Livin' By Faith: New Hobby

My new hobby??...dehydrating food!! :) I bought a dehydrator a few weeks ago and it's so cool. It's an awesome way to make snacks for the kids and since you take the majority of the water out of whatever you are dehydrating, it's mess free! (I've also learned that almost ALL of the nutrients stay in the food when you dehydrate!) Here are some of the foods I've tried so far; pineapple, apple, oranges, bananas, strawberries, watermelon, cantalope, and tonight I'm doing kiwi. The favorite fruit thing we make in the dehydrator.....fruit leather!!! It's SO easy and it tastes just like fruit roll ups from the store, but SO much healthier and cheaper! We've made combinations of apple-strawberry-banana, apple-strawberry-yogurt, apple-strawberry-watermelon. I've also made fruit leather out of applesauce (yummy!) and out of yogurt. BUT....the ultimate fav thing from the dehydrator???....JERKY! Yes, I made my own jerky and man, is it good!! We just got some more beef from our farmer and we get our milk from, so I'm am looking forward to making more. It's easy too...just take the beef, mix in the spices, put it in the nifty little jerky gun, squirt it out onto the dehydrator and in 5 hours you have amazing jerky! :)

Brayan has starting eating solid foods and now that he's started, he eats a TON! He'll eat ANYTHING we give him and he'll eat it all. Last night he had avacado, brocolli, mango and banana (of course, all fresh!) and finished off the whole plate full! Since he's eating so good, I've pre-made some baby food and froze it in ice cube trays and then put them in plastic bags (about a weeks worth) so then I just have to take them out of the freezer a few hours before and it's ready to go! Other foods he likes are carrots, pears, yogurt, blueberries, applesauce and this morning he had blueberry waffles! So basically, he'll eat anything :)

Tiernan is doing GREAT with potty training and is now pretty much accident free! He continues to practice his counting and is currently up to 20! (although he tends to skip over 13, so we are still working on that!)

Not too much new with Caedmon...he still loves to sleep (praise God!) and he is OBSESSED with reading books!..but I guess that's a good thing :)

Not too much new with the job situation. They still will not lay him off so he'll continue to work until the end of the job, which Nathan thinks will be in a couple weeks. The job in Iowa got pushed back a month so now that is scheduled to start in June. We're not sure if he'll be on that job or not, but it's still a possibility.

Tiernan "helping" me make bread....he really just licks everything he can get his little hands on :)