Birthday, Anniversary, and Fall Harvest

So a couple of weeks ago I had my birthday. I turned 31! Young - Old who knows. All I know is I had no problem turning 30 last year, but then for the rest of the year it hit me that I wasn't getting any younger. I am still young but realized that I really am going to age and hit middle age and old age someday. I think when you are a kid it takes so long to grow up you wonder if you really are and that is how I feel about growing older too.

Aside from that string of random thoughts I got to go up to my Grandparents house in Mackey for my birthday. It was so great. They have only seen Aria once over Easter, and it was good to see them again. I hadn't been up to their house for a couple of years. Justin came up, Candice lives there, and Rochelle came up with her family for the day too. Of course my parents came. It was a great time. I loved watching and hearing my kids do the things that I used to do when I would visit my Grandparents Ranch. There was hay jumping, horse riding, kitten hunting, bbqing, treats - always lots of treats, and unlimited cousin playing. Justin thought we should always go up that weekend every year - and I think it sounds like a great idea too. Plus you can't beat that my Grandpa's birthday is the day before mine and my mom always makes me a treat - I always seem to request Mississippi Mud too.

Exactly two weeks after my birthday is my Anniversary. We celebrated 11 years this year!!! Go us. I was able to get my niece up here and babysit my kids. Marcus and I were able to go out to eat and then do some shopping. It was so much fun. She said that the kids were great. And they were so excited to have their cousin come over and play with them. Now I just need to figure out how to get another date soon.

At the beginning of the growing season we just bought our house. So we didn't have much time to plant anything in our garden. I was given 8 tomato plants so I thought I better do salsa. I got some pepper plants and onions. Then because they are easy and I was low on time we got three different pumpkins and planted those. Now it is harvest time and boy have we harvested and worked hard. We ended up with a ginormous pumpkin patch. The kids were so excited. I had 4 huge pumpkins that the seed could have gotten up to 100lbs. They didn't but were big. Then we got 25 jack o lantern sized pumpkins and grow well over 100 small mini pumpkins for decoration. I picked one of the medium size pumpkins and baked it and made pumpkin butter, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin cream cheese, pumpkin bread and even froze extra pumpkin. Then since we had so many we set up a table and had the kids sell pumpkins. We sold the huge ones for $2 the regular ones for $1 and the mini's for $.50. I told the kids that they could use the money for Christmas presents and if there was any left they could just split it. They earned $34!! I was very impressed. We still have over 100 mini ones left though.

Then I have had tons of tomatoes and have done several batches of salsa. I have made over 80 pints of salsa. I made 28 pints of spaghetti sauce (and need to do another batch). We had so many tomatoes that last week we decided to pick all the red/orange ones, all the white ones, and even tons of the green ones. We picked so many we filled up our entire wheel barrel full of tomatoes. I even heard if you hang a plant upside down in a cool place that the tomatoes will turn red well. So we even have a plant hanging in our garage. We still have green tomatoes out in the garden. And tomatoes strung across my shelves in the kitchen.

Just this last week I have been doing gobs of canning. I bought 60 lbs of grapes down in Brigham City and made 10 gallons of grape juice and grape cocktail. 7 Cups of grape jelly, 11 pints of applesauce, 44 pints of salsa, about 8 dozen chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, and 4 gallons of potato soup that I freeze. It has been tons of work, but I love looking at the bottles and seeing all my hard work. Fall really is my favorite season, and you can see why.