Jared's Haircut

Jared has lots of curl in his hair when it gets long. It's really cute, but when it gets too long it starts looking a little stringy and we have to cut the curls. The first time I was afraid they wouldn't grow back, but it's easier now that I know I'll see them again in a few months. Here are the before and after pictures of the most recent haircut:

Gingerbread Adventures

Making gingerbread houses is one of my favorite childhood Christmas memories. But somewhere in the years since my childhood, my mom lost her recipe and pattern. Last year she finally found them again and made one with my boys at our house before Christmas. I mostly stayed out of the way, but she gave me a copies of the recipe and pattern. This was the first year I tried making one on my own. I baked it and glued it together with the royal icing one night and found half of one section of the roof broken off when I woke up the next morning. My kids almost got blamed for breaking it before I realized what happened. I think I just didn't bake the gingerbread long enough to get it hard enough. After repairs with more icing and an inedible piece of cardboard, we rescued it, decorated it, and used it as a centerpiece for our ward Christmas party. I thought it turned out pretty well, after all. Here's a picture:


About the same time we needed to do the gingerbread house for the ward party, Adam had an assignment in 3rd grade to make a model of an American symbol. He chose to do the Liberty Bell. His teacher said if they made their models out of something edible, the class could eat them after their presentations. So after our gingerbread house, we ended up making a gingerbread Liberty Bell. Jeff was the mastermind behind getting the circular layers of the bell cut to the right diameter to shape the bell. (I was in awe of his math skills, which are usually pale compared to his verbal skills. There's a reason I keep the checkbook in our family.) We only had to smooth it out a little with the icing. There wasn't room for the whole inscription, but we did what we could. Adam did very well on his presentation also, and got an A for the whole project. Here is the finished product. Not bad, huh?

A History of Sewing: Mine, Anyway

My first real introduction to sewing happened one summer while I was in high school. My friend and I took sewing lessons from her mom, a very talented seamstress. I'm sure I was fulfilling some goal for my Young Womanhood Award. I made a pair of shorts. And that was it. I wasn't hooked. Several years later I took a Beginning Sewing class at BYU. I must have felt sewing was a good skill to have, so I gave it another shot. I made a skirt and a blouse that I wore maybe twice. The final project for the class was to compare the cost of buying an outfit vs. making a similar one. When I realized I could buy clothes cheaper than I could make them, my interest in sewing faded completely.

Over the years I've never really regretted not developing that talent, but I have wished I had a sewing machine, just so I could mend things. I'll admit to saving almost all my mending for my mom and mother-in-law. Then earlier this year I received a really nice hand-me-down sewing machine in a cabinet from a lady in our ward in Texas. But I was intimidated by it. Still I saved my mending until my mother-in-law came to visit. She figured out how to use my new machine first and caught me up on all my mending--again.

So, inspired by my friend Charlotte and her lists of goals, I set a goal to figure out how to use my fancy new sewing machine myself before the end of this year. Last Wednesday became the day. Adam earned his Cub Scout Wolf badge and three arrow points at a Pack Meeting sometime last spring. I stuck the badges in a "safe place"--the outside pocket of the diaper bag. And there they stayed through the summer and through our move. Then last month Adam started Cub Scouts in our new ward here in Utah. Not only did he need his Wolf badge sewed on his uniform, but he also needed a new council patch and a new pack number. So I went to the diaper bag to find the patches. All three tiny little arrow points were still there, but the Wolf badge was gone. So I put the arrow points in a safer place and procrastinated. Sewing on patches by hand is a pain and very time-consuming, so I was glad to put off that particular project. But then pack meeting was coming up this month, and I found out the Cub Scout leaders were planning to award Adam his three arrow points again, because he told them he hadn't received them yet. Guilt trip. My fault. No more procrastinating. Time to sew on the patches. So on the day of pack meeting I made the trip to the Scout Shop, bought the requisite patches, and--ran out of time to sew them on. When I finally sat down to sew them on last Wednesday before the next den meeting, I decided that even though it would probably take me just as much time to learn how to use my sewing machine as it would take to sew the patches on by hand, I would be better off in the long run if I would just bite the bullet and get out the instruction manual. It took all afternoon, but I got all the patches sewed on in the proper spots and they look good, if I do say so myself. The pocket is not sewed shut, and the sleeve is not sewed together. . . anymore. It was an absorbing project, but that was a good thing on that particular day when I was letting negative thoughts get the better of me anyway. When I was done, my mood was better and I felt such a sense of accomplishment. I even mended a hole in Jeff's sweatshirt, and tried to patch some of Ryan's jeans. (The patching didn't go so well though, so I made a trip to Sears the next day to buy double-kneed Toughskins jeans, worth every penny of the full price I paid. Although I have yet, to test it, I've heard Sears will replace them for free if your kid goes through the knee before they grow out of them.) I doubt I'll ever claim the title of seamstress, but if I can mend and sew on Scout patches for my four boys for the next 20 years, I think my sewing skills will be just fine.

An apple a day...

...or four bushels in eight hours! On Saturday I did something I've never done before. Jeff and I bottled 30 quarts of applesauce. As a kid I helped my mom bottle and preserve fruit and other things, but until now I've never really had the space or even the desire to do it on my own. But this house we moved into has two apples trees in the backyard, one of which produced a bumper crop of Golden Delicious this year. And it has a mostly empty food storage room in the basement. Three weeks ago we spent three hours picking apples on a Saturday morning when a storm was blowing in and we thought they might freeze if we didn't get them off the tree. Then they sat in boxes in our storage room, waiting for the next free weekend when we could do something about them. I have to admit that when the time came, I wasn't super excited about the project, but I really didn't want the apples to go to waste either.

We started after breakfast, about 9 a.m., with a little over-the-phone coaching and some equipment borrowed from Jeff's parents. And then we just kept going and going. I knew it would take some time, but I didn't realize it would take all day, nor did I realize how all-consuming it would be. The kids watched A LOT more TV than they are usually allowed. And they escaped all their Saturday chores (except helping turn the handle of the Squeezo strainer machine). I didn't want to stop for anything, because I just wanted to get DONE. About 3 p.m. the kids asked, "Can we have some chips?" Potato chips for lunch? "Sure, that's fine." Then my recently toilet-trained three-year-old came and asked for help going to the potty. "Okay, let's go." Then I can go too! We finished about 5 p.m., only because I had arranged for a babysitter so we could go on a date at 6 p.m. and I still needed a shower, not because the apples were all gone. We still have a bushel or so left to eat or dry--I'm done with applesauce!

By the time we finished, I was tired. I told Jeff that I wasn't sure it was worth the effort or the money. I spent $60.00 on a steam canner, canning tools, and jar lids. That means the applesauce cost about $2 per quart, not to mention the man hours it took to pick the apples and make the applesauce. Jeff's man hours are worth at least $25 per hour, and mine--well, it's hard to put a dollar value on what a mom does, but I figure mine are priceless! So basically, we have 30 quarts of really expensive applesauce. It would be so much more cost effective to buy it on a good sale at the store. We don't even eat applesauce very often. Jeff's response was, "Doesn't it make you feel like a good Mormon housewife though, canning your own food?" In one way, I suppose it does. It's what I grew up with. Somehow it seems like something I'm supposed to do. I always figured when I had a decent-sized kitchen and a place to store it all, I would learn how to can.

A little more than eight years ago Jeff had just finished his Master's degree at BYU, and Adam was nine months old. As I remember it, we had our U-Haul packed and ready to drive across the country to Cincinnati where Jeff would get his Ph.D. My parents came up from Cedar to say goodbye and give us a hand-me-down twin bed that Adam could grow into while we lived there. My mom also brought me an antique rocking chair from my grandma's house, and a box full of home-canned fruit. I thanked her--I love home-canned pears and peaches, and she was nice to share them with us, as both sets of our parents have over the years. But I didn't think much of it until we got to Cincinnati. The first time I opened one of those jars of fruit, my chest tightened up and the tears rolled down my face. We were tight on money, and I was very homesick. That box of fruit was a box of love from my mom--food that I didn't have to pay for, and a comforting piece of the home and family that I was missing so much. I hoarded that fruit, and fought back tears again when it was gone.

So what value do I put on my 30 quarts of homemade applesauce? Is it just a waste of time and money? Or am I passing on a heritage of self-reliance and my own jars of love? Guess we'll see next year when our apples are ripe again!

And now I'm off to scrub the stove and kitchen floor...

(The pink jars are cinnamon applesauce, a Packer family tradition.)