Make a splash at your Library

We are big supporters of our local library. Each summer they have a summer reading program. The boys are young enough that they are still in the "read to me group." Each book read must be written down along with the number of pages. The kids get prizes for completing certain goals. The library also recognizes the person that reads the most books and most pages.

The Library hosted a water fair on a Saturday. They had stations for the kids set up, duck pond, bubbles, bean bag toss. I was running a station so the boys were there all day with me. They had a lot of fun playing with the bubbles.

As for our results, I read about 60 books to the boys. The winner was over 700 books. We happen to know this family and had invited to go to the Amusement park with us and that was considered frivolous. Now I know why, they were spending all their time reading. Either that or the mom picked out the skinniest books she could. Oh and the prize was a pass to the Amusement park. I wonder if they used it then. Any way we enjoy reading and we loved going out to eat at Applebee's with our cousins.

I think this is Parker's last year to be in the "read to me group" so he will have control over the number of books that he reads. The summer can be a difficult time to sit still and read, when there are so many other activities going on.

They also offer if for the adults. Of course it takes awhile to complete just 1 book.

100 Bottles of food on the wall,

Ok, so I didn't actually count all the bottles on the wall. But I will give you a run down of what is there. As I mentioned earlier our garden was too small to do any canning, so I bought from local sources and shared with my Mom, who planted a big garden. There are a few remaining jars from last year that we just did not eat as much.

The following is what I did this summer.

• Strawberries - 2 batches of syrup, froze with sugar
• Blueberries- 1 batch of syrup, froze for later use
• Green beans - 35 quarts (this was a marathon day at my Mom's, we did 14 cookers in 1 day)
• Peaches - 25 quarts
• Grapes- 28 quarts of juice, 1 batch of jam (these were given to me by a lady in our ward, all I did was comment on her garden and she was sending me home with boxes of grapes!)
• Tomatoes- 25 quarts ( I was a little over ambitious and bought a bushel from the Amish)
• Raspberries - 1 batch of jam (I should mention I have a raspberry patch, but it takes 3 cups of fruit for jam and I only got 2 cups. So I froze my berries for another time not sure what I was going to do with them. Turns out we found a guy that had raspberries in Sept, so I had enough to do 1 batch of jam.)
• Applesauce ???? This is yet to be done. The apples are now on. It is just a matter of getting them and doing it.