Grape juice, delayed celebration, and a first for Terah!

It's the eve of Terah's 6th birthday, but we are very much in Terah's birthday "season" as this gal is stretching out the birthday celebrations (i.e. attention) as far as she can in both directions! So I'm gonna knock out this post before we enjoy one of the birthday menus she came up with (that spilled out beyond the bounds of October 11th!). None of us seem to mind, as we are eager to celebrate Terah's spunky, sweet, tender, funny self!! She got to start the fun a whole week early when last weekend Emily, Jonas and Ivy spontaneously invited her (only!) to go mini-golfing with them. It was really special for Terah and about half a dozen times she commented to me how sweet of them it was to include her in that outing. They even brought a piece of Ivy's birthday cake for her to enjoy before donning her mask and heading out!

Chewing has changed for this kiddo as she officially has a hole in her mouth now and is enjoying twisting her tongue to fit sideways into the hole. I did the honors of pulling it. She was pretty excited!

So knowing the next post will be a "Terah-exclusive," let me just share a few other scrapbook-worthy items here. I'm going through "Ezzah withdraw" right now as it has been a number of days since I've seen her - I was thankfully able to swoon over a little video sent today. We don't have many baby things left anymore except a few things that we are sentimental about that were Nora's. I got to see Ezzah use Nora's ladybug tummy time mat for the first time. She wasn't super impressed but I imagine it will grow on her! The girls and Jason got to come along on one occasion so they could meet her. There was a lot of baby adoring happening that evening!

On the home front, harvest days have shifted from 3 days/week to 2, which is a welcome change. And slowly the number of things being harvested regularly is dwindling, also a welcome change. What I thought was the last big canning was the day that I harvested all the hot peppers and chopped up the plants. It made a batch of green hot sauce and one of red, large enough to fill both canners! If you want to try Tangly Woods' hot sauce, let us know. We are hoping that this will last us two years so that next year we can fill that slot in the garden with paprika peppers. They didn't do much where we planted them this year so we are flush with hot sauce and won't have any homegrown/dried red paprika this winter. Next year is the year to remedy that! Since our harvests and the food processing that comes with that are slowing up a bit, we were able to get in on a last cider pressing next door. That actually netted a small canning project, as we brought home enough cider to can two loads. I'd never done that before and any apple fragments in the cider more or less turned into gelatinous pectin in the canning process. Interesting!

So, as often happens, just when we we're "done" canning for the season, we learned that our friends had a bunch of grapes from their vineyard that were going to "go to waste" (or to animals, when they would be perfectly good for humans). Another friend went and got a carload. So yesterday, thanks to a second juicer from a neighbor, the Tangly Woods' team pulled off processing over 70 quarts of grape juice and then a canner load of grape sauce. There's a dehydrator full of grape leather going to wrap up that project. The canning shelves have truly never been so full and have never had so many colors and a diversity of foods on them. I also pulled out the very old boxes full of jars that Samuel had given us from their barn years ago. I thought about and missed Samuel as I chipped off dirt, soaked them, scrubbed labels off and filled them with liquid gold!

It was really a full-family project and the girls kept at it at rates appropriate to their age and ability to stick with a task. We started the day with a yummy brunch (another one of Terah's birthday requests) complete with steaming fresh grape juice! We took a break in the evening to make a run out for birthday balloons (a present from Kali to Terah that has already been a bit hit - she and Alida are playing with them as I type this!) and to Smiley's for birthday ice cream. Of course it feels much more "worth the drive" to pick up ice cream for her bday if we also get ice cream cones for all of us while we are there. :) We came back and saw the new day in wrapping up the juicing and canning of the sauce. While a "big day" it was a really good day!

And here we are at today! This morning I got way in over my head in the kitchen - cleaning up from yesterday's canning and finding places to tuck the jars of grape juice, making cheddar cheese and making many rounds of dishes with my cooking/baking! Due to happily being at a birth on Jason's bday morning, I never made him the birthday brunch I had planned. Finally today I fit it in. The girls were in on it and we were even able to surprise him as he was thinking any special cooking at this point was about Terah's bday. So he got his funny cake pie and mushroom and sausage quiches (and we enjoyed them with him!). While making pie crusts, I also made a pumpkin pie with roasted delicata squash that we dug into for an afternoon snack!

After downing half the pie, we all headed up the hill together since it looked like the rain was going to hold off. Jason was going to fix a bench placed at the top of the hill by a tree planted in Samuel's memory. It's one of my favorite spots on Fruit Farm Lane and a place the younger gals have hardly been. They didn't want to come down, even when the sky started spritzing at us! I think it was the combo of the location and the undivided attention of the parental figures in the family who had stopped moving for a few minutes! Like I say about many things, I could stand doing that more often!

Ok, time to get the pasta cooking and transform the living room into our family bedroom for the big birthday sleepover tonight. Eager to lavish love on our littlest! I was pretty eager to welcome her into our family and now can't imagine life without her. 6 years ago right now I was starting to think I might get to hold her in my arms before too long!