Harvesting, Canning, and Hal's Big Win

Last weekend, while Casey was in Escalante rappelling Calf Creek Falls (luck-eeee!), the kids and I started our annual fruit collection. Last Friday we picked a bounty of pears and on Saturday we gathered Gala apples. (We have really nice neighbors with fruit surpluses that let us come pick gratis.) I had planned to start canning on Saturday, but the picking alone exhausted my energy, so we waited for Monday.

I must be out of it, because it wasn't until Monday that I realized that Monday was a holiday, and a perfect holiday for sweat shop labor. Labor Day!! Amazingly, the kids get excited to can every year, especially the apple-pear sauce that we make. Sophie likes to crank the handle of the vintage Victorio strainer and Hal prefers to tamp the fruit down, often dramatically retelling the story of when she fed the strainer a wooden spoon and it came out in the refuse bucket shredded. So labor we did, from about 9:30 in the morning until nearly 10 pm at night. We did stop, naturally, to eat, and to reward ourselves with a round of bowling at Fat Cats--Casey and Hallee dominated the score board--for FHE. We also had a surprise visit that night from Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan and Great Grandma Tiede. (They actually came to the bowling alley with us for a while.) 

To accomplish the mammoth task of canning of 66 quarts of apple-pear sauce, required that I wear some medical grade maternity support stockings all day--not easy in a steamy room in summer. It was a literal sweat shop down in the basement kitchen, but lots of fun for all of us.   

My faithful canning laborers--working it all day long. Whenever they had some down time between batches, they'd go out to the "art bar" and furiously craft with Zeke, producing large volumes of creative projects. 

Zeke attempted to dethrone Sophie on several occasions when he realized how awesome cranking that handle is. He was so excited to see that he was making the applesauce.

One Labor Day's work.

We spent most of today preparing for our trip up to Island Park and Yellowstone. We have some friends that own a cabin up there and they are willing to let us hooligans come and stay there. Yes! We leave tomorrow and will stay for a week. Holly and her family are coming up for the first half of the trip and Mary and some of her kids will come up for the second part of our stay. Sophie was a baby the last time that we went, so all of the kids are excited to go experience the wonder that is Yellowstone.

Hallee got an epic phone message today announcing that she was the kid-winner of the grand prize for the summer reading program at our local library.  She got to go pick up this load of booty and was so excited.  Her prayers tonight were all about her gratitude for the unexpected win.