Full Hands

Sometimes its so hard to look past the business of parenting young children. Sarah W. at Give Me Neither shared some great thoughts about that today. A few months back, as I was grocery shopping with the three kiddos, a middle-aged women approached my cart. She looked at me, at the kids, and back to me and commented, "if all those children are yours, you are very blessed."

Whoever this woman is, these words have come back to me time after time as an echo of how God views my children, and that my attitude and actions should reflect God's.

It is quite obvious that I am pregnant. Stick a personal sized watermelon under your shirt and you'd resemble me quite accurately. Conversations naturally evolve around the expected baby and I get a lot of raised eyebrows when others learn this will be our fourth child. One of the most common comments people make goes something like, "you'll certainly have your hands full!". Yes. I like to reply, "my hands are full of blessings".

Cherries, Revisited

When I started this blog, it was more for me. To remember what it was like to be the wife and mom in a busy, young family. Today my blogging paid off when I needed to look up how I preserved cherries. I didn't can any last year, because we had enough from 2009. My ultimate goal is to can cherries, peaches, applesauce & tomatoes on an every-other-year rotation.

We went to Well's Orchard this year for our cherries. Last year we picked at Robinette's and we used Moelker Orchards in 2009. After visiting 3 different orchards, Well's and Moelker have lower-hanging trees and more easily maneuvered aluminum ladders. This is highly valuable when one a) is rather pregnant and b) brings along a 15 month old to join the fray. My neighbor picked at Robinette's today and shared a few sweet cherries with me - they are darker, softer and sweeter than the ones I picked last week, but it may also be a different variety. She noted that the tart cherries were easily picked from the ground.

This year I paid $1.50/pound for u-pick and took home 22 lbs.
Some we ate fresh (not too many... the kids had their fill at the orchard)
6.5 pints canned (1 quart jar didn't seal)
12-ish quarts frozen

The next adventure will be blueberries. My favorite website for checking out farms and orchards also has nice info on preserving the produce.