First Days....

First Day of School, Aug. 17th 2009

Cayden is in the 4th grade and it still blows my mind that my little boy is this big. He is such an awesome student, he loves loves to learn and always tries his hardest. Thanks for being you Cayden and wanting to be the best you can be.

Our sweet little Ally girl is in the 2nd grade now, wow! It seems just yesterday she was so sad that Cayden was going to school all day and she was in preschool for only half day and she would get so bored at home without him. She is a little social butterfly and has ALL of her friends in her class this year, poor Mrs. Hendon! She is seven going on seventeen and Travis and I are doing everything we can do keep her "our little girl" for a little longer.
They were both so excited they could hardly stand it, they were both up and dressed before my alarm even went off to wake them, I am so glad they both LOVE school!

"Bye mom" she is off, Cayden was already long gone.

Now another first day, if you have a tendency to get queesy (sp) easy then maybe this next post isn't for you...

My first day of canning meat. Yeah I know alot of you could probably do this in your sleep but it was my first day and I got 4 other suckers, I mean people, to do it with me.

I have canned before, beans, applesauce, jams, etc. but my first time doing meat. We had 180 lbs. of beef. Yikes!

Here is a small glimpse of some of the meat in an ice chest being transfered from the "thawing staion" aka bathtub to the kitchen.

Here is a very small portion of the lids and one of the three canners we used.

Shannon Carver very studifully picking out the thawed meat to put in jars and the still frozen meat to go back to thawing. *Notice the clorox wipes on the the counter by her. We used many of these through out the day* Shannon and Lori were AWESOME and had their system down of putting the meat in jars, while the rest of us salted, sealed and dealt with the pressure cookers, oh and the 5 kids we had.

Again just a GLIMPSE of the jars. I think there is about 30 jars in this picture and I believe we ended up with just about 200 jars, give or take a few.

Lori, such a good sport to transport the meat from the "bloody bath" to the ice chest to the kitchen. Not the job I would have most preferred but we all did a little of everything. Kind of gross to see that bathtub full of bloody water. We joked all day about that Brooke and Heber (we were at Brooke's house and Heber is her hubby) better not get in a fight and have the police called, cuz with all the DNA all over the place it would have been quite the seen, lol! I know kind of twisted synical thinking huh?

We had a good time, it took us 12 hours to do it all. We could hardly stand on our two feet by the end of the night, well except Shannon who was playing the wii at 9pm while we waited for the jars to finish pressuring, but with some energy strips, coke and dr. pepper we did pretty dang good! Look forward to our next canning adventure ladies.