Our life in pictures

A picture diary of our recent happenings:

*Kayla and Alyssa had their Spring Piano Recital recently:

Alyssa Playing. The recital was held at a local nursing home, which I thought was a unique and good idea. The folks who lived there were able to come and listen to the kids for their "entertainment" that night.

Kayla Playing

*We've been trying to work on our food storage and so we had bought a bunch of flour, rice, pinto beans and a few other things at Costco. Then because the cannery had a better deal on Oatmeal, I bought some of that there and checked out a dry pack canner (they let us have it for a week, but it took a month of being on the waiting list). We spent the better part of one of our recent Saturdays canning. It was a family affair!

Kayla and Alyssa helping to fill the cans and put the labels on. Can you tell how messy the flour was?

We ended up canning 130 cans worth of stuff. The cannery mentioned they were raising their prices again at the end of this month. So if there is anything you want, buy it now before the prices go up!!

We opted to do the canning on our backporch, it was a good choice because of the quantity of product and the mess!

Even the little kids (Rilyn and Tyler) got in the action by helping to put the cans in boxes after they were filled, sealed and labeled.

*We've been going to the library once or twice a week lately and one of the books we checked out was a book on how to draw dinosaurs. On a recent rainy day the kids and I pulled out the book and we all had drawing lessons:

The kids drawing dinosaurs in the dining room. They got licorice while they drew too.

Kayla and her drawings.

Tyler and his drawings and some of his is a little help from Mom. ;)

Kyle and his drawings.

Rilyn and her drawings.

Alyssa, our 'like her Dad Lefty', and her dinosaur drawings.

*And King Soopers, a local grocery chain, has had raspberries on sale this week for 99 cents per 6 oz. container. So I took advantage of the sale and made some raspberry jam yesterday.

Raspberries is one of our families very favorite things!

The jam cooking.

The lids 'cooking'. I learned from my Mom that if you warm/boil the lids before placing them on the jars, they will seal themselves (when making jam) without having to put them in a water bath canner.

Some of our finished jam! Yum!! It is another family favorite way to eat Raspberries! But boy, does it use a lot of sugar! I even bought the Reduced Sugar Sure Jell Pectin (in the pink box).

*And finally, I'm getting ready to teach this little Fencepost Snowman for a midweek Enrichment Activity at the end of next Month. It will be Christmas in July at my house.