Strawberries

Remember the strawberries from yesterday's post?  I made 6 pints of freezer jam and it was super duper easy!

Isn't it bee-u-ti-ful sitting on the counter.  It was pretty hard seeing it there and waiting for it to set up before I could slather it on some bread.  Tonight, definitely tonight!

Produce!

The latest Bountiful Basket was full of stuff we'll definitely eat.  I also got some bread, strawberries and I split a box of oranges with a friend.

I have a plan in the works for the strawberries.  And I see a lot of orange juice in our future.  J

Tooth Fairy, Part II

Grace has had a loose bottom tooth for quite awhile.  When she was last at the dentist, they told her to keep wiggling it so it would come out so the big tooth could come in properly.  The other day, I was looking at it and noticed the big tooth is coming in behind it already, so it was a tooth wiggling fest.  The other night Daddy was helping her...it WAS gonna come out.  We were all prepared with string.  And it did, before we even had to use the string.  The tooth fairy visited that night and left Grace with a whole dollar bill.

Weekend & Body Wash

Wow, over the weekend I got a lot accomplished.  I canned some carrots; 6 pints in fact.  I forgot to take a picture before I took then downstairs.  Imagine 6 lovely pints of carrots here.  I also had to use up some zucchini from the last bountiful basket.  So I made 2 loaves of zucchini bread....yet again, imagine a picture here.  I have a bunch of training this week until 5:00, so I premade some dinner.  After training, I have to pick up Anna and Leah from daycare, then I have to run to Burns and pick up Grace.  I probably won't actually be home until after 6...Jeremy may beat us home.  I ain't gonna wanna be making dinner when we should be eating by then.  So I made some soup, chicken pasta salad, broccoli salad and egg salad to throw some things together easy enough when I get home.  I also made laundry soap, you saw that post yesterday.  I made some body wash too.  Jeremy bought a whole bunch of Irish Spring bars before he broke his hand.  Then when he had to use a plastic bag on his hand, he decided body wash was easier to use.  After searching the internet for some recipes and then kind of throwing them together, I made some.

 Here's the soap and water melting together in the pot.

Here's the finished product all ready to be put in the bottle.  I made a small batch with 2 bars of soap and 6 cups of water, to be sure it turned out the right consistency.  Jeremy said it was a bit thin, so next time I'll use a bit less water.  And much cheaper than buying body wash all the time.

Laundry Soap

Awhile back, I thought I would give making laundry soap a try...again.  I made powdered stuff several years ago and just didn't like it because the soap was never grated fine enough and left little soap balls on the clothes.  After talking to a couple of my coworkers, I thought I'd try making liquid laundry soap.  I used a recipe from the Duggar's blog.  I made my first batch several months ago and it was super easy and cleaned my clothes.  I was about out, so this weekend, I made another batch.

Here's the grated soap in the pot.  The Fels Naptha sure smells good.

After adding the water, before the soap begins to melt.

In the 5 gallon bucket with the melted soap and other ingredients.  This was taken before the overnight sit to gel up.  This morning I divided it up among the old milk containers and added the remainder of the water.  I got about 10 gallons of laundry soap.  Now that it's documented, I'll see how long it takes to use all of it up. If you look around the internet, this stuff is around a penny a load....super money saving.

Willy

If you've ever seen Ax Men on TV, you've seen the Swamp Man, Shelby Stanga.  Well, Jeremy just laughs at all his antics.  He even has loaded a ringtone on his phone.  Shelby has a dog named Willy....since Jeremy idolizes (as near as I can tell, HA!) the man, it was not hard at all to come up with a name for this little guy.

Meet Willy.

Donut Muffins

I've had an urge to do some baking lately.  After perusing the internet via Pinterest (have you been there, it's awesome!), I found a recipe for some donut muffins.  I used muffin liners because I've never had luck getting the muffins out in one piece when I just grease the pan.  Our batch made 23 mini muffins, this morning there were only 12 left and after breakfast only just enough to let daddy have a taste.  *ah-hem*

Scoot, Scoot

Last night I sat Leah on the floor next to the table.  I was paying bills at the table and she was happily screeching away.  I looked down and she had managed to scoot herself up to the leg of the table and was trying to chew on the leg.  She doesn't have any teeth yet and kept bumping her noggin against the leg of the table.  After awhile the squeals of fun turned into squeals of unhappiness.

And last night on the bed, she got herself up on all fours.  Watchout mama, I think crawling is on the horizon.

Oh, Mittens!

I recently finished a pair of mittens.  I really like the color work cuff.  They have become my new driving mittens.  From one of my favorite bloggers, Yarn Harlot, check them out here.

Jeremy goes back to work on nights tonight for 3 nights.  His last day of work was nearly 2 months ago.  And then in a few days he starts turnaround.  That means a 12 hour shift every day for about a month.  I'm not looking forward to that, but at least he's not on the night shift for the next month!

What a disappointing winter storm we had....it flurried, horizontally, of course, the wind blew, but we didn't get any accumulation of snow.  However, I still expect a storm before summer comes about.

Easter

Wow, where have I been?  There really hasn't been much of interest happening at Chez Yearout lately.

The girls saw the Easter Bunny last week and got their picture taken.  Afterwards Grace asked why he was wearing tennis shoes (they were peeking out from the costume).  The years of believing may not be long lived.

We went to Douglas for Easter.  It resembled a daycare there with 3 under 1 year old and 3 over 2 years old!  The girls got lots of candy and toys from the Easter Bunny.  They had a fun time finding eggs, the Easter Bunny's getting pretty tricky and hiding them in harder to find areas than last year.  Grace and Anna got chocolate bunnies with big ears, in order to make them easier to eat, we whacked them up into small pieces.

You can see Grace's wooden whacking spoon in motion if you look close.  Then they wanted to eat "killed bunny" for dessert.  That seems wrong in all sorts of ways!