Plums, Peaches and First Day of School

 Last week I was able to go down the street to pick some plums from a tree an elderly sister in our ward has in her back yard. For years now I've been getting plums from her tree to make plum jelly. The girls were excited to help me clean them and I guess that motivated me to get going on making more jelly sooner rather than later. 

This is the first time Curtis was able to help me. Most years he was gone or had school.

Nikki was disappointed that I used all of the plums that I had picked because she wanted to eat them fresh. Well, Sister Cable still had some plums on her tree and said I could take as many as I wanted. So I went back and picked pretty much the rest of them, except a few that were just too difficult to reach even with a ladder. Since I had more plums not only did I make more jelly but I also decided to try making fruit leather. Some of the fruit leather got over dried (cooked) so I ended up throwing out about half of it but was able to roll up the rest like fruit roll ups and have them for snacking. Charlotte loves them!

I had to cook the plums for a short time to soften them up after I cut them in halves and removed the seeds. Then let them cool down and into the food processor they went. My processor has a crack in it and I didn't use it for the longest time because of that but I needed it since I don't have a big blender so I put regular clear tape over the crack just for now and it worked!

The pans are lined with parchment paper. 

I dried them in the oven on the lowest temp possible which was 170. They told me to preheat it and then turn it off for an hour. Then repeat the process until they were dry. I rotated them a couple times. The pan on the very bottom dried very quickly so I took that one out way before the others. We were able to eat about 2/3 of that pan.

I tried to make fruit leather years ago with leftover plum juice and I don't think it turned out back then but thankfully I was able to get half of this batch to work. I looked up a recipe online that looked really simple, just very time consuming. I ended up making two quart size bags filled with roll ups and 19 jars of jelly, some of them smaller but most were pint size. Most of my jars have the regular size mouth. I used the lids I had leftover from last year but then couldn't find any more when I went to Walmart. I had to buy some wide mouth lids and use the few jars that I had with wide mouths. I did find that some of my regular half pint jars had a lid that looked like I could use (like it hadn't been used yet or at least didn't have a deep impression in it) so I used 2 or 3 of those. I just wish I had some homemade strawberry jam. That's my favorite. Maybe next year or if I find a good deal on strawberries. I would have to make freezer jam though since there seems to be a lid shortage.

Wednesday evening Curtis, Jack and I went out to pick peaches at the church orchard. Nikki had to work and Garrett watched the girls at home. It was the first day for people to begin picking so there were a lot of groups there, however we were the only ones from our ward. We started our row and worked for an hour to get 3 trees done. I posted on the Facebook page what we had done to hopefully motivate people to come out. The next morning I heard that the Relief Society President and at least her son (not sure if her husband went too) went out and did 4 more trees. I have no clue if anyone else has gone out since and I know the orchard was wanting them done by today I think. Hopefully somebody did. 

Thursday night Charlotte had a virtual open house (we had picked up her ipad on Tuesday) where she got to see her principal and teacher via an app called zoom. It's been a long weekend, especially on Sunday, getting caught up on school emails that started to pour in on Friday. I had planned to do it on Saturday but ran out of time so I spent most of Sunday going through emails and watching tutorial videos with the kids, etc. I felt a lot better but still felt a little unready for the 1st day of school the next day. 

Yesterday was the first day of school for the 4 oldest kids and online distance learning. Even though I woke up early to try and get things ready I was still rushing around when it came close to school start time. It wouldn't have been so bad if Charlotte and Alice hadn't tried to unclog a toilet without my help. I was in the bathroom I think when they couldn't find me to tell me it was clogged. After I got out and was going to get the hair brush and spray bottle to do their hair I saw the entire bathroom floor was covered in water. At first I thought it was Garrett who made the mess from taking a shower but then Charlotte told me that she and Alice unclogged the toilet because they couldn't find me. NOT what I needed on the morning of the first day of school but it was hard to be mad when they were trying to do something good. That being said I still had to rush to soak up the water with lot of towels then mop it up. Nikki was there to help get me towels and then got the mop bucket ready for me. I got most of it done but then decided I would have to finish rinsing out the bucket and mop later. I still needed to brush Charlotte's hair and figure out how to get her logged on to her first zoom meeting with her teacher. I was able to figure it out just in time. After the zoom meeting I gave her a little break and then she colored a picture of herself for an assignment. She also had to make a recording to go with the picture telling about herself. Then we had a nice long break until her library specials zoom meeting at 12:30. Charlotte, Alice and I went outside to get some air and recess time (after I finished cleaning up the mop and starting the washing machine).

Alice spilled a bunch of lemonade at lunch time and I'm just thinking "Another mess?!!". But that's okay because we got it cleaned up. Thankfully the 3 oldest kids have been able to get onto all their class meetings without my help and without problems! Garrett has been there to help Jack when needed.

Charlotte is set up in our bedroom. We needed a quiet place with the fewest distractions.

Nikki was in her room yesterday but today she's trying out the office with the boys, using my office desk.

We brought in our fold up table to set the boys up on in the office.

Alice was doing Starfall, an educational website so Charlotte joined her on her break.

Got my signs printed out finally and got some pictures. Alice will be doing preschool this year. A friend of ours is doing a small group and invited her to join. We decided it would be good for her to have something like this for her with all the other kids doing school at home. She's excited.

Nikki wanted to make her own sign design. The problem was that she wanted a black back ground and used up our black ink. She still wanted to use it even though it ran out of ink.

If it looks like Charlotte's teeth are a little dark it's because she had just finished eating some plum fruit leather, ha ha!

After school was done my friend Whitney needed a ride out to her boss's place to pick up more work to do. She's been sanding boxes that he has made for people to buy for their animal's ashes when they die. He must sell a lot because she's been doing it for 3 months now. She needed a ride because her car is not working and she's waiting for car parts to be delivered. Anyway, this guy has goats and horses. I found this out when I took her out their the first time last week. So I thought the girls might like a little field trip to see the animals and of course they did! I didn't get pictures of them with the horses but I did when they were feeding the goats some green weeds.