Category: Our Family

Early Thanksgiving Feast

While I was down the hall this morning, and the kids were about the house doing their own thing, Adam and Lydia got bored and decided that they would decorate the living room with Jango’s dog food.

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I asked the bigger kids to help clean it up, which they all refused to do, so I declared it nap time. I couldn’t have them playing out in the living room with it looking like that! So sending them to take naps got them out of the way so the mess could be taken care of. Meanwhile, Chewy and the cat thought this was a great feast for them. Fitting since tomorrow is Thanksgiving….

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After the bulk of the kids fell asleep I got Ethan and Jeremy out here to help clean it up, of course they spent most of the time goofing off and sometimes dropping the food before it made it back into the container.

Experiments in Canning

We were shopping at Sam’s club a while ago and found that they had persimmons on sale for a really good deal. I also picked up a 3 pound bag of cranberries. I initially picked up one bag, and as we were eating those persimmons I had the thought, to try to can them. So I sent Kyle back for some more. I also got a couple of 3 pound bags of cranberries. I started by making some cranberry jam, and some spiced cranberry jam. I really can’t tell any difference between cranberry jam, and cranberry sauce though.

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Then I made some persimmon jam. The recipe I found online called for a lot of lemon juice and as soon as I poured it in the whole pot smelled like lemon. I think if I every try to make persimmon jam again, I will reduce the lemon juice slightly to hopefully get more of the persimmon flavor.

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My last experiment was to can persimmon slices. This experiment failed, big time. During the canning process the persimmons created this think slime in the jar. When we opened a jar and tasted them, they just tasted like they had gone bad. 🙁

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Apples

I have FINALLY finished canning apples for this season! We went to pick apples at my co-leader’s house a couple of times. We picked apples at Granny’s house, and Aunt Linda and Uncle Aaron brought us a box of apples just as I thought I was nearing the finish line. I am glad they brought them though because they were nice enough to make apple rings from and I wouldn’t have been able to make any apple rings otherwise.

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I made 50 quarts of applesauce (18 quarts of peach, 9 quarts of blueberry, 10 quarts of cherry, 9 quarts of unsweetened, and 4 quarts of red hot), 22 quarts of pie filling, 12 quarts of apple rings (9 quarts cinnamon, 3 quarts mint), 12 pints syrup (6 pints apple pie, and 6 quarts cinnamon), and 28 half pints of jam (7 jars of apple pie, 7 jars of candy apple, 7 jars of apple cider, and 7 jars of mint).

Getting Ready for Baby

We are getting closer to baby’s arrival, and it’s time to be making preparations. So last night Kyle moved our giant bed over about a foot, and I put the bassinet together. The little ones were attracted to the bassinet when they saw it this morning.

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In between pulling Adam out of the bassinet, I unpacked other newborn baby stuff into the drawers of the dresser to get ready for baby. 🙂