Saundra had prepared sandwiches for everyone who had been participating. I don't know how she made them but they were bagel dogs (hot dogs cooked inside of bagel doe. (I definitely need to get the recipe...for Michelle!)

We are certainly grateful to everyone who helped to process so much fruit and especially for the few who stayed to the bitter end (clean-up). We love to host these parties but sometimes the clean-up can really be a chore.

Fortunately we had enough help that we were done by 5:00 pm. That gave Michelle just enough time to jump in the shower and get ready to go to Women's Conference at 6:00 pm.

Recuerdos de mi Pueblo

My first assignment on the High Council was to give a talk in my assigned ward the next week. After that I took over planning and running our stake cultural activity, "Recuerdos de mi Pueblo".

It took was quite the project and I didn't have a lot of time to coordinate all of the various aspects of the activity. I was fortunate to be able to work with some very dedicated activity chairs from the various wards in the stake. With their help we were able to put together an exciting cultural event.

We had each ward contribute a poster about a different country that talked about how the church has progressed in that country. We also were able to get several flags representing most of the countries in North and South America.

During the pre-show time we had an activity for the kids. We had 2 pinantas that we hoisted up on the basketball standard and let the kids hit it. We started off just letting the little kids hit. Then we graduated to big kids with a blind fold. Finally we allowed the big kids to just swing because the pinantas were not breaking. It proved to be very entertaining and we managed to get most of the kids some candy (one way or the other).

The actual performance, "Recuerdo de mi Pueblo" is done by a group of performers from around the area. Brother Cenobio Valderrama put this show together and was "touring" around to various stakes in this Utah South area. We were very fortunate to have this production in our stake. The show consisted of song, dance, magic and cultural explanations.

We estimated that we had nearly 500 people attend this performance. Everyone there seemed to enjoy the production and had a good time. We were excited to note that there were at least a dozen non-member participants in attendance as well.

After the performance was over we cleared the chairs and had a Latin dance for a couple more hours. Even though it was supposed to be a family dance, most of the families went home to put their kids to bed. We still had over 100 people at the dance.


It was a wonderful opportunity to participate in this production. Our hope was to have an experience that would allow people to interact and provide some missionary moments. As far as I can tell we were able to accomplish both objectives. It's too early to say whether we will try this activity again as a stake but it was a great experience for me to coordinate a large activity at the stake level. It'll be interesting to see what I get to experience next.

Donovan Survives Car Wreck...Only Minor Injuries!

David and Donovan were playing so well together in the backyard today. David was pulling the car and Donovan was along for the ride. However, David got a little carried away and went faster than the car could handle causing it to roll. Donovan sustained only minor injuries and was able to walk away from the accident.

Nice bruise next to left eye

Boys Create Fire

The kids were running around in the back yard while Michelle and I visited with our friends Amelia and Richard Anderson. I happened to notice the garage door open and thought that was a little strange. My real concern is that the boys might damage some fruit, break a bottle or escape out the garage door. As it turned out, none of my fears were realized. David had the brilliant idea of gathering all of the pine needles that had fallen on the patio into one big pile and he needed a broom or rake or something else useful.

Once they had a big pile somehow the idea slipped out that the boys should put the pine needles into the fire pit and we should just burn them. Well the boys thought that was the most brilliant idea, especially since they would get to start the fire (which means that they get to play with the matches). It went off like clockwork except that Donovan was so excited that he and Michael collided as they raced off with their matches. Donovan went down and got a pretty good bruise on his knee. That postponed the lighting ceremony just a few minutes while we repaired his knee. Otherwise, the boys had all sorts of fun with the fire.

Donovans knee starting to show the bruising

The boys light the fire

The great pine needle bon fire

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Whenever God sends rain into your life make sure you look for the rainbows!

We certainly had a rainbow in our lives today and just wanted to share.