50 Hour Candles

My sister, Caitlin, has been on an Emergency Preparedness kick (obsession?) lately and this week's adventure was 50 hour candles.

She found the "recipe" online and ordered the materials online a couple of weeks ago, and picked up the 1/2 pint canning jars at a local store.

Saturday she had Alyssa and I come over and take part in the adventure. Confusion and hilarity ensued. :)

We had no idea what we were doing and so we kind of made up the process as we went. Okay, and I didn't do much except take pictures and laugh and play with Rachel. :)

Oh, right. We were there to make candles (and do my laundry). So on to Candles....

First Cait and Nick filled the jars with wax chips and put them in a canning pot with boiling water to melt down the wax. The original instructions said to melt the wax strait in a pot, but Cait decided that would cause too much wax loss so they just kept adding more wax until it was all melted and filled to the first lip.

Waiting for the wax to melt.

Once the wax was all melted, Cait and Alyssa put in the wicks. The wicks wouldn't sink to the bottom, so Nick donated washers to weigh down the bottom. It worked perfectly.

To get the wicks to be centered, cait jimmy-rigged a system to hold them in place. 

Then things got a little crazy. Caitlin "ate" Rachel's hand. And Rachel just looked at her blankly. It was hilarious. Lys kept giving us hard time about how we "played" with Rachel. Cait said that was why she had a kid so she could have fun with her.

So then, Cait and the boys (Nick and Dave) got hungry and so she invited Lys and I to stay for dinner (at 9pm) as a thank you for "helping"--really it was because my laundry wasn't done. So we had Tacos. So delicious!

Cait was a bit out of control with the bag of ice. It was almost as big as her so she had to fling it over her shoulder in order to fill the glasses. I'm not sure why she didn't just scoop the ice out, but McGraths aren't known to take the easy way. ;)

The boys made their tacos so spicy (yeah, that's radishes) that they were crying. Um, no thank you.

Quite the adventurous night. And we became more emergently (can I make that a word?) prepared.