Life Right Now

I'm not sure what the deal is right now, but I seem to be in a bit of a blogging rut.  Our life is busy and full of things, but they are the same 'ole things week after week after week, and if I'm not intentional about taking pictures and finding funny things in the middle of normal boring things, well, it seems it's easy to stop writing about anything.  And I don't really want to do that.  I love looking back over old posts and seeing what our kids were doing, the funny outfits Willow put on, the songs Jayden sung (he still sings all the time, but he's much more shy about me recording them).

We still have swimming twice a week and both kids are still loving it.  Jayden actually moved up from Level 3 to 4a two sessions ago, and while that is totally blog worthy material, he wouldn't let me take a picture or post about it, so I'm sneaking it in here.  But let me tell you, it's awesome to watch him cruise down the pool doing freestyle and backstroke, and now he's learning to master breast stroke and butterfly.  (Uncle Jordan, you'd be proud, his swim teachers coaches tell him he has an awesome dolphin kick, now all he has to do is figure out how to breathe with the right timing of his arms.  He said he wants to race you.)

I am tutoring 7 kids in math. (like I didn't have enough to do, but gosh darn it, if I find an idle hour somewhere I'm libel to sign up for something!)  I'm part of a volunteer program called Andover Schools Community Volunteers, that basically plugs people into the schools to help in pretty much any area of school you could imagine.  Royal helps out a high school chemistry class once a week over his lunch hour, and since I can't do a lot during the school day because I'm taking care of Jayden and Willow, I do after school / evening tutoring.  Turns out high school math stumps as many parents as it does students.  I usually do one-on-one tutoring, but there seemed to be a high need and as I was the only tutor at the time, once a week I am tutoring 5 geometry students together.  I actually have to prepare for that one, with 5 kids to teach, I don't have time to look through the book and figure out where they are, I have to come to the session knowing what they have been going over.  That means I have my own Geometry book and I print out and do their homework, and truthfully I kind of think it's fun.  I heart math! :)  Then, I'm not sure how, but word spread and about a week after starting the geometry tutoring, I got a phone call from someone outside the volunteer program else asking if I could tutor their daughter in Algebra 2.  Then again, word got around, and I got a call a couple nights ago asking if I could tutor someone else's son in Algebra 2.  And that's how I ended up with 7 students and packed our family schedule just a little bit tighter.

But in an effort to remember what is happening in the normal hours around the house, I am trying to remember to take pictures of the kids. 
Willow LOVES helping in the kitchen.  She is constantly standing on her stool waiting for instructions.  And while sometimes it is annoying and slows me down, I try and remind myself that I want her to love cooking and I want her to know where her food comes from and hopefully all her help now will one day turn into her cooking for me!  :)
Here she is buttering a muffin tin.  We were cooking up eggs for breakfast sandwiches that Jayden loves.  Willow only loves the breakfast sandwich if I take it apart and she can eat her egg separate from the muffin.  I'll do whatever I have to do to only have to make one breakfast that both kids like.  (Please try to look only at little Willow and forget the rest of the mess that is our house!  holy smokes I need a maid, or maybe to stop signing up for things so I have the time and energy to pick up and clean once in awhile, but I'd much rather do math than pick up blocks and puzzles)

Jayden spent a couple hours this afternoon making pom-poms.  Who knew that pom-pom makers could be so entertaining?  But they have officially been moved out of my crafting area and into their own bin in the kid's crafting area.

Willow sat around wearing a helicopter hat and causing as much grief for her pom-pom making brother as she could.

She may look all sweet and innocent, but that girl knows how to rile Jayden up like it's nobody's business - I suppose it comes ingrained her in little sister DNA.

Central Kansas Yarn Hop

This weekend was the Central Kansas Yarn Hop!  I've been wanting to do it for the past couple years, but I've always not gone at the last minute because the people I was going to do it with didn't work out.  So this year, I couldn't find anyone with my level of obsession of yarn to commit to going with me, so I decided I was just going to do it by myself.  Slightly loserish?  I suppose, but I'm okay with that, I've been slightly loserish pretty much my whole life.  :)  I tried not to be self conscious when my dad and Royal kept giving me pity looks and saying things like, "You're going by yourself?  Are you sure there isn't anyone else who might go with you?"  There is one person who I know loves yarn as much as me, and I know we would of loved to have spent days together, but she just went and had a baby 10 days ago, so she was out for this year.  So, I went and bought my passport and I planned my route out.  I really wanted to get to all 11 stores, because I just know that I will totally win the grand prize, which has over $600 worth of yarn and goodies!  And let's face it, I totally need more yarn, needles, bags, and goodies! :)

(sorry for the lack of pictures, especially of the kids, I had my camera with me most of the time, just never got it out, and lets face it, a post just isn't any good without Jayden and Willow to cute it up)

On Thursday, after lunch, I set the DVD player up in the car, let the kids pick a movie and we headed out on our first stops.

• Twist in Wichita
• Heritage Hut in Wichita
• Sugar Bunny Blvd in El Dorado
• iYarn in Winfield.

Each day, I totally found new favorite yarn store!

I've been to Twist tons of times, it is my normal stop for yarn here in town.  However, they've recently reduced the size of their shop from 2 store fronts down to 1, so their selection and quantity of yarn has gone way down.  :(

The Heritage Hut is only a few miles away from Twist, but I've never been a huge fan of their store.  The store owner always seems annoyed that I have my kids with me, and more annoyed that they want to pet her ginormous Irish Wolf Hound, so I pretty much just went into the shop to get my passport stamped and left when I saw she wasn't running any great Shop Hop deals.  :)

The kids were excited to actually get moving and watch their movie for more than 15 minutes at a time.  So, we headed down to Sugar Bunny Blvd in El Dorado.  The shop was cute in the front room of an old house, but was pretty small and I didn't find anything I was super excited about, so we didn't look around too much.

iYarn on the other hand was awesome!  While their website is lacking, the storefront is really cute, and they had lots of great yarn.  It totally made the driving around worth it and I found some sparkly ruffle yarn to add to my stash.  Sparkly ruffle yarn makes for some really great quick knit last minute gifts!

On Friday, the kid's weren't as excited to go yarn hopping with me, but at each yarn store I get a free ball of yarn with my passport to all be used together in an infinity scarf and the kids were taking turns choosing the yarn for me.  Let me tell you, it will be a very interesting scarf - Willow was choosing the most sparkly, or furry, or pink, and Jayden was choosing UW colors and Halloween colors. 

I only had 2 stores on my list for Friday, but after finishing up the Creation Station in Newton, they decided they weren't quite done with finding yarn stores, so we drove up to one more in McPherson.

• yarn. in Hutchinson
• Creation Station in Newton
• Oh, Yarn It! in McPherson

The Friday stores were pretty cute.  Yarn. had lots of really cute projects knit up, like an entire chair covered in knitting!  And stuffed alligator eating a human.  And a pink pig knit around a big bouncy ball.

Stop #2 - The Creation Station was pretty pathetic when it came to yarn, but it shared the store space with a book store and a tea shop.  It also directly connected to a Natural Food Store, and a Kitchen Store.  Yarn, tea, books, natural food, and kitchen stuff?  I could of spent all day there!  The kids and I spent time in the book store looking at books and playing with some of their toys.  Then we wandered around the natural food store in search of a snack, which we couldn't find because Jayden was looking for something specific but wouldn't tell me what.  Then before we left, I couldn't not go into the kitchen store.  The kids thought it was fantastic because they were handing out free bags of popcorn and they each got samples of the homemade fudge.  Yay, snacks!  And it's even better that the kids thought those snacks were put out just for them!  Kids crack me up.  So, since the kids were now having so much fun thanks to bags of popcorn and tastes of fudge, when we got in the car to head home they both said, "Home?!? We can't go home yet!  We need to find another yarn store!"  So, we drove north to McPherson.

Oh, Yarn It! was a really cute store.  And they were giving out little tootsie rolls and cookies.  More free snacks and the kids thought they were in Heaven.  This store finally had some great yarn hop deals for me to cash in on, and Jayden found a book that had a pattern for a Ninja in it, and begged me to make it for him.  After 7 stores of the kids acting awesome in, how could I say no???  :)

Friday afternoon/evening Jayden started showing signs of the cold that Willow has had for the past couple of days.  Colds always seem to hit Jayden a little harder and he was not feeling too hot by the time we put him to bed, so I starting thinking that Jayden wouldn't be up to hopping on Saturday.  The original plan was for me to just do the rest of the stores on Saturday by myself, but in the end Royal and I decided it could be fun to do together, if the kids were ok with going.  Part of why I wanted to do the shop hop was to have a reason to visit different parts of Kansas that we hadn't been to before.  I was totally up for letting the kids off the hook on Saturday.  Since they had spent parts of Thursday and Friday in the car, if they were totally burnt out on driving around, I wanted them to be able to stay home and play. 

I went running Saturday morning and Royal got up with the kids.  He gave them both some medicine and they both perked up quite a bit, but by the time I was back, showered, and ready to go, Jayden had changed his mind and said he thought he just wanted to stay home and stay in bed all day.  Then when I was walking out the door he changed his mind again when he found out we would be going out to lunch and maybe dinner and that there would be special treats.  So, all 4 of us piled into the Pilot and headed out.  The best part, and I can't believe I don't have a picture of it, is that Royal rode in the backseat in between the kids the whole time.  Not because he had to, but because the kids begged him too.  So, he sat back there and watched movies, and I sat in the front seats listening to my ipod and singing to myself while chauffeuring everyone around Kansas.  We got some pretty funny looks driving down the road.  :)  We started the special treats early by stopping by Starbucks to get the kids and Royal and hot chocolate and me some tea for my sore throat.  Sick or not, we had a shop hop to finish!

• Wicked Stitch in Wamego
• Wildflower in Manhattan
• The Shivering Sheep in Abilene
• Yarns Sold & Told in Salina

We started by going to the shop that was the farthest away and figured we would work our way back home.  I knew I was going to love The Wicked Stitch when it said in the passport that they specialized in carrying products from "small independant companies, and those dedicated to preserving the earth's resources".  And once there, I did totally love it!  Besides yarn, they had lots of great roving and acid dyes for coloring your own yarn and lots of different drop spindles and spinning wheels.  If it wasn't so far away, I would be hanging out there all the time!

It was around lunchtime, so we had lunch at The Friendship House and stuffed ourselves on bierocks and soup and salad and then headed across the street to this big park and let the kids run around.  Sadly, the cold air and running around totally wiped Jayden out and he started feeling pretty crappy again, so we loaded back up in the car, dished out the tylenol, and headed towards Manhattan.

Holy smokes, Wildflower yarns was awesome!  It had tons and tons of yarn.  I managed to find all the rest of the yarn I needed to finish up the things on my Christmas lists!  This was the first store the kids decided to stay in the car for and wouldn't you know it, but without them, I forgot to get my free ball of yarn.  Dang it!

We then moved onto the Shivering Sheep in Abilene, the hometown of President Eisenhower!  This store, although small and crowded, had a basement FULL of clearance yarn.  Awesome!  Well awesome for me, not so awesome for Royal's credit card...

Then we finally finished the 11 store shop hop at Yarns Sold & Told in Salina.  I've been wanting to stop by this store for awhile because it has billboards on the side of the road that claims they are the "2nd friendliest store in the Universe!"  Too bad I didn't really get a chance to find out.  We were all a little tired of shop hopping, so I just went in, got my final stamp on my passport and turned in my card, and we piled back in the car and drove the rest of the way home.  Royal in the back watching Looney Tunes with the kids, and me in the front listening to my ipod and singing to myself.  :)

Here's all the free yarn the kids mostly picked out that's to be knit together into an infinity scarf.

And here's all my loot!  Time to get cracking and finish my Christmas knitting!

Food Storage 2012

I'm pretty sure this was our biggest food canning/freezing year ever.  The kids are eating more and more of our reserves and we ran out of food long before the winter was over!  So we knew that this year we were going to have to go big!

It all started way back in May with strawberry picking.  Other than a couple strawberry pies, we have pretty much just frozen the berries to use in fruit smoothies (a breakfast staple for my kids) or to warm up and top ice cream with.

Then, in June, we picked peaches at Beck's Farm.  I was hoping to get all my peaches canned before heading to Washington for the summer with the kids, but it was too early for the peaches we normally can and the ones we ended up picking had super cling stones in them, so there was no way to get the flesh off the peach without destroying it.  So, not to be wasteful, we turned them all into peach cobbler fillings!

At the end of June, right before we got in the trailer to head west, we totally lucked out and Gaeddart's Corn was harvested early and Royal didn't have to freeze the corn all on his own!  My dad was even in town (to drive west with me), so he got in on shucking, cutting the kernals off the cob, blanching, and freezing 144 ears of corn with us!

Once in Washington, there was some major food processing done.  400 pounds of tuna, half of which we took home with us (112 pints), 60 pounds of green beans, half of which we kept (30 quarts), and 100 pounds of peaches (45 quarts).  Needless to say, all the food AND the tredmill my dad gave me while we were there, totally weighed down the truck and we were slow going over the passes!  :)

When we got back to Kansas in August, my garden was in sad shape.  We had once again had a scorcher of a summer and with only Royal at home the garden got water with the sprinklers in the morning, but then had to survive the horrible midday heat until Royal got home after work to water them again.  I wasn't so sure how well things would bounce back even with me watering 3 times a day, so I took out a little insurance.  Willow LOVES pesto.  Loves it so much, she will dip anything in it.  Sandwiches and apples and french fries just to name a few.   Pesto is so expensive in the stores and so easy to make, so I planted a LOT of basil in my garden this year.  But since the plants were struggling I bought a couple big bags of basil at the Farmer's Market just to make sure Willow had pesto in the freezer.  Turns out basil is pretty hardy.  After ripping off the flowers to keep it from bolting and watering like mad, my garden basil did really well.  So well that I was begging for a food dehydrator (one more piece of food saving equipment I need!) so I could dry the leaves because there was just going to be too much pesto.  All in all, with the Farmer's Market basil and the basil from my garden, I put up 20 half pints and 2 pints.  So, if you need pesto, please come see me!

In September we did apple crisp filling and applesauce.  A record amount of applesauce.  Jayden eats applesauce even more than Willow eats pesto.  Other than just eating it right out of the jar, he will dip anything in it - sandwiches, crackers, cheese, french fries, etc... Even with our 55 quarts put up, I am having to limit him to just one quart a week or we aren't going to make it to next fall!

And finally, there is the pumpkin puree.  My grand finale!  I always know that once I get the pumpkin done, I am pretty much done for the season!  A few years ago at the farmer's market I was looking for pie pumpkins, so I could freeze the puree, (way cheaper and way better tasting and way fresher than the canned pumpkin at the store) and one of the farmers there talked me into buying a rumba squash, saying that it tasted just as good but was less stringy and watery than the pie pumpkins.  So, I tried it out and I've never gone back!  The only downside is, most people don't know what the heck you are talking about when you ask if they are growing them, and they can be tricky to find.  I've lucked out the past couple years and stumbled across them, but this year I figured I was out of luck.  I was at the Farmer's Market every Saturday searching solely for the rumba and it wasn't there and we were now in October and I'd never found one that late and everybody had been talking all year about how the harvests were 3-4 weeks ahead of schedule, so I was totally preparing myself for surviving on the 3 measly bags of puree that I had left from last year.  Then it happened.  I spotted a man pulling a wagon through the market with 4 of my pumpkins on it.  I totally stalked him.  We followed at a distance until he stopped and then we pounced and begged him to sell us his pumpkins.  He said sorry, but he had brought them for another vendor.  So I asked the lady he brought them for if she would be willing to sell me just one.  Selfish lady said, "No way!" as she stuffed them in the back of her mini van.  Dejected, we finished up our trip to the market and headed towards the car.  On our way out, we saw the guy with the now empty wagon talking to another vendor and I couldn't help myself, so Royal and I asked if he was going to be bringing anymore to the market.  He said he was done selling for the year, but he had a whole bunch of rumba's sitting on his front porch and I was welcome to come and get them if I wanted.  So, that's what I did!  I had to drive an hour west to Kingman to pick them up, but we will have some fresh pumpkin puree for the rest of the year!  I now have the farmer's phone number and his address, and I'm pretty sure I'll never be throwing them away!  If he doesn't show up at the Farmer's Market again next year, I will totally be calling!  :)

I only put up 2 of these pumpkins, which gave me 10 2-cup bags.  I've managed to rope a friend of mine into some of this crazy canning/storing with me and 2 of the pumpkins are for her!

Since I've had a couple people ask, this is what my storage area looks like.  We have a pretty small, unfinished room in our basement that is perfect, even though Royal has to keep buying more shelves.  :)  It's right at the bottom of our stairs, so it's convenient to send the kids down to get something and since it's underground it keeps a real even temperature all year, and hopefully it would survive if a tornado took out our house.

And our freezer out in the garage.

We were really short on berries this year.  We got lots of strawberries, but hardly any blueberries or raspberries or blackberries.  We are going to be hurting in that department until next summer, but I guess that is what they made grocery stores for, right????  :)

What Willow Wears :: vol 18

Willow is obsessed with my black boots (and also her pink cowgirl hat).  I finally had to put a kabosh on her wearing them outside, when they came in covered in blue sidewalk chalk.
"Yeeeee Haaaaaaw!"

Applejack 2012

This past weekend, we made our yearly trip to Applejack Pumpkin patch.  I've heard there are some other pumpkin patches around that are better, but this one is the closest to our house and I got a 50% off a family of 4 admission, so we just headed back out there!  We did the usual big slides, jumpy pillow, zip lines, corn mazes, etc... so here are some pictures!

 

 We had a small problem with mud and getting stuck this year..... :)

Papa's in the House

I love having family come and visit.  Being that the visits are so far in between, there is always so much excitement and countdown calendars made and in this case a map was draw on the chalkboard and we were tracking Papa's journey across the country.  It also makes me quite sad.  I can see how much my kids miss their extended family.  Jayden hasn't been able to go more than 15 minutes today without hugging Papa and telling him how much he loves him and is glad that he is here.

We started our Papa-visit with a trip to Target.  1)because Papa wanted to buy the kids a gift and 2)because there is a Starbucks inside with caffeinated drinks.

Jayden made out with some new Pokemon action figures.  He went into Target knowing what he wanted, grabbed it off the shelf, and never hesitated or changed his mind.

Willow started out with a cell phone in her hand.  Then she put that back and grabbed a laptop.  Then she put that down when we entered the doll aisle.  Papa picked up a Merida doll (from Brave) and said, "Ooooo, Merida!  How about Merida!"  Willow did want the doll, until she saw the costume.  Why play with a Merida doll when you can actually be Merida?????

So, since then, we have had Merida in the house.  She is referring to me as Queen Elinor (Merida's mom in the movie) and she keeps asking when King Fergus (a.k.a Royal, also Merida's dad in the movie) is coming home.  At least she's not asking where her horse and bow and arrows are!

We love having Papa here!

Thunderbirds

There was a free open house and airshow this weekend down at McConnell Air Force Base.  We've never been before, but I totally wanted to watch the airshow.  However, with 300lbs of apples sitting in my kitchen needing to be processed, I just couldn't talk myself into going and spending 4+ hours there looking at airplanes and fighting the crowds.  So, I did the next best thing I could think of.  :)  I loaded Royal and the kids up in his truck, put our folding chairs in the back and headed down towards the base.  But instead of going into the airshow, we parked right across the street from it right before the Thunderbirds started flying and watched the show from there!  Then when it was over, it was easy to get out and get back home to all my apples!
It was an awesome show to watch!