Girl Scout Cookies anyone? Get em' while you can!

OK all, it is Girl Scout Cookie time at our house. The girls, Shawna' and Camryn have been busy selling cookies for almost one week now, with one week left to go. They both usually sell quite a bit, so come March when we take delivery of said cookies, our garage becomes full of yummy cookies.

So, I thought that I would share some fun cookie facts with you all.

Courtesy of Little Brownie Bakers.

Cookie Fun Facts:
We make our own caramel for Samoas®. It‘s cooked the old fashion way in copper kettles to 234 degrees.

Do-si-dos® and Tagalongs® take 230,000 lbs. of peanut butter per week.

Peanut butter crème is deposited onto Do-si-do® cookies at the rate of 2800 per minute.

After exiting the oven, Thin Mints travel 300 feet on a conveyor belt to cool before being coated in the chocolate.

A rotary die shapes Trefoils. There are 300 identical Trefoil shapes engraved in one rotary die. The die rotates 17 times a minute equaling 5100 cookies a minute.

Samoas® go through a cooling tunnel at 40-50 degrees before chocolate is applied.

Do-si-dos® crème goes onto the cookies at 2800 per minute and are wrapped at 64 packages per minute!

WEEKLY INGREDIENTS (during peak production):
Flour: 21 truckloads, 1,050,000 lbs.

Shortening: 7 truckloads, 300,000 lbs.

Cocoa: 50,000 lbs.

Chocolate coating: 500,000 lbs.

Sugar: 14.5 truckloads, 650,000 lbs.

Peanut butter: 230,000 lbs.

Toasted coconut: 75,000 lbs.

MIXING INSTRUCTIONS:
Mixers are machine operated. Ingredients are weighed and released with the push of a button.
Each batch is 1200-1500 lbs... It takes 10 minutes to mix the dough, which lasts 20-30 minutes and takes 5-7 minutes to bake.

There are 7 ovens approximately 100’-280’ long.

BAKING INFORMATION:
Each oven approximately 100-280 feet long and has 4 baking zones with very specific jobs…

1st: prepares the cookies to be baked by softening them.

2nd: bakes cookies from the bottom up

3rd: brings the cookies to a flat shape

4th: gives the cookies their color

Just in case anyone was wondering!

P.S. I have a confession to make.... I still have a box of Do-si-Dos in my freezer from last year!

How Josh found Will a few nights ago

Winter items are on sale now, so Josh picked up a few items for the kids. Here is Will sporting his "Burglar Mask"
Will also has a fascination with boxes. I think that he would collect them if he could. He is constantly asking to keep boxes, even the boxes that the milk comes in when you buy it from Costco. Anyways, we happened to have a bigger box and Will immediately took it over. As we were coming to bed, Josh found Will sleeping in his box. It was full of toys, blankets, and trinkets.

He is still carting that box everywhere with him through out the house. He had it loaded to the brim tonight.
Sweet dreams little man!

Merry Christmas 2008 and Happy New Year!

We hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas and that you will have a wonderful New Year! We had a great Christmas with lots of family parties, chili cook-offs, sledding on the side of the house, and an adults only dinner out on New years.

May you all be healthy and joyous in the New Year!

Love The Kilpacks!

Opening the Christmas Eve gift.

Thanks Mom, your the best!

Yay!!! Mom made us new pajama pants!

So, on Christmas morning, Josh and I had laid in bed for what seemed like forever. We never heard any kids rustling about in the living room or anything. So we finally got up to find that not one of the kids was up yet, and it was 7:30! That's a first! The girls came out shortly and we had to have them go downstairs and wake all of the boys up! Can you believe it?!

(All the boys sleep together in Coltons room and the girls in their room on Christmas Eve. It's become a tradition!)

This is what Colton looked like Christmas morning. Funny!!! It didn't take Dallin or Will long to get over being woken up!

The dog got a new bone and chewed away while we opened presents.

Christmas Eve.

Everyone got what they wanted.

(Will did, except for the real motorcycle with training wheels that he wants soooo bad!!!)

Merry Christmas everyone!

The kids and I with Val and Megale.

(Dallin was taking the picture)

Dad's turn!

After all the presents had been opened, we spent the day enjoying them together. Josh made a great Christmas breakfast of French Toast and honey dew melon. Later we had my Uncle Joe, and the kids Grandparents Val and Megale over for a ham dinner with funeral potatoes, green beans, rolls, a green salad, and of course dessert. Megale made a wonderfully yummy cheesecake (all for me of course) and a delicious chocolate cake (all for Josh of course)!

A few random pics from Seattle 12/08

Here are a few more pics that I wanted to post. They are some of my favorite.

Josh standing in the forest. We stopped at a trail on the side of the road over on Bainbridge Island. It was so cool. I wish we could have explored it.

Josh and I riding the ferry over to the island.
It was a bit cold out.

Josh and I a top the Space Needle.

Me on the ferry.

Mt. Rainer

Trip to Seattle Day Three 12/07/08

On our second full day of being in Seattle we went sight seeing. We crammed a lot into one day, but it was totally worth it. Her are some pics in random order.

At the end of the day we managed to squeeze in visiting the Boeing Flight Museum. I think Josh could have stayed here all day. They had some really neat stuff and lots of it.

One of my favorites.


A flying car. Who knew?!

There were a lot of airplanes in here. This was just the first building. There were like three more, and you could go out and see the Concourse and Air Force One. You could even walk through them, but we didn't get there in time to do that. Josh was bummed.

Some more airplanes.

View from atop the Space Needle. A storm had just moved over us, and this is what it looked like after it left.

Downtown Seattle from the Space Needle.

There was a Seattle Sea Hawks Football game going on while we were visiting.

This is the stadium. I can't believe how many people were there!

Josh bringing me a warm cup of hot chocolate while a top the Space Needle.

What breathtaking views!

On the elevator to go up. I have to say that I was a little bit freaked out by riding the elevator. For those of you who don't know, the elevator is on the outside of the building and the whole front of it is glass. You can totally see how far down you are from the elevator. I wasn't really sure that I wanted to ride it back down. (But I did with much teasing from my husband no less.)

Some more pics from the Space Needle.

Looking out towards some of the islands.

Getting ready to go to the top of the Space Needle.

The Science Fiction Museum. It looked really cool, but we didn't get to stop here. They recommended at least three hours to see everything and we didn't have three hours.

The monorail by the museum.

A view from the restaurant where we had lunch.

After lunch we walked through Pike's Place Market. I loved it! They had everything for any type of meal all right there! I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. There was crab everywhere!

(For those who don't really know me, I love crab tremendously!)

I was able to have some for dinner that night. We ate a place called Ivars. It was wonderful!

(Although I thought that Josh might not kiss me afterwards. He doesn't like any seafood and doesn't understand how I can eat those things. They are like a giant spider!)

After riding the ferry back over to Seattle from Bainbridge Island, we went to the Seattle Aquarium.
It was pretty neat. We hoped it would have been a bit neater though. It was similar to what we have here in Sandy. Except ours isn't on a pier.

At the Farmer's Market.

The entrance to the aquarium. If you look closely at the tank behind us, there are actually scuba guys in there.

We had a busy day, but I enjoyed every minute of it. It was so wonderful to spend some quality time with my husband. The trip was over (too soon in my opinion). On Monday and Tuesday Josh had class, so I just hung out in the hotel room. I napped, ate, napped some more, read, napped, and watched t.v. All of which I don't have a lot of time to do at home.

Thanks honey for inviting me on this trip.l I had a blast!