More Projects of Yester-week

Last Friday afternoon, Katie came over and together we took the last 15-20lbs of my tomato harvest and cooked it down to a delicious tomato sauce. I found several recipes online and sort of just combined them to come up with the one we made.  It has been way too hot to can anything, so I decided to take advantage of our deep freezer and just make freezer sauce.  It went much faster than I expected it to, and if we end up loving the sauce, I'll probably forget about canning sauce in future years because freezing it was so easy.   We made almost 10 quarts of sauce!  I didn't write down whe final recipe we used but it has peppers and onions and garlic and honey and loads of herbs in it. I added 2 cans of tomato paste to thicken it up, because I was just too hot and lazy to let it simmer down for 2 more hours on my stove.  My house smelled like a pizza factory all night. Yum.

Our stake planted a few acres of corn as an activity to teach youth and adults to be more self reliant.  Wards were assigned times to participate in the planting, care, and harvesting process. Unfortunately, because of the nasty drought and heat wave we are experiencing, most of the corn became ready to harvest this weekend, rather than stretching out in 2 week intervals until September.  It was available for anyone in the community to pick for 10 cents an ear or 5 cents for ears that the heat or bugs had gotten to, first.

On Saturday morning, we donned our hats and headed to the corn fields. 

It was unbearably hot at 9am and we only lasted about 20 minutes, but between the children, Kasey, Aaron and I, we picked over 125 ears of corn.

 Many of the ears the children picked had been affected by the drought, but even on those, at least 75% of the kernals were in great shape...and for 10 cents an ear?  Totally worth it!  I froze all the icky ends of the cobs that we broke off and have been feeding them to our chickens. They love them!

After the children went to bed on saturday night, kasey and I shucked, blanched, and cut the kernels off of over 125 ears of corn!  It took a couple hours, but we were just sitting and chatting and watchign the olympics, so the work went really quickly. 

Below are my 15 quart sized freezer bags of deeelicious sweet kernel corn ready to go for about $7. 
Yes, we had to romp through the corn fields and pick it ourselves.
Yes, it took awhile to prepare it.
Yes, when my children eat corn with their dinner over the next year, they will know exactly where it came from, how corn grows, and remember how hot they were in standing in the Centerton corn fields when they picked it.
Hopefully, they will develop an appreciation of the effort involved in getting food onto the table and love the convenience of picking it from their own yard or buying it at the store even more than they did before ;)
I also hope they'll feel satisfied knowing they did a servive by participating and contributing to their family's meal.

projects of yester-week

The bunk beds for the girls' room are done done done!
I already mentioned this on facebook, but really enough gratitude cannot be expressed to Aaron, Kasey, Angie, Darcie, Hillary, Emily and Katie for helping me paint this sucker.  It is a big unit of furniture and it would have taken me months to do it on my own.  You know you have the great friends when they are willing to hang out in the garage and paint with you when it was 105* outside that day!

Here is the bottom bunk after we started sanding the orangey poly finish on it, but before we did anything to upgrade it.  Notice it just sat on 1 inch castors....so the bed was practically sitting on the ground.  The headboard was only about 14 inches tall, too so it just felt like there wasn't even a bed there--the mattress would have sat sooo low to the ground.

(It's upside-down here) We added firring strips (thank you kasey and kasey's table saw) to cover up the 80's spindly headboards, then built and attached legs, an apron,  header boards, and finnials.

It took days to sand everything.

Then, we had a 2 night painting party in my 1,000 degree garage.  Many sonic drinks were consumed during the completion of these beds!

 Reese picked out the bedding and we found it even cheaper online. woot!

 Reese loves her new desk for doing homework.  There is a light wired underneath.

 My favorite part has to be the mismatched knobs. We added two more knobs to the side of the desk so the girls could hang up their backpacks.  Hooray for not tripping over them in the entryway anymore!

My other favorite part is the HUGE storage space that adding legs to the bottom bunk created. Those are14 inch bins slid underneath and they neatly store the sweet streets and all of the pet hospital gear. I also have the barbies, babies, musical instruments, and play food bins under there. They slide out easily along the carpet just like drawers.

I'm still waiting for the hardware hooks for the ladder to arrive. Originally, the ladder was screwed to the side of the dresser, but I don't like the idea of smaller kids being able to climb up onto the top bunk whenever they want...especially if we have a play-date over for Corbin.  Now we can just unhook the ladder and store it up top and keep everyone safe.

I'm so happy with the finished result. Don't be afraid to buy ugly furniture if it is solid wood, the price is right, and the bones are good.  The Pottery Barn and Land of Nod loft bed systems similar to this are $2800 and they aren't even entirely solid wood!  Rooms to Go has them for the same price and they are an ugly ambered oak finish and you have to pay extra for the ladders and drawers and of course, shipping.  Craigslist was my friend and this bad boy is solid poplar and we got it for $200.  The bunk beds my brother and I slept on when we were kids are still being used by my nephews, and they originally belonged to my aunts.  The small price I paid to upgrade these beds to make them more safe, functional, and attractive than they were before is a worthwhile investment.  I have no doubt these suckers will last 3 generations!  

Hey you..with the face.

Quincy just referred to Aaron as "the guy with the glasses." 

We knew this day would come.

Bed Rest. 
2 weeks.

Baby is at zero station and I'm almost to 2cm...slightly more progressed than I was with Corbin at this same week in pregnancy (-3 station) but since I've been dialated since 28 weeks, this time, and I'm experiencing a lot of lower back pain with my contractions, we have reasons to be concerned.

So basically, I need to keep my contractions from getting too regular or frequent. Once they set into a pattern, they probably won't stop at this point and labor will progress.  As of right now, they're only regular at nighttime.

I am choosing to let a lot of things go, this week.  I hate doing that. 
Good news is that he is healthy and very active!  He had the hiccups during my appointment, and it was kind of funny to hear his heart beat jump on the fetal monitor every few secconds. My blood pressure is a little too low, but since I'll be pretty much doing nothing for the next 2 weeks, the dizzy side effect of that isn't really an issue. 

Corbin is asleep. I'm going to go nap.  Another bonus to having a 7yr old is that she loves to get Corbin out of his crib for me when he wakes up.  That sweet girl has been so helpful lately, I feel like I should start paying her.  Maybe I will.

What the H---?

No, seriously. ARE we in Hell?
Is that why it is 110* outside, right now?
I feel like my baby is a little rotisserie chicken the way he's flipping around and slow cooking in there.
I'm a sweaty hog.

The 5 day forecast is:
Mon 106*
Tues 106*
Wed 104*
Thurs 101*
Fri 102*

With heat advisory and drought conditions to continue through the weekend.  Blech! Here's our menu for next week:

Mon snowcones
Tues snowcones
Wed snowcones
Thurs snowcones
Fri snowcones
Sat tears and whatever they serve in the snack shack at Metfield pool, cuz that's where we'll be spending the day.

We had a super productive weekend that I'll post about later.  I am paying for it now with contractions that are pretty painful last night and today.  I really wish Aaron wasn't leaving town on Friday.  That's pretty terrifying.  I really just need to sit tight until after the 15th and then we're good to go.  I'll know more after my appointment on Tuesday. I definitely can feel that labor is getting close though. My expectations for what I can accomplish in a day are much lower than they used to be. My friends and Aaron have been awesome with helping get stuff knocked off my "to do" list. I'll get some pictures of finished projects up soon.

Stockholm Syndrome

I noticed it had grown significanly quiet down the hall, where the children had been playing. 

After several minutes of continued silence I decided I'd better go check things out, and see what kind of trouble my littles were up to.

Dude, all 3 kids had tucked themselves into beds and were fast asleep.
I hadn't sent them to bed, they're just totally awesome.
#bestdayever

Reading Time

When Corbin takes a nap, Reese and Quincy have reading time. Keeping a summer jounal was a success last summer to help Reese stay fresh on her writing skills, so we are doing that again, this year.  She writes a page about something we did that day or the day before, then adds and illustration. When she's done, she reads for 20 or 30 minutes.

Quincy's writing might be "behind" for her age, but she is flying through the kindergarten sight word rainbow.  I found a great website with printable activities that uses almost the same sight word list as her elementary school.

I also cut out and laminated all of the flashcards from the Cooper Kindergarten packet and we spend a short amount of time reviewing them and I add a new word or two every week.    I'm realizing how often she looks to Reese when she doesn't have an answer for something. Rather than make a guess, she always asks Reese if she is correct, first. Reese, of course, totally loves this and always offers prolific assistance that often becomes counterproductive to Quincy's progress.  I've had to separate them and send Reese to another room when I work on writing with Quincy, because Reese hovers over Quincy's shoulder and corrects everything that she does.  She is very loving and encouraging, but Quincy needs space to be independent.  It is good for Reese to be in another room, anyway, because she gets distracted and focuses on Quincy's work, rather than doing her own.  She wants Quincy to be able to read so badly. It's really sweet.   

We finished reading Stuart Little together, and I got the movies for the children.  It is fun to hear them compare the differences between the book and the movie while they watch, "Hey, Mrs. Little's ring fell down the tub drain, not the sink" and "That's not how they met Margalo"...things like that. It makes me happy to know they were paying close attention to the little details when we read the book.  I love that my kids enjoy books as much as I do.

Also, in the past week, Quincy has started to pick up all of her pens and pencils with her right hand, place them in her left and then write/color. She still switches back and forth for some letters, but I think she will eventually favor her left hand for writing.