Jam Day

Today we headed back to the berry farm. Just me and the boys. Reagan is at camp this week and Tony had to go to work.
We go through a lot of strawberry jam every year as apparently all other jams are sub par. Only strawberry for my crew. Therefore, we have to pick a lot of strawberries. I don't always pick my own, sometimes we just walk into the farm stand and walk right out again with two flats of berries that some nice person has picked for us. But I am sort of on a "make these kids work for their keep around here" kick so why not make them pick berries. We were successful and it took us about an hour to pick 27 pounds of berries. They actually all really surprised me by not only picking and getting the product into the bucket rather than throwing it at each other, but also doing so without any complaining. Even when we got rained on. I'm not saying that I have no faith in my kids to get a job done, but really I had little faith that my kids would get the job done. I feared I would be picking and they would be whining. Love it when things don't turn out the way you expect.




If he doesn't know by now that making faces into my camera will only get you posted into blog land.....well...I'm just saying.



When you see pictures of Cooper taken outside with his eyes somewhat open, please realize it is a rarity. He seems to believe that opening his eyes outside is next to impossible as the pain is too much for him to bear. Only when I'm taking his picture though, mind you, the rest of the time he's fine. Again...I'm just saying.

The rest of the day was spent washing, hulling, crushing, stirring and jarring.

We now have exactly 62 jars of strawberry jam. If that doesn't last us 52 weeks, we probably need to seek some jam counselling.