Canning Party

This weekend we picked up 88 pounds of peaches. Yesterday morning I was feeling a little overwhelmed as I looked at them and thought about the full next week I'd need to get them taken care of. A friend called, and I mentioned what I was doing, and she volunteered to come over and can. Another friend called and had never canned but wanted to come learn, as did another. We ended up with 5 kids running around playing, while four of us canned. Within 3 and a half hours we ended up with 45 quarts of peaches for the winter. I spent time in the garden yesterday morning picking tomatoes and my husband and I canned 14 quarts of tomatoes last night. We still have tons of tomatoes in the garden - and hope to get at least 45-50 quarts this year. The exciting part is that we started these plants indoors from seeds back in March - so it's been really fun to see them develop into the taller than me trees that we've got now. The 35 quarts that we got last year went quickly and we had to ration them!! We are also praying that it stays warm enough that all of the raspberries will ripen for jam, and we are looking at harvesting the grapes within the week. On Monday we picked apples from a friend's, and I will be doing lots and lots of applesauce today. It's been so awesome to produce our own food, and store it up for the winter. There's nothing more reassuring than looking at a full food storage, and knowing how hard you've worked, planting, growing and canning... what a reward!!
On another note, the girls are busy with school and gymnastics. Seminary is finally starting to settle into a routine. Our power went out for a second yesterday and the messed up the alarm clock. When I reset it, for some reason it rang at 12:01 am. Just as I was getting into the shower I looked at my watch and realized that it was NOT 4:30 am. I got back into bed - relieved, because it felt like I'd only slept for an hour and a half... funny thing!
My husband applied for an internal job promotion yesterday - he was told that there should be an offer by the end of the week - this has definitely taken an emotional toll since we first learned about the possibility the first week of August, but we are hoping that it all comes to fruition.
We will be traveling 3 hours away for our stake conference this weekend.
That's pretty much our life in a nutshell this week!