We gotter done!

Processing all that fruit and all those ears of corn just about did me in.

It took me an entire week to recover.

Ugh.

The kids are already plowing through the food too, much to my dismay.

But, since they all begrudgingly helped, I guess I'll let them.

Remember last year when I went to pick up the small mountain of veggies that we had ordered and I discovered that the employees there had nicknamed me "the crazy lady"?

And employees came out of the back room to see what I looked like?

Well, this year because I'm no dummy I sent Corey in there to order 1000 ears of corn.

He seemed shocked when he came back home and reported that they had laughed at him.

Because they thought he was joking.

I laughed gleefully when he couldn't see me because I was glad that it was him and not me knew how he felt.

Then we figured out the battle plan got organized for C Day (corn day).

As truly painful as it is to have kids helping put all this food up, we knew that the lesson was more important then our comfort.

After all, they are the ones that eat most of this food.

The day Corey went and picked up all the corn, we set up a "corn station" outside and went to work.

Even the four year olds shucked corn for several hours.

Hannah was such a good worker.

We set up the double burner camp stove outside and boiled the corn.

We then put it in the kids swimming pool to cool.

Hey that rhymes!  snicker...snicker...

After it had cooled, we used an electric knife to cut the corn off the cob.

Joshua's job was to put 2 pounds of corn into a bag and put it in the freezer.

Quality control found that the bags contained 3 and 4 pounds so that had to be remedied.

Thankfully we are not consuming that much...

Yet.

Lily was the official taste tester.

She took her job very seriously.

I had already made a mental note to have Corey change her diapers for the next few days...

The kids loaded up the husks in the trailer and hauled them back to the compost pile.

The tractor rides were their favorite part.

It took us 10 straight hours but it is done.

Can I hear a hallelujah?


Moving right along...

We also canned the peaches and pears.

We filled every.last.jar.that you see here.

I had kids peeling, cutting, complaining...you name it...they did it.

Also worth mentioning are the 220 pounds of green beans that we processed.

I had two groups of helpers on this project.

The littles.

And the bigs.

One group threw green beans at each other, spilled beans on the floor and one kid thought that he was a genius for discovering a new way to take the ends off.

Sorry, but biting off each end until you have a mouthful of ends (think like a chipmunk) and then spitting them machine gun style into a bowl just doesn't work for me.

Guess which group worked the best?

If you guessed the littles...

Then you are right.

I'll let you guess how this all ended...

Scenario #1

Everyone got along
Everyone worked without complaining
All the beans got done

Scenario #2

The kids complained and complained
Gray hairs started popping out all over in mom's hair
Mom finally lost her cool and screamed loud enough for the neighbors to hear at them to allgotoyourroomsifyouknowwhatisgoodforyou.
Mom finished the beans in blessed quiet, but all by herself.

The answer.

I'm so not tellin'...