Harvesting our first crop of Honey!!!

Our bee's were already done with the first box of honey for us. They were working hard. Here is Dave and Mark starting to take the frames out. They are all nicely capped.

Dave always takes a helper down with him and it was Ethan's turn this time. The kids have no fear of the bees. It is amazing. Ethan has gotten stung once but not by a honey bee. So it still doesn't bother him at all.

Here they are brushing the bees off of the frames.

The precious frames full of honey just waiting for us.

Ooooh, ahhhhhhhh!!

Dad and Mark cutting off the caps to reveal the tasty honey.

Look at all that golden honey.

Using Mark's nifty contraption for extracting the honey from the cell's. Dave is coming up with a design of his own to use later at the end of the summer when we harvest again.

Look at all that honey spraying out of the cells. WOW! I loved this part.

The final steps. Pouring into storage containers.

All of our honey.

And it is so good.

Fishing with Grandpa

So Dave's dad, loves to go fishing and will come over and take the 3 older kids to a nearby lake. The kids love to go fishing with Grandpa. This one time Ev and Mia caught the fish. Here they are and Grandpa is teaching them how the clean it out. Yes in my sink, but I made sure it was nice and clean afterwards.  Yuck!

Ethan got to clean Mia's cause she would not touch it. She's my kind of girl.  

Updating

So it has been a while since our last post. Many things have happened so we will be doing many posts in the next few days. Hope you enjoy.

Our Princess is 5!

 Our Mia is 5 today. I can't believe how fast those 5 years went. She has been a princess to us all along but she continues to love being a princess. Whether it is carving pumpkins,

at Disneyland 

reading to her baby doll, Summer

or teaching Lily how to be a cowgirl princess

she has always loved being in a princess dress. I don't know how many dresses she has actually worn through, to the point that we have to just toss them. There are just to many to count. They were lovingly hemmed and stitched up many times over. Her dresses were loved so much. I actually thought that maybe I should of just bought princess dresses instead of other clothes cause she hardly wore the other things. Having a girl in our home has brought so much joy. Her cute laugh, her sweet caring, nurturing for babies, and the way that she adds the princess or cowgirl into whatever the boys are playing. I love how she adores Dave. When he calls in the evening to say he is coming home and she answers the phone there is just this loud cute voice saying, "Hi daddy!" with so much excitement. He says that everyone in his office can hear her and just smile every time cause it is so cute. I agree. I hear it here and I smile. I love that. I love how she can come over and just put her arms around him and love on her daddy. There is so much pink now in our house. She wanted a pink house when we asked what colors we should paint our house. O.K. so we are not going to allow that but we had to ask to see what the kids thought. Lots of fun! Needles to say, we praise the Lord for giving us such a sweet daughter and we look forward to many more years ahead of watching her grow into a beautiful young women. We pray that she will become part of God's family as she continually learns about Him and what He has done for her. We pray that her strong desires now to become a wife and a mommy will deepen as she gets closer to that part in her life. And we pray that God will help guide us in raising her to become a Godly woman who whole heartily wants to serve God.

Strawberry jam

So after our strawberry picking day I wanted to try making strawberry jam again. Although unlike the kind I have done in the past, full of sugar, I tried an all fruit recipe. We have yet to try it since we are using up the other jam we have in the fridge, but it looked like it jelled nicely and it was fairly easy too. I had 6 cups of blended berries, 2 cups of white grape juice concentrate, some pectin and calcium powder. I cooked everything first to a boil. After I got it in the pint jars, I water bathed them for 5 minutes. And done. It was a lot faster then I thought. Maybe an hour from beginning to end. We love jam on toast or biscuits and of course the old stand by, p.b.j. But we don't go through a ton of it so we will see how long 5 jars gets us. I might do some peach jelly too. We received some as a gift once and boy did the kids love that.

Yummmm!

The kids and I packed up early this morning and went down the road to Unger Farms to go strawberry picking.

 We met my mom, sister, Christie and her daughter Addie there. It is a newer farm and we have really enjoyed it. This year was their first year for u pick berries. And we got there just in time, cause they are at the end of the season. We did pretty good though for having young ones help. My mom helped out with the littles so Chris and I could pick a lot. Mom got a little picking in when Addie was walking the aisles. Addie was the strawberry thief. If you left a bucket unattended she would get to it. She really enjoyed them. So did everyone else. I tried to prep the kids, eat one, put 3 in the bucket. Well, I think the boys took that to heart, mostly. Sweet Mia got maybe a few handfuls in her bucket and the rest she enjoyed immensely.  Lily Mae spent her time in the shade of the stroller. She is such a trooper. We were there for about 1.5 hours. And came home with an abundance of strawberries. We are looking forward to homemade strawberry ice cream, some on oatmeal, and some just to eat. The others we will freeze. Yummmm!

Tillamook

So Saturday we decided that it would be fun to take a day trip to Tillamook just as a family. We have been wanting to do a few things there with the kids and since the weather looked nice and it was a 3 day weekend we took a day off from working the homestead to enjoy the day and each other. We started our morning early by leaving the house at 7:15 ish and went to Maggie's Buns, a fun little restaurant that has these really big and tasty cinnamon buns. It is in Forest Grove about 5 minutes from our house. To our surprise there was no one sitting inside so we decided to sit there and eat. Usually it is crowded. It sounds like we go there a lot but we haven't really. Maybe 4 times in the last 1.5 years. From there it took about 1 hour to get to Tillmook, OR. We got to the Tillamook Cheese Factory shortly after it opened and started the tour. They were actually making Colby Jack cheese at that time. We didn't see them making the curds but we saw how it all goes from the curds to the big 41 pound blocks of cheese and then how it gets packaged and stored in the warehouse to age it. Then on the other side they were taking the aged cheeses and cutting the big blocks and making the small blocks of cheese. It was all very interesting and we spent a lot of time looking, reading and talking about it all. Lily was just mooing the whole time since there was a life size cow statue there.
After the self guided tour we got in line to try all the different kinds of cheeses. That was fun and they finally got to try the squeaky cheese that we had been telling them all about. We bought some for a snack later in the day and then ended our time there with waffle cones for Ethan's birthday treat. Man or man were we glad to have just ordered singles. They were huge. !!!! All the kids really enjoyed the cones but I think Lily did the most. Once she got her hands around my cone she had a death grip on in and wouldn't let go. She was very sweet though and kept letting me have a very, very quick lick.  I had to help her out though with all the drips. Many people got some good laughs as well as all of us. We were all very full afterwards and didn't need lunch for a long time.

 We went to the Blue heron petting farm after that which was just down the street and they had some rather large goats, some with horns. WOW They were big. They had  some llamas and an Emu, as well as chickens. That was fun but we didn't stick around to long for that. After the petting farm we went into town, just a few minutes away and parked on the street across from the Pioneer Museum. We had read about it from the Tillamook Cheese Factory website. It looked very fascinating and the kids are all into Pioneer stuff right now. It was just $4 for adults and the kids are free. Can't beat that. We were there for a few hours actually. We all had fun looking at all the of

 the old things that it had. There were three floors of items. The main floor had the Tillamook Pioneers and some of their things, a military room which the boys loved, a pioneer room and a workshop/barn room and everything like a plow, bear trap, wheel hoe, all kinds of equipment, an inside of a house with a second story like an old bed. There was so much to look at. So much detail to everything. The upper floor was a rock room, an old Victorian room, and a whole room with all these stuffed animals, from a Polar bear to the tiniest eggs. That was cool. The bottom floor had the earliest automobiles, including a wagon and sleigh, an old fashioned kitchen, the first cameras, the
first laundry machines (a wash board) and so on. Again it was all so fascinating and the kids loved it all.

 

After we left there we drove 20 minutes inland and went to the Tillamook Forestry Center. That is cool. We ate our lunch outside at a picnic table and then walked around inside, watched a movie about the Tillamook forest fires which was all so devastating but good in the end, and then the funnest part was going across the bridge and walking down to the river. They had some fun trails and the river felt good on a warm day. We walked up the tall tower that they had used to watch for forest fires which was a good hike up tons of stairs. We closed the place down at 5:00 and headed home which was about 35 minutes. I never realized how close it was to us. We were all exhausted but we had a wonderful day together learning and playing.