Autumn or Winter???

Yesterday evening Mara got into the Fall decorating mood. It was so fun to watch her in action. I didn't get any pictures of her doing it but I did get some of the finished product:

She had gathered some pretty little fall leaves and pressed them for over a day and then decided to make a swag on the window using them.

A little closer view:

She strung them up on some red yarn.

On the living room windows where I have grape vine over the valances she poked the leaves on the grapevine.

For a finished look like this: (sorry it is rather distant)

Then I helped her put together a simple centerpiece for the table. We put clay around the bottom of the candles and stuck them into a tray shaped like a leaf and then we filled in around them with little apples, tomatoes and acorns. She also laid a fall colored place mat on the table and added more fall leaves.

It was beginning to look very festive for fall and pretty and then I looked outside.... "Hey Mara, guess what it coming down?" "It's SNOWING!"

We found the timing rather humorous! God is certainly full of surprises!

Mara also made us place cards and wrapped up our silverware in napkins and added a leaf for decoration for our supper.

We ate mostly by candlelight which was fun!

The sweet little decorator!

This morning I figured the snow wouldn't last very long. But I was wrong. It snowed off and on all day.

Aaron decided we had better add some snowflakes to our decorations, so he made some and tied them up with the leaves! :-)

On Saturday morning we usually have late breakfasts so the youngest 3 were out frolicking even before we ate. Snow is always exciting!

From Apples to Applesauce

One of my favorite things about fall is APPLES! While our apple trees aren't producing yet, we have been blessed to have others share with us and so for several years I have made much of our own apple sauce. (Last year I was able to get a bunch of apples through Freecycle, you can read about it here. I didn't have any success with that idea this year but perhaps some of the rest of you might if you try.)

I love to put up food for the winter but being the busy homeschooling mom that I am, I also like to find the most efficient way to put things up. My mom came up with this easy way to make applesauce and so I thought I would share.

1. Wash the apples

2. Cut them into quarters.

3. Core them (and you can cut them smaller now if you have big apples) and throw them into a big cooking pot. Leave the peelings on. In organic apples the skins are actually quite good for you.

4. Add a little water to cover the bottom of the pan at about 1 inch deep.

5. Add sweetener if you wish (to taste) and we like to add cinnamon.

6. Cook them until soft on medium (or lower) heat. (You can also use the crockpot if you don't have very much. Very little water is needed then.)

7. Next I use my hand held blender and blend them all up into "sauce". This gadget works very slick for this. You could also use a regular blender but that would be much more work. Maybe a hand mixer would work but It wouldn't be as fine of a job.

At this point the applesauce is done. You can eat it right now (though if we are going to eat it fresh like that, I actually don't blend it as we enjoy it warm and chunky) or my Mom freezes all of hers but personally I like to can mine.

To can them I use the water bath method and I do it like this:

1. Wash the jars and rings you will be using.

2. boil some water to pour over the canning lids to sterilize them.

3. In a large pot that is big enough that you can have water 1 inch above your jars, fill with enough water that the water will go one inch above your jars (I always have to do a little guessing here) and put it on to boil. (Put a lid on to make it boil faster and conserve energy.)

4. Fill the jars with applesauce (I use a jar funnel to do this) up to 1/2 inch down from the top.

5. Carefully wash off the rim to make sure there is nothing on it. (Also jars with any chips in the rim will not seal.)

6. Lay the canning lid on top and then carefully put the ring over and tighten it down (make it tight with your hands but not super tight.)

7. When the water is boiling put the jars in the pot of water. I have a wire basket that they fit in to go down in the water, this works nicely or you can also use a jar holder to place them in but you do need to make sure that you have some sort of rack inside so that the jars aren't sitting directly on the bottom of the pan. If you don't have anything you can actually put something together yourself out of wood or metal. Be creative!

8. Bring the water back to a boil and then let it boil for 25 minutes.

9. Shut the burner off and carefully (without tipping if possibly) take the jars out of the water and set on a towel. If you have a basket like I do you can take them all out in that or you can take them out one by one with a jar tongs.

10. Leave them alone until cool and then test the middle of each lid to see if it is tight (sealed) or whether the middle still bumps up and down (unsealed). If they didn't seal you need to store them in the fridge and use them soon.

I find canning to be a very fun and useful hobby which helps my family eat healthfully and also helps us to keep our food budget frugal.

What things do you enjoy canning or would like to learn how to can? I would love to hear your stories!

For more frugal ideas visit Frugal Friday at Life as MOM.

Up in the Tree Tops

Ken and Jonathan in the Tree Fort

After a summer of working (on and off as Ken has had lots of other things to keep him busy too!) the Tree house is basically done! There are a few things that we would still like to add to it like a zip line for a quick getaway from the porch area, a trap door up on the top story and a dumb waiter to haul stuff up to the top but the basic structure is done!!

Here is how you go up: A rope ladder goes to the porch level. (With stabilizing boards behind so that it doesn't swing wildly and make it almost impossible to climb.)

Than up a regular ladder to the inside. (For some reason this picture turned on me and I am to lazy to fix it. )
Once up their you have quite a view. If you look straight down Megan looks this (above) tiny!
Out the front window we have a bird's eye view of our yard. Here comes Granddad across the lawn.
What fun to have a tree fort. We have ideas for furnishings now and hopefully the kids will have a lot of fun playing in it year round! :-) The kids also offered it for Granddad and Nana to live in should they move this way. I'm not sure if they are going to accept the offer or not. :-)

A House of Prayer

I really enjoyed the post "How to build a house of prayer" by Ann Voskamp. I wanted to share the link with you too so you could be inspired as well. I have tried to have my day be filled with prayer and to share that with my family as well but this gives me new ideas and reminds me to keep working to have that continual connection with our Heavenly Father.

God is so Good!

"I praise you forever, Lord! You are the God our ancestor Jacob worshiped.

Your power is great,
and Your glory is seen everywhere in heaven and on earth.
You are king of the entire world,

and You rule with strength and power.
You make people rich and powerful and famous.

We thank You, our God, and praise You.

1 Chronicles 29:10-13

I missed recording a gratitude list online last week but that certainly didn't mean that I didn't have anything to be thank-ful for. In fact that idea is very, very far from true! There were so many things to be thank-ful for that I was to busy to write about them. :-)

One of the ways God blessed enormously has a bit of a story.....

Each fall for quite a few years now we have driven a ways South of here to glean potatoes out of the field. The first year it was just our family and we met up with an older couple that lived by the fields. We picked up around 1,000 lbs that year and hauled them home in a mini van (along with all our family!). We were pretty excited about that and we told others about it too and pretty soon others were wanting to go along. They would say: "please tell us when you go to pick potatoes, we want to go too!"

This year we had more people than ever before that wanted to go so it was a bit of a struggle to get all the schedules meshed together but Wednesday was decided on. It was mid week so several of our Men didn't get to go so we figured it might take a bit longer to pick a bunch up. But we headed off.

Dad had been in contact with the potato company to try to learn what fields they had recently harvested in (They don't mind us gleaning and in the past have been extremely helpful) but they were a little vague as to where we should go. We drove to the field that they had directed us to but it was in the process of getting tilled under and having fertilizer sprayed on it, obviously it wouldn't work to get potatoes from. The question was where to go next. We just drove for a bit, past a bunch of fields that didn't have any potatoes to glean and then Dad leading our caravan of 5 vehicles pulled over. He came back to discuss the options with me in my van and we were trying to figure out which direction to head when an empty potato truck zoomed by.

FOLLOW THAT TRUCK!

We followed him through several turns and for a mile or so and then... a potato field... with potatoes to glean! Thank you God!

Our group of 29 (3 men, several women, and lots of kids! - it was a great FIELD trip!) jumped out and started picking up potatoes. We had been their about 5 minutes and one of the workers drove up. My mother-in-law was closest and so she talked to him. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I was thinking "Oh no, for some reason they don't want us to be here and he is telling us to leave". A minute later she came running and hollering for my Dad and then I really thought so. But then she told us "He says that they accidentally dumped about 400 lbs of potatoes out in a pile and if we follow him in a 4 wheel drive vehicle we can come get them." He was in a hurry and just wanted a few of us to come so those of us who were closest jumped in the 2 trucks and followed quickly.

At the pile we were able to fill up one hundred pound sacks in just a few minutes. We found out that it was way more than 400 lbs, it was closer to 2,000 lbs. Thinking back on that situation just makes me realize how awesome God is and how good He is to His children! We not only were able to get potatoes (and were led to a field) but God blessed us with a way to get them super easily! It just amazes me with the way things were timed!

All in all from the weighing and calculating we did, we are pretty sure that the group got over 3,000 lbs. We know that in my Dad's truck we had 2,000 lbs. So for my Thanksgiving list today I have:

12.Potatoes!

13. God's perfect timing!

14. Fun times outside with friends in beautiful weather.
15. Ken's parents coming to visit.
16.Terry, my father-in-law, spending hours telling my kids Bible stories.

17. Mara, my sweet 10 year old. I can't believe how wonderfully God has blessed us to give us Mara as a daughter. She is sweet, smart, compassionate, obedient and she wants to do what is right. Thank-you God for letting us have Mara in our home and lives!
18. Ken! I thank God often for a loving and hardworking husband! I am blessed to be his wife. Ken also celebrated a birthday this past week and I am thank-ful for the years that he has been able to have and I hope their will be many more!

19. Flowers. I feel so blessed to get to work with flowers fairly often. Whenever I am around them it makes me feel so thankful that God decided to make our world a beautiful and interesting place to be. This last wedding I got to work with a couple of varieties I had never seen before and I so enjoyed seeing a new part of God's creation!

20. Getting to see the best circus ever- right in my own front yard!

21. Impromptu performance of a little fairy to keep us all laughing while the regular actors figured out their next costume.

22. A pleasant rainy Sunday afternoon where I got to listen to Sharyl, my mother-in-law, compost music while I rolled out tortillas by candlelight.

23. A pretty much completed tree house! (I'll post pictures soon)

24. Fun with friends decorating the men's bathroom at church. The first and probably last time we will ever have a "party" in the bathroom.

25. Good helpers! (Sharyl also helped but I don't have a picture of her there, I also don't have a picture of the completed wall.)

26. The blessing of a new church building and the fun we could have celebrating it's completion!

27. A sweet little Megan who choose Oven mitts over a beach ball as a door prize. :-)

28. Fun making baskets with my mom and sisters.

29. Times with family and fresh corn on the cob.

30. Miracles

Busy, Busy

We have been having lots of fun with having company for 8 days (Ken's parents), getting ready for an open house at church (tomorrow), celebrating Birthdays (Mara and Ken), picking potatoes and more. That is why I haven't been blogging but I hope to be back soon. :-)