Baby Ella

Today is Baby Ella's 2nd birthday and here is how we celebrated. You can find out more about baby Ella by looking at my cousin's wife's blog - The Endless Pile of Laundry - on my blog list to the right. Megan and Jason are amazing, and they may be tired of hearing that, but it is inspiring and touching to know their story.

 The balloon release

 Abby wasn't sure she wanted to let her balloon go

Because we have been focusing a bit on the temple this week, our conversation about Baby Ella made more sense, at least I hope. Like the balloons, Baby Ella has moved on but because she is sealed to her family for eternity, she and her family will be back together again once they are all in Heaven. She just got there a little sooner than they will. And like Abby, sometimes it's a hard to let go, but unlike a balloon that we don't really expect to see again, Ella's family can fully expect to see her again.

Appled out

I'm appled out. I'm glad this is just about over. Next week we are starting our General Conference Prep. Should I be concerned that I spend 4 weeks on apples and only 1 week on the Prophet and Apostles of the Lord? Probably.

Here were our FINAL apple activities.

Our very generous neighbor said we could pick as many of his apples as we wanted - all season long. So we went across the street and got to pick apples ourselves from an apple orchard. The kids loved it.

With those apples we made an apple crisp. (Half of which I ate for lunch that day :)

And in one of those apples we found a worm (he's in there, I promise.) This brought back a certain memory of biting into an apple and watching the frightened worm scurry back into the core before I could eat him. Gross! Why would I ever want to eat a worm? I screamed and threw the apple as fast as I could. (but being in the car it couldn't go very far). It took all the courage I had to pick up the apple again and throw it out the window. Ew. I almost bit him in half! Anyway, I knew enough this time to see that there was going to be a worm in this apple before I actually cut into it, so I had a little time to prep myself.

With a few of the Allred Orchard apples we had left, we made some apple cider - which was yummy - but not as good as, well, the good stuff.

And with the very last of that 3/4 bushel I pulled out the hand-me-down food dehydrator with no manual and no knobs or dial. Just a cord and a plug. Sounds easy enough, but I've also had past dehydrator experience, so I was cautious and didn't promise the kids too much.  We made this into a science experiment. What happens when we dry out the apple slices? What will they look like? How will they be different than the fresh apples?

He took the slicing job very seriously

the night before

the next morning

tasty little guys

And then for fun we tried to rehydrate our dried apples with the last of the apple cider. We let them soak overnight. They were pretty good. It was also a fun science experiment to hypothesize whether or not the rehydrated slices would be exactly like the fresh slices and why or why not.

before

after - they don't look much different, only slimier, but they did rehydrate a bit

We made this awful "bushel of apples" craft that could have been SO much better if I had put more than 3 seconds into planning it. There are many many things we did "wrong" and all those creative mommy minds out there are welcome to take the base idea and actually make something cute.

But this little activity/drawing was a success, I think. I like how Joshua spent a lot of time and thought into it and tried to really draw an appropriate picture for each square.

If you really want to read the captions, just click and enlarge the photo

Last but not least, Joshua has been asking for a week or so to draw/create a dinosaur with our craft supplies. So one afternoon I brought down the box and he and I just let our creative juices flow. It's good, I think, to just let him create whatever he wants sometimes, instead of dictating what he should do with all those little crafty things.

Next week, General Conference!

A sad story with a happy ending

It takes a lot of faith for me to plant a garden, because up until this morning, I didn't really believe garden's actually grew. Mine never have. Ever. (ok, not that I've had that many.)  We had harvested some radishes, but grasshoppers harvested everything else in our box. Our broccoli didn't make it above 2 inches. Our cucumbers because the daily "resting" spot for little beagle on his walk. gross. (I almost put out a sign for said beagle's owner, but decided against it last minute.) One of the 4 zucchini plants obviously wasn't going to make it and the others were more like baby dwarf zucchini plants, if there even is such a thing. The crookneck were slightly larger, but that's not saying much.

Derek and I decided that it was just good enough this year that we made a real effort. The prophet said plant a garden and that is what we did. Nobody becomes a master gardener over night, anyway. I had kept the plants alive all summer, and that is really saying something.  Our awesome ward started a "farmer's market" where all the neighbors who do have producing gardens can donate their surplus and those of us who don't can come pick it up. Brilliant idea. See, hadn't we been blessed with fabulous fresh garden produce anyway? We had been blessed for our efforts. I was started to feel ok about things.

And then... our 3 tomato plants started blooming and eventually those little blooms started turning into little green marbles. From the 3 plants (none of which, by the way, were taller than maybe 18 inches) we harvested 3 tomatoes and were eagerly awaiting the 4th and 5th. I could hardly wait! Just one more day... until we walked up the driveway on that sad Monday morning. The plants just didn't look the same. They were somehow... smaller?  Much smaller.

Deer.

I was very very sad. I'm not even joking. I felt awful. The deer did not even leave one little green marble. Why my tomatoes? Julie down the street has a gazillion tomatoes, all big and plump and red and juicy. I know because she gave me about 15 the other day to make up for my sad, sad harvest. Why me?

Well, little deer, you cannot defeat the Mocks. Come after us, and we will just grow back bigger and better and stronger. Take this!

TWO zucchini!

take that!

and that!

(This is a fertilized cucumber. We might leave it right there)

Oh yes! 4 little marbles. There are more where that came from.

And I know.  The deer will probably get these little guys too. (unless somehow I can steer them to Julie's garden...)

Did you miss it?

Yesterday, I mean. It was the first official day of fall. Although here the weather started cooling off on September 1st!! Ok, it was 78 degrees today, that's still pretty awesome. In fact, it is TOTALLY awesome. I love fall. It is my favorite season of them all.

Here is what we did to celebrate...

Fall leaves to adorn our window

WARNING: This activity may take all day long if 1) you let your four year old pour the glue on the "leaves" because you have to wait all day for it to dry, and 2) you let your two year old pour on the glitter because you will spend the rest of the day cleaning up the mess.

Some butternut squash for dinner (honestly, this should have been the dessert)

squash, raisins, cashews, butter, and brown sugar (I was going to use crushed pineapple instead of butter/sugar but the can went mysteriously missing)

And some raspberry picking!!!! Is that a fall activity? Well, it's a late summer/early fall activity at least - and we just happened to plan it for yesterday so it became our welcome fall activity. I definitely want to do this next year, maybe every year, maybe next week, too.

McBride's Briar Patch - raspberries and blackberries $3 a pound

J: Mom, there's an animal over there. M: well, what's it doing? J: it's looking at us! M: uh.. just don't touch it, you'll be ok. (can you see the "animal")

Here's a better view - actually lots of "animals" The white one lying in the ditch is Bambi's papa, just FYI

After 6 pounds of raspberries and one very tired and unhappy little boy, we decided it was time to pack up and head home.

So good. No jam this year, just fresh raspberries for as long as 6 pounds will last, which at the rate we're going, wont be very long.

Apples and more Apples

Our 3/4 bushel of apples is getting lower... but not yet empty. Which means we'll have another week of great apple fun. But for now, here are our apple activities for this week.

Some Apple Science

An apple slice with Vitamin C, a slice with lemon juice, and a slice with nothing.

Time lapse one hour: from left to right - a fresh cut apple slice, the lemon juice slice, the vitamin C slice, and the nothing slice.

 Some Apple Math

 Some More Apple Science

In one of the books we read (the fraction book actually) we learned that most apples have 10 seeds. We decided to test and see if that was true.

According to our six randomly selected apples, it's not. We came up with 10, 10, 16, 15, 9, and 11. But we didn't only count the mature seeds, we counted even the tiny little "almost seed" seeds. It was very hard to take those out of the core and tape them onto the paper.

Some Apple Literacy

This comment is too big to put as just a photo caption. These books are so awesome. I will start with Apple Fractions. First of all, fractions are way over my kids heads. But I think even they started to get the idea that you can cut something into little pieces, but you still only have the same amount of that thing as when you started. The book has apple facts and fraction facts. It is super informative, the pictures are cute. And I thought it was funny. It had a page for oranges and did a little Apples to Oranges comparison. And they had a pear in there that looked like an apple, but wasn't, so they used that to introduce improper fractions (like 5/4).  They introduced maybe 5 different kinds of apples, talked about what they looked like, what they tasted like and they even talked about apple blossoms, bees, and pollination. (1 sixth of all the bees are still pollinating the blossoms.) There was just a lot of information in a very short and easy to understand book. I thought it was very clever.

And second, A friend for Dragon, which I thought was going to be kind of boring, is jam packed with discussion material. The following is a very incomplete list: friendship, lying, teasing, Adam and Eve (snake in the garden part), honesty, diversity, characteristics of a true friend, depression, loneliness, mourning, healing, love, giving, the circle of life, how apples turn brown, how apple trees grow... and on and on. This book is, in a way, so funny. A snake tricks the Dragon into thinking the apple can talk and wants to be his friend, but after a fabulous evening of sharing, laughing, and having fun, the apple doesn't wake up the next morning. Dragon takes it to the Doctor but while he goes to get a drink, another patient eats the apple leaving only the core - or in Dragon's words, a white, wet, skinny thing. Dragon takes the apple home, and when he gets there it is a brown, soggy, mushy thing. "Are you sick? Are you dead?" And then Dragon cries, buries his friend, falls into a deep depression where he can't eat or sleep or leave the house. But eventually he recovers. I don't know. That's more information than you need. And the book is much better than my short recap, (90 percent of my readers probably just skipped this paragraph anyway - I would have too, actually - BORING) but honestly, the book is really fun to read and think about with a 4 year old.

Some Apple Art

These are Apple Peel Collages - a.k.a. I just needed to keep my kids busy for a while

And last but not least -- Apple Snacks

Applesauce

 And this last Apple Dessert goes out to Apple Farmer Annie.

 

 Yes Annie, your Applesauce Cake recipe was a smashing hit. Mine didn't turn out exactly as yours did, by looking at the picture in your book, but we still ate it up pretty fast.

Annie's Applesauce Cake (from the book Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington)

1/2 C butter
1 C sugar
2 eggs
1 1/4 C flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg (optional: I used it)
1/2 tsp allspice (optional: I used it)
1 C applesauce*
2/3 C raisins

Cream together butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add eggs and beat well. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture, alternating with applesauce and mixing well. Stir in raisins. Pour into a 9 in greased tube pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or until browned (use a toothpick to test) wait at least 15 minutes before you try to get your cake out of the pan or you'll lose a little of the top, like I did.

Butter frosting
2Tbsp softened butter
2 C powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract (I usually put in a little more)
3 Tbsp milk

Cream butter, sugar, and vanilla. Add milk and stir well. Frosting should be smooth and easy to spread. I just spooned large clumps and ran them along the top and let it drizzle down the still warm (maybe too warm) cake.

*a note on the applesauce. I used my homemade applesauce, which is always a little chunky, just because I like it that way. The end result was a cake that had sporadic little pieces of soft apple, which I also liked. But if you were using store bought applesauce you wouldn't have the same effect and it would taste more of just like a spice cake and still just as delicious.