January 2019!

Jan. 1st-5th Montana! Skiing, campfires, games, sister outings to the town, snow walks at the state park and a huge wind storm that broke the trampoline!

Jan. 6th Sweet Kids!  Swiggy uses Jasper to drink his bottle. First tooth! Opal gives Mama a full massage!

Jan. 11th Tuff finishes his preschool level iPad game! Mama and Dada go Duck Pin bowling with friends and score all we can play bracelets and Mama scores a 540 at skee-ball - her highest score ever!

Jan. 13th We take Tuff out for mud pie for finishing his preschool. The family comes over and surprises Dada with cleaning and rearranging the MamaDada room. (Side note: if your bed, a whole living room set including a piano, desk, 3 dressers, a hot tub, and your extended family can fit in your bedroom...it's too big of a bedroom. Stuff is gonna pile up in there!) (2nd side note: we got rid of the hot tub!)

Jan. 19th-21st Peter surprises Eben, Kivi and Jasper with a trip to Universal Studios! Here's Jasper's take on the trip:

Jan. 21st Pella goes indoor ski diving with her friend, Isabella! And the rest of us strain the honey that we got from our bees (who all died of mites) back in Oct!!

Jan 22nd Buggy and I and the kids go to the March for Life Rally at the capital in the rain!

Jan 24th After taking Berg and Pella who have gymnastics on Thursdays (or Jasper who is in advanced gymnastics on Mondays) all the way in Dupont, Tuff and Coal and I go to the garden, the library or the Dupont Museum - their favorite. After being there multiple times, I finally realized the old store was called Johnson Bros. - fitting!

Opal, Berg and Pella helped the Holmes girls in a snowman building contest at Sprinker and won first place!

Tuffy asked Jesus into his heart!!! He prayed with Mama and Dada on the living room couch during our night time devotions.

Jan. 25th Awana Youth Leader Bunco Party at our house! Mama has lots of fun leading these amazing HS and MS kids at Awana each week.

Jan. 28th Dada comes home to bring us police cookies and ice cream in his uniform. A treat since his is a plain clothes guy usually. 

Jan. 29th Babies wagon ride.

Jan. 31st Family ping pong in the basement.

Honey Harvest 2013!

Little Fall Lessons

I love fall! I think it's my favorite time of year. This year it kind of sprang upon me. I realized I was suppose to start homeschooling, get Jasper's party ready, direct our church's Cubbies program and manage our home all at the same time and I wasn't ready. So we started our school a little later in the year than the kids who go to school. (We can do that, because I'm the teacher and I decide when we start!) I took some time to get my little babies in order. Well, first I had to make a baby - a sock baby, so I made a Pella. This seems unimportant, but sometimes these little details make it easier for me to focus on the bigger picture. Now I have a complete little sock baby set in the homeschool/ dining room. Lesson: Do the fun things, the other things will always be there to do later.

Then I got our little lives in order. I created a very structured schedule. I've never tried this type of structured schedule before, but working around Pella's feeding schedule, and working with all the kids one on one with school it had to be done. And it works! The kids look at it all the time and check to see what they're suppose to be doing and follow it! Mostly. We do have flexibly lax days sometimes. This has been a great sanity to our little, loud home. I love how the middle kids have stepped up to the times when they are scheduled to take care of their littler siblings! Who knew this would work so well!
By the way, on the first day of school this year the kids cried and said they didn't want to do school, and they were so sad and it made me sad. So on the second day of school I told the kids we were no longer doing school. From now on we were not going to have school. We were only going to learn stuff and they were so relieved and so happy. So now we don't even do "school" over here. We just "learn stuff".
Lesson: Kids can follow a schedule when they know what the schedule is (and the word school is not on the schedule).

Every fall we make "Happy Fall" muffins to hand out to our neighbors and drive around to our friends. The kids each get to pick a family to give muffins to. This year we made pumpkin chocolate chip and pumpkin cream cheese muffins but had no time to drive them around to our friends, so we gave them to our Awana leaders and our Cubbie volunteers. 

Lesson: Friends are everywhere so give the ones you see muffins.

The kids love, love, love their new dentist, Dr. Beck, at Fircrest Pediatric Dentistry! They all get to go into the big room together where they each have their own chair, movie and dental hygenist. Then Dr. Beck comes and looks at them all and I just follow him around the room and hear what he has to say about each one. It's so fun and they are so nice! Fall dentist check-ups - check! (Except Eben has to go back and get some cavities fixed.)

Lesson: Mama has to do more brushing!

This fall we had an experimental honey harvest. Removing the frames from the hive went well. Shmee and I got all the frames out fine, except I think some of the bees may have swarmed because there weren't as many bees as we've had before, but who knows because these are a new type of bee to us. We have Italian bees this year, they seem littler and way less aggressive.

The experiment was our new extractor which we purchased online cheaply, and now we know why, all the frames we tried to spin, broke. Oops. I think it had something to do with the drill being too fast and the frame holder putting too much torque on the wrong part of the frame, plus a lot of the honey was from our last bees, the Carolina ones, so it was super thick and heavy.

The kids sure liked it though, they got to lick a lot of broken frames of honey.

Our friends came over to get a lesson in honey harvesting. Sadly we were not very good teachers of how the process should go as we failed to extract any honey.

This was the messiest honey year ever. We ended up having to cut all the honey, wax and all, off the frames and into a mesh bag to hang and drain into the brand new trash can container. The process is still not finished. Gravity isn't even working to pull the honey out of the wax. So, we'll have to squeeze it out at some point. Now we know the importance of a good extractor.

Lesson: When your cheap-o extractor breaks all your frames; get sticky, eat the honey and next year buy the expensive extractor.

 We went to the Steilacoom History Museum's Apple Day and found out that no one uses all the apples in the little orchard. They said we could come back and pick them. So we did! We picked 2 huge bins full of apples! Peter was an amazing apple peeler and canner! Who knew he had such skills. He totally got the canning bug. (I think it was all those Mother Earth New magazines we got from a neighbor.)

We made so much out of all those apples. No part of them went to waste. He made applesauce and canned apple slices. I made dried cinnamon apple nests out of all the peels and apple curd and jelly out of the cores. The small part that was left over we fed to the chickens!

Lesson: When life gives you free apples, can them!

Opal finally got her first haircut (not counting when we cut her bangs). Her hair was actually going into the toilet when she went to the bathroom, so she decided it was time to cut it. I trimmed it up to her shoulders and it's so much easier to do now! Plus, it doesn't get into her food when she eats, or the toilet - bonus!
Lesson: If you can wipe with your hair, it's time to cut it off.

Bee Batch # Two

I don't know what happened to our poor little bees. They didn't make it through the winter. The mysterious thing is that they didn't all die in the hive. Only a handful were left and there was still a ton of honey for them.  Either they swarmed and then died because of our harsh winter, or they were the sad result of the confusing colony collapse disorder.  Either way, we got new bees. On April 14th, we went to Trees and Bees and picked up our new Italians.

It's actually funny how calm our kids are around bees now. There were so many bees flying around and they didn't even bat an eye.

Berg and Opal were so cute eating their lunch together there.

The next day, Peter had to work so I asked Miss Kim if she would come help me put the new bees in and she said, "Yes!". Good thing too, cause it really is a two person job. She had to cover the hole on the bee box while I got the queen out and put her in first and then we dumped the other bees in on top of her and put the frames back in.

 It went super smooth and fast except for the fact that I put the queen in upside down which meant she was blocked and couldn't get out!  I had to go back the next day and free her from her cage by myself. But she was cooperative and crawled right out onto my finger and into the hive. They're all still there so hopefully that means they like their queen, but we haven't checked them yet so we'll have to do that soon.

Thanks for being such a good sport future bee keeper Kim and great pictures, Eben!

Getting Ready for Fall!

Actually, it has been fallish for a while, we never really had a full summer. But that doesn't mean we get to skip out on our end of summer responsibilities. Right after Jasper's birthday party we decided to take the honey supers off the hive. It was about one of the last dry, warmer days left of the season and once it starts getting rainy and cold, the bees will start eating the honey. It felt really warm in that bee suit. I think Baby Wormie made me feel even hotter.

Since Peter was out of commission, Kim helped out as my bee partner. She was a pro shaking the bees off of each frame and lovingly handling "the girls". Look at all that capped honey!

We've been harvesting vegetables from our garden through out the summer, mainly a ton of lettuce and yellow squash. We did get some zucchini, one cucumber, carrots, lots of tomatoes and a basket full of peas. We still have some tomatoes, corn, romaine lettuce and acorn squash to pick. But we'll see what the cold weather does to them. They're not quite ready yet.

We had 2 cords of wood delivered and the amazing children stacked it all!! We really had no other choice, Peter couldn't do it and neither could I. They have 2 lame parents right now. I mean literally, we are lame. Well, I can walk, but not far as my hips and pelvic bone had already started the separating process and it feels like I will rip in half while I waddle along. They did such a great job with the firewood, though, they didn't complain and all worked together for the couple of days it took them to do it.

It really was a lot of work!

I just like this pic of the bigs reading to the littles. We usually have story time every morning before they get dressed. Jasper and Opal both get to pick out a book or two. This morning, I decided to let Eben and Kivi do the reading while I cleaned the kitchen and looking over at them made my heart melt. I love my kids!

I had to clean the kitchen so we could do honey extraction!! Usually this process takes a while but our friends that we share the extractor with updated our hand crank spinner with a drill bit. Much faster! I cut the caps off the honey with a hot knife.

The summer was short, so we didn't get as much honey as we thought we would. One whole honey super was empty, but we did get about 14 frames of honey.

Dada puts the frames in the spinner two at a time and the drill does all the work. Berg looks on mesmerized. And the other kids eat the honey and chew on the wax caps from the pan where I cut the frames.

Then we pour the honey through two different strainers and into the big honey bucket so later on we can fill our little jars.

Mmmmm. Honey.

Helpers and honey

Our kids are great helpers. We ask them to do a lot to help the family and most of the time they chip in with a great attitude. Not for money, prizes or rewards, but because it's all of our responsibility to help out - and there's always something to be done. This fall, Jasper was so excited to help Dada outside with wood projects. He'd sit outside and watch him chop the wood and then wait for his turn to put it in the wheelbarrow or stack it in the pile. The boys are also great at getting the wood from outside and bringing it in for the fire.

After stacking many wheelbarrows full of wood, Jasper took Opal outside to admire his work and in his best big brother voice told her, "Hey Opal, wanna know who moved all this wood? Bubba Did! You know how? Cause God made Bubba so strong!"

And finally, all of our honey, jarred and looking pretty. It looks like a lot, but sadly, we're already out. Time to go buy honey at the store. Well, we did get pretty excited about giving it away this year as our Christmas presents.

The boys stacking more wood.

This year we had to buy our pumpkins! Sadly the Lakewood fire dept. was not able to get any free pumpkins for their harvest day, so we went to Safeway instead. The kids were still excited about getting to pick out their own pumpkins.

Dada's new fall craze: Making pretzels. Last year he was really into making bread. This still involves the kids kneading and rolling the dough, but also adds lots of salt, or cinnamon and sugar or mustard or my favorite - nacho cheese!

Fun Things

Other fun things happened on honey day (and the day after):

Grandma rode the jetski! Peter basically told her it was her turn to ride and she got right on and hung on like a champ. Grandpa gave her a lovely, not too fast ride around the lake.

The kids played outside all day, while we did our honey extraction. They'd come in and out for turns to crank the extractor and lick spilled honey off the table. Then at one point, Jasper and Kivi came in after jumping on the trampoline looking like this:

We were laughing so hard! They said they decided to switch suits while jumping on the trampoline!

The You Go Girl Run our small group ran was actually the day after Honey Day. But it still felt like we were in the middle of it, because stuff was everywhere, and we hadn't canned the honey yet. So... our crazy small group, while we were eating our progressive dinner, (I think Shari started the idea) decided that we should all do a 10K together. I, the girl who hates to run, was anti the idea. But peer pressure won. I got in 3 practice runs - a 1/2 mile, 1 mile, and 3 mile (which I believe is 1/2 of a 10K) with the small group girls before the race.

Some of the guys dressed in pink and ran along side us. Peter was so great, he had a pink headband that read, "In my dreams I'm a Kenyan" and a 100% Rough and Tough Cowgirl shirt. He went my slow little pace the whole way and was super supportive, so were all our kids who came with Poppie in the bus and Grandma and Grandpa too! They were all there at the 3 1/2 mile point waving flags and cheering us on - they were so cute!

Here's our little group! And our great guys! So I did it - a 10K and I ran the whole thing. I never have to do that again! Did I mention that it was freezing cold and raining? I was blind the whole first mile while the mascara ran into my eyeballs and all down my face - I'm sure by the end I looked like a bruised pinata.