Canning

Peaches and apricots were a great price this week - at least as cheap as I can get them here - so I decided to can. I anticipated about 40 quarts - so that is the amount of jars I got out. Turns out later I underestimated a bit.

And of course don't forget the fruit! 50 lbs of peaches, 50 lbs of apricots, and 5 pineapples (and 2 "helpers")

Once we started to prep the fruit, I discovered this problem - there were a total of 6 peaches that I found like this. There is only one culprit - and she's two.

We ended up with 33 quarts of apricots/pineapple, and 21 quarts of peaches. There should have been 2 more quarts of each but 2 jars of the apricots broke, and we were tired by the end and didn't want to put just 2 jars in the canner for the last of the peaches - so we just ate those!

Aren't they pretty???

Rating: 54 quarts of fruit (of course!)

A lot about a little...

I feel like I have a bunch of snippets of things to talk about but not enough for a post for each one, so just like my birthday post, this is going to be a hodge podge of miscellaneous stuff!


First off, my Grandma was here the whole week visit. We had a lot of fun and it was fun for the girls to get to play with their Great-Grandma!

Grandma and Emmaline both had fun playing Wii Bowling together. Grandma was determined to NOT have Emmaline beat her and finally on the last day Grandma did win!

If you recall, we found a baby bird on the ground, he was still there the next day and we got worried that he would get hurt or something, so I called the Humane Society to ask what to do. Turns out they get a lot of similar calls this time of year. Apparently birds learn to fly from the ground! I never knew that. They assured us that we should just leave him alone, and that his family would still be feeding him and encouraging him to fly. Turns out that was true. We found his a couple days later spreading his wings, and a few hours after that, he was gone!

We had an awesome storm during the week too. The lightening was going continuously. It was really spectacular. I don't think this video does it justice, but you get the idea. The next day we had an afternoon storm with thunder so loud and long that it was shaking the house.

We also caught Lil doing this one day. She was eating chicken nuggets for lunch, and decided that ketchup was yummy enough to finish off with her spoon!

Grandma also helped me can this week but that is long enough for another post!

Rating: 5 Lollipops

Chocolate Cake

We took this video of Lil on my birthday. It is impressive when we get this much talking out of her and we were thrilled to hear her say "chocolate cake!" I guess she just needs incentive to speak!

Rating: 1 Chocolate Cake

Star Trek

It has been exactly 1 year and 5 days since the last time we saw a movie in the theater. My grandma is visiting so we put the kids to bed and then went to the movies. The bonus is that we had coupons for free tickets and also free popcorn when you buy a drink - so it was a pretty cheap date! We both loved the movie - it had a good story line but didn't take itself too seriously. It also opened itself up for a sequel so I am thinking we will see more in the future!

Rating: 5 Lollipops

Happy 30th Birthday . . .

. . . to me!

This is it! The BIG 3-0! We didn't do too much today, yet there were several photo opportunities so I will share those.

First off this morning, Emmaline cracked me up, she was playing with a toy lion, a toy sheep, and a farm. This is how it looked:

It made me giggle. Actually this lion is only carrying the sheep to the farm - like a dog would carry something in its mouth - but boy does it look bad!

Then we made a cake. I'm not actually a cake fan but it is important to the kids, so Emmaline and I made this little Chocolate Snack Cake together. Later in the afternoon Lil came up to me smacking her lips and saying, "mm-MM!!" This is what I found:

Later in the day, AJ found this poor little baby bird in our yard under a tree in our yard. He must have fallen from his nest - poor little guy.

Besides giving me a GPS (which he actually gave me a few weeks ago so we could use it on our trip to Silverthorne), AJ gave me a bag of my most favorite chips - Salt & Vinegar. I can eat those suckers until the bag is gone and my tongue is burning. They are SO good. If people would bring me bags of these instead of chocolate chip cookies, I'd be happy. I was concerned about the new labeling on the package though:







Emmaline selected a present for me from The Present Store. She got me a fantastic purple puppy birthday card with a squishy nose AND my very own stick pony to ride! I am pretty sure I am the luckiest mom there is.

To top off the day, we ate birthday cake. Since the cake was tiny we only put 3 candles on top - one for every ten years. Luckily with so many candles, I had plenty of willing helpers to assist in the extinguishing.





Rating: 1 Chocolate Birthday Cake

Messy Day

I am completely kicking myself for forgetting the camera today. Ugh.

The office that Lil's Speech Therapist works at had a summer activity for all the kids that they work with (both speech and occupational therapy). They called it a Messy Day. It was set up outside and designed it to let the kids just have fun and make a mess. The activities:

• Kiddie pool filled with shaving cream
• Big bowls and tubs filled with Jell-O to touch and squish fingers in
• A big deep table (like a water table) filled with "goo" (I think it was a flour and water mixture)
• A big tub filled with Millet
• A few kiddie pools filled with water
• And a painting activity.

I actually think the painting was the neatest idea there. They bought a long piece of clear vinyl and hung it up on the fence. Then they had tubs of water-based paints there to paint on the vinyl and huge sponges to wipe it off when you were done.

The girls left wet, dirty, and happy!

A Fantabulous Father's Day!

What a great Father's Day! I think the best part of today was just being around the kids. They were amazingly well behaved at Church. Lil and Emmaline played very contentedly on the bench, and Idgie was just happy being held (amazingly enough). I actually got to pay attention to most of Sacrament Meeting!

Oh! And then there was Emmaline "singing" with the rest of the primary kids. I think she'd have rather been anywhere else but up on the stand. She was looking this way and that, and twirling around, and playing with her hair. But she sure was cute. :-)

For Father's Day, Emmaline has heard me complaining about my car (the transmission is in the process of dying... but it's not dead yet!), and so she decided that she wanted to get daddy a new car! Bethany took her to the The Present Store, and apparently she knew exactly what she wanted to get me - a green car! (Which, if you've been reading the blog before, is fairly similar to what she wanted at one point...) Bethany got me an alarm clock that connects to my iPod so I can wake up to Blue Man Group - it rocks.

The best thing I got, though, was a new grill! You see, we've been without a grill since the Incident Which Shall Not Be Named™. And we used the grill fairly often, so 6 months without it has been rough. Turns out, though, that the timing was great for getting a new grill! And having BBQ and other assorted grilled foods once again is just heavenly.



All-in-all, a good day to be reminded that being a dad is a good thing. And the girls are proof enough of that.

Rating: 48,000 BTU... YEAH!

Silverthorne - Day 4

Last Day!

We had to be out of our place by 11am so pretty much we just spent the morning packing up and getting ready to go home. On the way out of town we stopped at a park and played for awhile and had a picnic. It was good for the girls to get all that energy out before the drive home!

I think the highlight of the park had nothing to do with OUR kids at all. The park was set up with play equipment in a sandy area (swings, slides etc). There was paved area around the park and a little fishing pond nearby and such. There were two boys - probably about age 9 or 10. They were riding their dirt bikes and come riding straight through the play area! I asked them nicely (twice) to please not ride their bikes in the play area and to take them on the pavement. The finally did. Then about 10 minutes later one of the kids comes riding in again on his bike! I admit I snapped at him, "Take your bike out of here. This is not a bike area!" He turned around and left the area. A few minutes later, a third kid joined them. AJ overheard the first two telling him, "Don't ride your bike over there or that lady will yell at you!" Sometimes I really like being a grown up.

Anyway - that was the end of our trip. We had a great time. Next time we are thinking of heading east to Nebraska!

Silverthorne - Day 3

On day three we decided to spend the morning being lazy. We looked at a few more of the outlets and just hung out. There are three different "villages" of outlet and to get from one to another, you have to walk on the path next to a river that goes under the freeway. Emmaline decided that she wanted to pick more dandelions along the way. She kept rubbing them on her nose and mouth and asking if it was turning her yellow - which of course it was. She thought it was so hilarious!

About 30 minutes later she started to melt down, her nose was running like crazy, and her mouth was getting red and swollen. That's what happens when you're shoving pollen up your nose I guess - silly girl! We always carry Benadryl with the Epi-Pen so we gave her some of that (we love their Perfect Measure products!) and headed home.

We had lunch and afterwards, we settled everyone into the car for an hour ride (and nap for the kids!) up to Leadville. The ride up there took us though a section called Top of the Rockies which according to our GPS - we peaked at 2 miles 644 feet (11,204 feet) I didn't get a picture of it in time but here is one that was pretty close. Are we weird for taking a picture of the GPS? Probably, but this is my story to bore you with so I'm going to do it any way I can!

The purpose of going to Leadville was to ride the train of course! Anyone who knows AJ knows how much he adores trains. Lately Liliana has been on a kick about trains too - calling everything from semis to RV's a "choo-choo". The train ride was 2.5 hours long. It was kind of stressful because Liliana wanted to run between the cars by herself. That area was all open air with a bar and a piece of fabric to close the hole on either side - so needless to say we didn't exactly relax on the ride. We opted as well for a closed car versus an open air car to prevent small children from leaning over the side and falling out. Of course something DID fall out the window eventually - but I'll get to that.

At the halfway point where we turn around and go back, they stop at an old water tower (that we didn't get in the picture) and let you get off for about 15-20 minutes. We had the conductor take our picture and if you look closely you'll see that she put her hat on Emmaline.

On the ride back we got out the toys because the kids were getting bored. We purchased some toy trains in the gift shop before we left. Liliana's was a little wooden one that connected with magnets and a string on the engine so she could pull it around. The girls played very happily with the trains for quite awhile.

At one point though, Liliana started to play with her train by driving it along the windowsill. Unfortunately, I didn't realize the window was open there and all the sudden I hear Lil say, "uh-oh!" I look over and the engine to her train is nowhere to be found. She pointed out the window like she wanted me to just reach out and get it! Not gonna happen. So that train is now living a peaceful life at about 11,000 ft, along the tracks, just like a real train. Good-bye little train!

When we got home, it was dinner time. The girls had hot dogs and we topped off the evening with S'mores - made in the oven instead of over a campfire. We had to use Hershey's syrup since it is dairy free but that worked out just fine. The S'mores were a hit (sadly no pictures - S'mores are sticky too!)

AJ and I declared it to be date night and decided to order dinner from a local restaurant to eat in while the girls were in bed. We got a recommendation from asking around while we had shopped the day before. We picked a play called Pug Ryans. Can I just say - NOT GOOD. Well, the entrees were good, but instead of the salad, we both opted for clam chowder instead. We LOVE clam chowder. Love it. This stuff was gross! The broth wasn't very creamy and it had a TON of rosemary in it. Who puts rosemary in clam chowder??? Rosemary always tastes and smells like mold to me so it made the soup really really nasty tasting. Yuck. If we had eaten at the restaurant I would have sent it back and asked for something else, and I never do stuff like that. It was bad.

So that's it. All in all an exhausting but fun day!

To Be Continued . . .

Silverthorne - Day 2

Day 2 we decided we needed to go on some sort of nature hike with the kids. The thought of hiking with a 4, 2, and 11 month old though? *shudder*.



We went down to the local visitor information office and asked the nice old man there who has probably lived in the area for 10 million years, where we could go on a nice easy hike with very young children. He pointed on a map to a little loop trail nearby that he claimed was a nice easy and fairly short walk. Turns out that having lived in the area for 10 million years - he did not mislead us and that was all true. *phew*. We were even able to take the stroller on it!




Idgie started out in the stroller and Liliana and Emmaline walked. There were a few parts where Liliana made us nervous because that girl is not afraid of anything. She would walk right up to the very edge of the path (which had no guard rails and was a steep hill down) without batting an eye - which gave us several heart attacks.







The trail had a beautiful scenic outlook at one point where you could look out over Lake Dillon and also watch the chipmunks that were all over the place.






In fact there were so many chipmunks, that were so unafraid of humans, that I found it just a tad creepy - but the girls loved it and squealed (literally) with glee.

Emmaline was intent on picking every dandelion she could get her hands on but her greatest treasure was a pinecone.

Eventually Liliana got into a bit of a meltdown mode so Idgie finished the hike in the mei tai and AJ pushed Lil in the stroller. He reports that it was MUCH harder to push that stroller through the gravel with 30 lbs in it versus 16 lbs.





After the hike we went home had lunch and had the girls all lay down for naps for awhile (mostly so we could nap too!).

After nap time we hit the outlets. I didn't realize there was an outlet mall in Silverthorne so that was a fun surprise. Most of it was still too ritzy and pricey - but we did hit some great deals in some of the kid stores - I think walking all those stores and wrangling three kids was way more of a workout than the hike we went on in the morning! I think the best store we hit was Gymboree oddly enough. Usually Gymboree is too overpriced - even with a sale. The Gymboree Outlet was having a great clearance - shirts for $4, adjustable waist jeans for $5, etc. We got several things for Emmaline to grow into which was particularly great!

That night we all went hot tubbing on the deck! We left it turned off so it was safe for the girls to get into. They loved our private "swimming pool" and we loved relaxing after chasing them around all day! Sadly I was too busy sitting in the hot tub to get any pictures.

To Be Continued . . .

Silverthorne - Day 1

This is the part of the blog where for the next few days we tell you all about our vacation. Our job will be to tell boring stories and maybe we'll even dust off the photo album and show you a nice slide show of every rock and tree we saw. In return you can ooooohhhhh and aaaaahhhhh and try not to fall asleep!


A few months ago, we decided we needed to go on a little family vacation. Our criteria was that it couldn't be too far of a drive from home and it had to be somewhere we've never been before. The thought of camping briefly crossed our minds and then we both had a vision of Liliana + Fire = BAD. So we quickly decided against that. We then decided to look around on VRBO (vacation rentals by owner) and see if maybe we could rent a cabin somewhere for cheap. It turns out that the ski towns here in Colorado are pretty cheap in the summer so after a little digging we settled on Silverthorne.

Because the rates were so good we ended up with a bit more than a "cabin". It was a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom duplex/condo complete with hot tub. It was pretty nice digs but with three little ones it was worth it to have the comforts of home. Not to mention with Emmaline's allergies it is a lot easier to be able to still cook for ourselves. We didn't get in until 4:30 so that didn't give us much of the day. We just settled in, ran to Wal-Mart to get some things we realized we had forgotten, and that was pretty much it.

The highlight of Day 1 was that the girls got Oreos for dessert! (I still can't believe those suckers are dairy free!) Even Idgie really enjoyed hers as you can see from the picture. The best part was that the place had limited cup options - but a full supply of glasses for wine and liquor - so the girls got to dip their Oreos into shot glasses of rice milk.

To Be Continued . . .

Cooking Dinner

Emmaline helped me make dinner tonight. She actually did almost all of it herself. I just told her what to do, and she did it. It was an easy recipe so that helped. I even let her work with a knife for the first time. It was a bit nerve wracking but she did a pretty good job and still has 10 fingers, so I can't really complain!





Rating: 4 Lollipops

Escape Artist

So a couple of days ago, Liliana figured out how to unlock doors. Not from the key side but from the inside where you turn the little knob thingy. Luckily nothing bad happened but it does destroy several of the defenses we have set up around our house. Every time we figure out a way to protect her from herself, she figures out how to best it! The second she learns how to defeat our mounted baby gates, we are done for.

Rating: 2 Fireballs.

Tornados

Yesterday after church, we ate lunch and got the kid all settled into naps and quiet time. Just as AJ and I settled in to relax for awhile, the tornado sirens started going off. So, we got to wake all of them up, and go hang out in the basement. It turns out the closest one to us was 15 miles away still. There were 5 that hit Denver and surrounding areas including one that actually hit in the city (Aurora actually) at the Southlands Mall. Pretty crazy stuff. They said that one went for about 30 minutes and traveled about 8-10 miles!
While we hung out in our basement we talked about how to make a safer place down there. Everything is either near windows or near places where things could fall on us. We came up with a plan and once we get it organized I'll take some pictures! Instead, enjoy this picture of the tornado in Aurora!





Rating: 3 Ice Cream Cones (for the 3 inch hail that fell some places)

Sales and Spices

You may or may not have noticed that on the side bar to the right there that we have a list of things we want to do this summer. We are always talking about things we want to do but then can never remember or forget to plan ahead so we finally decided to write it down. We did something on the list today but I'll get to that in a minute.

I have been trying to decide what to get Idgie for her first birthday. The problem is that it seems like we already have everything because of the older two girls. I finally decided that she might like a little slide since she is still too small for the big playset. I've been keeping an eye out on craigslist for something suitable but nothing has come up. Well this morning I was out running an errand and say that a local subdivision was having a neighborhood garage sale. I decided on a whim to turn in and see and there, the first house on the corner, was a Little Tikes slide for sale! They had it labeled for $20 but I was able to walk away with it for $10!! It is a little worn and dirty but nothing a hose and a Magic Eraser can't fix before her birthday!



So then this afternoon, we decided to make a trek to Denver to go to a store that we saw on Food Network called Savory Spice. Coolest store ever! They grind all their own spices and make all their own spice mixes right on site. They also had just about every random spice you could think of. It smelled so good and you could sample the different spices before you bought. I have my eye on several things but we each decided to get just one little bottle of something. AJ got the Platte River Rib Rub and I finally settle on some Hawaiian Black Lava Sea Salt. We can't wait to try them!!!

Rating: 1 taste of Peppermint Vanilla Bean Sugar

Salad Dressing

This is HUGE people. HUGE.

See those salad dressings in the picture??? Emmaline can have them! I was reading the labels randomly last night and was shocked to discover that NONE of them have dairy or any of Emmaline's other allergens!!!

AJ and I couldn't believe our eyes and I even called Kraft to confirm. We gave Emmaline some to try and she hasn't had any reactions and she isn't dead so it must really be true! She has never had anything like ranch dressing before and thought it was really yummy.

On one hand it makes me sad as a general consumer that something that *should* have dairy in it - doesn't. But on the other hand, as the parent of a food allergic child, I am thrilled that she can have some "normal" kid things. I can put this on her sandwiches just like mayo or make coleslaw with it! WOW!

I also checked and the *regular* ranch still has dairy in it - so it is just the cucumber ranch variety of the ranch flavors that is safe - and then the Creamy Italian and Thousand Island too are dairy free.

Rating: 10 Lollipops (I didn't know I could get so excited over salad dressing)

CSA - Week 1

Bell Peppers, Asparagus, Leaf Lettuce, Spinach, Dill, Radish, Tomatoes, Turnips, Cilantro

I promise I won't take a picture every week of our produce but I just had to this week because we had so much fun getting it! Isn't it pretty?

Today we did our first official pick-up of our veggies from the CSA. It was actually really really fun. We went out to the farm this time. There was hardly anything set out and he apologized and said they weren't quite ready yet. Instead, he offered to take us out to the fields and let us pick it ourselves. We were game for that so out we went! The kids had a blast picking lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips, dill, and cilantro. They didn't quite understand the idea of thinning and of being careful, so we left parts of that field looking pretty decimated. I felt bad about it but the man who was with us didn't seem to care.

The kids also managed to spot two frogs. My friend caught one of them (Carolyn you are so brave!) and I'm pretty sure playing with that frog was the highlight of the whole trip for the kids!

When we got back to the store area, he said that they also had tomatoes and bell peppers that they didn't grow themselves, but we could take them as well. Then they also had a TON of asparagus for the taking.

We ended up with:
4.38 lbs. Tomatoes
3.13 lbs. Bell Peppers
1.38 lbs. asparagus
1.44 lbs Leaf Lettuce and Spinach (I mixed it all together)
.63 lbs. Radishes
.88 lbs. Turnips
.5 oz. Dill
2 oz. Cilantro

Not too bad I think and it was worth it just for the morning entertainment for the kids!

Rating: 3 Lollipops