On Labor Day, my morning began with a glamorous run to the grocery store, sporting a baseball cap, sans makeup (and kids)! I’m a smart enough gal to know that grocery runs can be more efficient and enjoyable with a honey latte so, I treated myself to a coffee along the way. You may be wondering about the selfie with sugary cereals in the background. My sister began her Labor Day with a bike ride up to the local ski mountain. After receiving her text about reaching the top and she’d call when she got down the mountain, I took this selfie (which was brave considering two other shoppers were in the same aisle) to brag about my location in the cereal aisle, heading to produce next then I’d call her when I got in my car. I’m a badass.
After I schlepped the bags of groceries into the house and we put everything away, I went on to my next task of trimming three of our trees with all of the Littles throwing the many, many, many branches and limbs over into the pasture. Mister was in the pasture working on the fencing. Like a ding-a-ling, I forgot to take “before” pictures, so use your imagination and picture trees that have too many branches hanging akimbo. Here are the after shots. Again, you don’t know how much was trimmed off, but trust me when I say that the donkeys and goats were pumped for this feast.
After I finished oohing and aahing my handiwork, it was on to canning our pears! Mister took on the task of peeling and slicing up the pears. He had the encouragement of Little Man, as you can see.
I boiled the pear slices in a mixture of water and coconut sugar for a few batches then water and honey, which created the syrup to pour into the jars with the pears. In about four jars, I put in cinnamon sticks. That was a last minute idea so there weren’t any backup cinnamon sticks, so only the lucky few will bite into cinnamon flavored pears. Considering we had a five gallon bucket full of pears, we didn’t get a large yield of canned pears, which was a dissapointment. Worms had gotten into a fair amount of the fruit and since we don’t like worms in our food, off to the goats and donkeys they went. Did I mention that it was Thanksgiving for our herbivores in the pasture? Ha.
When I’d finished cleaning up the kitchen and washing everything involved with canning, Mister decided it was time to make pickles. Yeah, I said hasta and plopped my hiney on the couch to watch Singin’ In the Rain with Little Lady, Little Red and Little Man. Our Labor Day holiday was finally beginning. Ole’!
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