My friend Tenya told me that she was going to bottle a bunch of chicken over General Conference weekend this year. I have tried her bottled chicken and it is
way good and super convenient to have pre-cooked chicken just sitting on your shelf whenever you need it! So I asked if I could join the party and Rob ordered me in some nice chicken to bottle.
Saturday we went over to the Halls and got started. It takes about an hour and a half per batch of chicken to pressure cook it and seal the lids on. It was quite the process. Getting the chicken prepared wasn't too bad, but just the cooking time factor was the hard part. Tenya ended up doing most of the work, since we went home after the Saturday afternoon session and Tenya finished sealing all the jars. She is amazing! And now I have 40 lbs of bottled, shelf-stable chicken! Yay!
Sunday we stayed home and had a nice lazy conference Sunday. We had crepes for breakfast....mmmmmm!
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| Cream cheese filling, strawberry jam, cherry pie filling, yummy syrup, and chocolate! Does it get any better? |
Then we followed our usual tradition of doing puzzles together as a family so that we could still listen to conference. It is so great! Everyone is quiet yet entertained and we are doing something together that allows us to hear the messages of conference.
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| Don't know why she's making that face, but it's cute! |
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| Shaelyn-level puzzles |
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| Evie-level puzzles |
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| And the rest of us worked on the big puzzles |
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| A few of the puzzles we put together. In this picture, there are two 100-piece puzzles, one 300-piece puzzle, and two 500-piecers! Many happy hours spent puzzling! |
On Sunday afternoon, Rob tried to start a fire in our wood stove and it wouldn't start up, all the smoke just kept blowing back into our house. This had happened a few times in the last week or two and we couldn't figure out what was wrong.
Finally, Rob went up on the roof and found that the soot and smoke from our chimney had all built up on the leeward side of our top chimney pipe cap and basically created a wall there where it is usually mesh. So the wind would blow and instead of passing through the mesh, it would hit that wall of build-up and come straight down our chimney. This is bad for two reasons. A, it blows our flames out and creates smoke and B, it blows all that smoke into our house instead of allowing it to go up the chimney.
Very frustrating, especially before we knew what was causing the problem. We got totally smoked out of our house a couple times, and had to open all the doors and use the fans to blow freezing cold air from outside through our house to clear all the smoke. Once Rob discovered the problem, he went up and was able to knock down a lot of the built-up soot so that our chimney functioned properly again, and we haven't had a problem since. What a great guy! I am so lucky to have him for a husband!
So when all the smoke was pouring into our house, we retreated upstairs and closed the French doors in the library so that none of the smoke could follow us upstairs. After the final session of Conference ended, we couldn't go downstairs still because our house was smoky and cold from having the fans on and doors open. So naturally we had a tea party. What better thing to do with my four daughters?
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| Time for tea! |
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| Hallie and Claire remembered to put their pinkies up! Apparently I need to brush up on my tea party etiquette... |
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| Rob crashed the tea party with a little gangsta style! No boys allowed at tea parties! |
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| Well, okay. But only because I love you more than anyone on the entire planet! |
We are such parents. We can kiss while playing dress-up!
It was a wonderful conference weekend, and I enjoyed listening to the messages. I can't wait to read them over again when I get my Ensign!
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