Lefse Saturday

Three generations had a fun day making lefse, donuts, sampling and visiting.

Here are some pics:

Hanna with her own apron.


Caleb ready to test his lefse flipping skills. Paige is in the background.


This is the lefse flipping team; Caleb, Paige, and Kyla


This is the first day we saw Kyla with her first pair of glasses.

Here's Sue with the lastest addition to the third generation of lefse flippers, Leah (John & Heather) and Cece (Jeff and Bridget)

Chris and Katie

Caleb and Kyla - focused on flipping

Paige and Caleb

Donuts!

Katie (left side) and Heather rolling out the donut dough.

Sue is in the background. You can see the donuts cooking in lard. It does kinda stink up the house. On the near side of the picture you can see where the donuts were placed on a grocery bag to pull of some of the lard.

The finished product

What a fun day. I think everyone had a chance to sample the products. We made the lefse with yellow potatoes. They were very tender and very moist. It's unclear they passed the test of the resident lefse purists.

Deer Season 2009

Pretty unusual season with the warmest and dryest weather in years. We were also lucky to have Paige with us this year. Paige turned 11 while she was up north. This year three of the stands have heaters. Two have stairs and Jeff's stand is new.


Here's a picture of Chris with his deer. When you see him you should ask him to tell his story.


Paige and Matt with Matt's deer. The picture was taken looking down from Matt's stand. Yup, they are in blaze orange T-shirts.



Matt has an indoor/outdoor thermometer in his stand. It was pretty warm.


Paige, Matt, Chris, John, and Jeff

There were a total of 16 hunters out on Saturday.

Every Saturday during deer season there is some sort of dinner in town. This year it is in the old city hall. Here are John, Matt, and Paige.

Chris

Sue with Cece in her Camo outfit.

Jeff with John in the background

A great weekend!

Bob

Detective John

We are excited about John's promotion to Detective in the Airport's Criminal Investigations group. This job will start in December. Here we are at the Olive Garden in Roseville this past Sunday celebrating this event.


In preparation for this new role, Jeff and Bridget gave John this pipe for image clarification purposes.


Here's John, Heather, and Lea.


You can see most of our family at this dinner.


Paige and Kyla



Looks like Hannah is making a sort of celebration cake using her chicken strips and crayons.

Just a short video clip.

It felt good for our family to get out to dinner.

Congratulations John!

MEA in Lancaster

This is always a fun time. Each year lots of us go out to the "camp" to work on deer stands, sight in rifles, ride the four wheelers, talk about the new cabin, play cards, etc, etc. We now have four generations enjoying the camp.

Here are some of the pictures from the weekend:

On Thursday we worked on Matt's stand. Here we added spindles and railings thanks to John.


Kyla, Paige, and the Ranger

John finishing the spindles and railing. On Sunday Peggy walked up to check out the work and the stand.

Matt insulated and installed 1/4" OSB on the inside of his stand.

Here's Dick on the tractor with Nathan and Sean. Dick had bought and fixed up a "stock chopper", an implement which is designed to chop up corn stocks but also worked well to cut long grass and could cut down willows and small (2'') trees.

On Friday we added these steps to John's stand.

On Saturday we built Jeff's stand. The only thing left to do on Sunday was to install the windows.

Looking west out of Jeff's stand

Looking east

Looking south

Some final touches Monday for Matt's stand; a shelf and an indoor/outdoor thermometer.

A board with screws to hold jackets, etc.

The crew (Peggy, Floyd, Tom Baker, Bob & Sue) that did the four wheeler tour of some of the stands Sunday afternoon. This is by Tommy Baker's stand.

Vada and Macy Westerberg

This is Sunday night at Owen and Shelly's house where we celebrated Macy's 12th birthday. Also, Owen took Floyd, Glenn, and Bob out to look for elk. The day before he had seen 14 elk within a mile of his house. In this herd was a huge 6 by 6 bull elk.

I think we are ready for deer season.

We are so thankful and lucky we are able to stay at Peggy and Floyd's place when we are in Lancaster.

Bob

Grandma's 91st Birthday Celebration

This was an early birthday celebration for Mom, Grandmother, Great Grandmother, Mother-in-law, Irene. She will celebrate her birthday later in the fall but many of us were able to get together on this beautiful day in September at her care center. This is just a warm up for what we hope will be a family reunion in 2010. By the way, she is mom to 11 children, grandmother to 31 and great grandmother to 24.

Here are eight of her children
From left to right; Carol, Russ, Carmel, Bob, Dick, Crystal, Jean, Helen (missing - Jim (deceased), Sheila, and Muriel.


Four generation picture with Grandma

Bob, Jeff, Cece and Bridget with Grandma, Irene


Russ and his family
Russ, Pam, and Carlos (missing Jessica and Brian)


Crystal and her Family
Crystal, Judd, Gabe and Cassius (Missing Cole and Chelsea)

Jean
Jean, Greg (missing Melissa & Pat, Tony and Alex)

Carmel (missing Tom, Rachel & Matt, Lauren & Johnny, and Zach)

Dick's family

Pat, Sara, Karen (holding Ellie), Tanya, Jason (Madison - in front of Jason), Addison (Held by Jason), Emma (below Addison), Dick, Elise (held by Stacy), Ian (next to Grandma), Ava (red dress), Adan (behind Ava), Nathan, Sean (in front of Nathan), Darin - (Missing Mary, deceased, Jason and Jamie)

Bob's Family

Jeff (holding Cece), Bridget, Sue, Hannah (held by Bob), John, Chris, Caleb (in front of Chris) and Katie (Missing - Heather and baby Leah, Matt, Sarah, Paige and Kyla)

Helen (Missing Walt-deceased, Martha, Michael, Kelly, Katie, Liz, Tim)

Carol's family

Mark, Anneliese (in front of Mark), Carol, Michael

Missing from today's celebration:

Muriel & Dick(who were here last week), Eric, Michelle, Amy Natalie, Brian - Deceased, Jeff, Katie, Nora, Renae, Craig, Renae, Anna

Sheila, John, Amanda, John, Abigail, Samantha, Jill, Joe, Chloe, Charlie.

It was a wonderful day. Many that were a part of the celebration went to Bob & Sue's house for more visiting, playing, and food. It was really fun to be together. We are hopeful we can get together next year.

If I "oopsed" on anyone's name, please let me know and I will edit the blog.

Bob

Carmel Apples

A couple of times this year we have been with some of our grandkids and made carmel apples. Although we don't have apple trees, our neighbors do and with their permission we picked them to make jelly, apple sauce, and finally carmel apples.

It's fun for the grandkids to choose and pick the apples and go through the whole process of making carmel apples.

This past Friday Chris and Katie dropped off Caleb and Hannah. Matt and Paige came over and we hung out.

Here are some pictures from Friday.

Matt and Caleb


Paige and Caleb


Caleb likes carmel apples


I'm not sure of Caleb's look but he really did enjoy having Uncle Matt read Widdermaker to him.

It might look like Hannah is winding down, but I think she stayed awake until her mom and dad came.

We had a great evening!