Getting ready for T-day

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving! A lot of prep goes into holidays and events here at the Becker ranch. Food, which is always a big deal here, plays an even greater role come holiday time. In an ordinary food week, we can barely fit enough chow in the fridge to get us through half the week. Finding room to squeeze in a 22-pound turkey required herculean effort, complex engineering, and the use of a table in the cold garage as a makeshift refrigerator.
Mmmm, butter. I'd say we go through at least four pounds of it in a normal week. Holiday cooking and baking pushes our butter consumption to a level that has a measurable effect on the commodities market. I spent two solid days in the kitchen cooking glorious butter-enhanced foodstuffs, most of which was consumed in a twenty-minute feeding frenzy.
Over the course of a few years' worth of estate sales, garage sales, and thrift shopping, I have amassed a lovely collection of pretty china, serving dishes, and silver plate. Real silver plated flatware and serving trays can be had for next to nothing; they are ubiquitous anywhere second-hand wares are sold, probably because nobody can be bothered to polish it anymore. I kind of like polishing silver, and started dragging it out to work on a little at a time during the week prior to Thanksgiving. The only snag in my plan was that I was still trying to do some school work with my children, and they are apparently very easily distracted by shiny objects. They are also very easily distracted by the sounds and smells of Christmas cookies baking, which is coming up soon!

Getting the full value

So, just how much fun can you squeeze out of one dead squirrel? Besides providing a meal for six people, little Mr. Squirrel has provided countless hours of entertainment for my young sons. Paul insisted on having a go at some home taxidermy, so I ordered him the necessary ingredients to go about tanning his furry friend's hide. Over the course of about three weeks, Paul defrosted the hide, scraped it, salted it, nailed it to a board, and soaked it in buckets of various tanning solutions. Here we are at the end of the process, where Paul is using my hair dryer to speed up the final drying so that he can bring his hide to church to show his friends. Oh yes, we did indeed bring a dead squirrel to church with us in a ziploc baggie! The hide is now nailed to Paul's bedroom wall, looking very squirrelly indeed. He definitely got his money's worth out of that squirrel.
We usually bring our groceries home in some of the free boxes we pick up off the pallets as we shop (because we usually shop in the kind of upscale places that plops out pallets of dry goods and makes you pay extra if you want bags for your groceries.) David sees no reason why he shouldn't get as much enjoyment as possible out of this empty cookie box before we send it out to the dumpster. We had three boxes waiting to be taken out to the trash, and David spent an equal amount of time sitting in each one.
In such a large family, there's no reason why everyone should have their own individual pair of shoes. Naomi, at age nine, now officially wears the same size shoes as me. She still has a lot of growing left to do, so she probably won't be pilfering my shoes for too long before she outgrows them. I do have two more daughters coming right along after her though....

Such is my life

So, I'm trying to learn a new song. It's actually an oldie that I kind of re-wrote the music for, to make it a little more bluegrass-y, and thus much more my style. Since there is no recording of it anywhere, and since I have not the brain capacity to remember the music in between practice sessions, I thought I'd try to record it myself so I'd have something to reference. As you can see, you can't bring out a video camera around here without all the riff raff coming out of the woodwork to get in on it.

Big (blue) Table

What do you do for a dining room table in a 20+ foot long dining room? You build one yourself, that's what you do!
By my very own little self, I designed, planned, and built a custom dining table to accommodate my extra-long dining room and extra-large family. We'd spent the last year debating our options for or newly-enlarged space; now that the floor was finally finished, the time had come to take action.
It was impossible to find an existing table that would have been long enough without having it custom-built. For the time, trouble, and expense of dealing with that, I figured I could make something myself for a whole lot less money. I based my design on this table from Pottery Barn that I liked. I would have had to buy two of the Pottery Barn tables ($$$$$) and pushed them up together to be long enough.
Not the best pics, but this table is just under 14 feet long, and can seat 18 people comfortably. I was going to leave the whole table in the same stained finish as the top, but as I got close to being finished with it, it just looked sooooo big and brown, so I did a distressed paint finish on the bottom. My house is finally starting to look like a real house again!

Squirrellicious

Since he was about five years old, Paul has wanted to go hunting. He made me promise him a long time ago that when he bagged his first animal, I would cook it for him. Well, my friends, that day has arrived. The hunter was victorious!
There was a good deal of deliberation, prior to the hunting trip, as to how the squirrel should be cooked if Paul was so lucky to actually bag one. Ideas such as Buffalo Squirrel Dip and Squirrel Smoothies were tossed around. Paul finally decided on Squirrel Marsala for his feast of triumph ( we are, after all, a higher class of redneck), which you see him preparing to dig into here. Five out of six kids declared it delicious; David and I abstained.

Ta-daaaaa

Remember these old floorboards? We salvaged them from the house of some guy who was remodeling last winter, and stuck them in the garage until spring. The kids sorted them and pulled out all the old nails, and back into the garage they all went until just last week, when I finally got good and ready to put them in.
I didn't get a "before" shot, but we'd been living with a piece of cheap carpet over the sub-floor in the addition since it was built last fall. It was a huge blessing to stumble on to someone (via a craigslist wanted ad) who was tearing out some of the exact mid-century era strip oak flooring that runs throughout the rest of the house, which we were happy to take off his hands. Above you see Paul helping me with the cleaning up of sanding dust, after we had gotten all the boards installed. FYI, it took almost exactly 2,000 nails, top-nailed, to hold this down. And all those nail holes had to be spackled over.
I'm very proud to say I did the whole job almost entirely by myself, which is not too surprising if you know me, but really threw the sander-rental guys for a loop. They looked up and down all five feet and 115 pounds of me, baby on my hip and a car full of kids, and talked me out of getting the heavier-duty drum sander (which I really needed) and into a pad sander (which didn't do what I needed.) At the end of the day, i only had to get the new floor to look as bad as the job we did on the old floor a few years ago, so it wasn't worth going back to the store to switch out for the sander I should have gotten in the first place.
I'm taking lots of pictures no, because as soon as I let the kids and dog back onto the floor today, it will never again look so clean and shiny. You can see the transition between the old and new- it really blends remarkably well!

Eeeeek!

*cue reel of a lady standing on a chair holding up her skirts*

We have mice in our pantry. Elena brought up a bag of frosted flakes this morning with a corner chewed open. This prompted the rest of the kids to rush down to the pantry to investigate, where they found a few more chewed up packages and some tell-tale "chocolate sprinkles". They seem to be coming in from our, ahem, "plumbing access panel" in the ceiling; how they got into the ceiling is anybody's guess.
I guess it was a good a time as any to clean and re-organize our pantry stocks. This is what our family room looks like (again), full of pantry items. The kids sorted through and pulled out anything that was nibbled, chewed, scratched, or sprinkled to toss out, while I got a broom and a bucket full of bleach water to scrub down floors and shelves. Then it was off to the farm store for mouse traps and poison, and some mouse-proof dry goods containers.
For your edification, those cheap little cartoonish mouse traps hurt a LOT when they snap on your finger. I managed to set two of them before remembering I'd need my fingers to play my guitar later this evening. The kids have checked the traps approximately every two minutes since we set them; we'll see how many volunteers step up when it comes time to empty the traps.

Cold water, good times!

We went with some friends to Stony Brook Park yesterday. As has been the case with most of our adventures this summer, this was David's first time there.
We try to come down here at least once every summer (see this from a few years back; we didn't get to go last year on account of David being so little.)
It was a rather cool day, and the water is always freezing cold, but that didn't stop any of the kids from diving in. When you have a group of kids playing around a particularly fascinating water feature, it's little more than a waste of breath to try to tell them not to get wet. Add into that the extra excitement of being with a bunch of friends, and, well--- they can't say I didn't warn them that they'd all be very, very cold before too long.
David, who dislikes most things, liked it here a lot.
I hadn't considered how much he likes playing with running water- he loves the spray fountain at the pool and the running water when the bathtub is filling. His only complaint was that I would not let him go entirely, as he would be swept downstream. At 15 months old, he still has little understanding of such concepts.
Did I mention it was cold? Freezing. My kids would break through ice to go swimming if I let them.
By the time we reached the end of the trail, they were all ready for dry clothes and hot chocolate, both of which I had the foresight to pack.
David, who objects strongly to all forms of restraint or containment, did very well in the backpack. I was prepared for a few hours of being kicked in the kidneys and having my hair pulled (as per usual), but he was so fascinated by all the waterfalls he hardly had time to complain.
This is a great place to take pictures; in fact, we came one fall with the camera tripod and did our Christmas card photo shoot here. The only problem is most of the pictures I tend to get are of the kids running away from me, so I get a lot of shots of people's backs.
We had a great day!

Creatures of the Night

Some of you may remember our Chipmunk Relocation Program. Our neighborhood has an abundance of the rodents, some prime rodent habitats, and no real predators, thus the little chippers have had ample opportunity to procreate freely and wreak havoc on our yard, not to mention causing great aggravation to our dog. Matt was of a mind to trap and remove each and every one, wiping them out and solving our problems. I was of the mind that we were only going to be able to trap the dumb chipmunks, leaving the smart chipmunks free to reproduce themselves and ultimately form some kind of superior race of genius chipmunks who would eventually overthrow us. The other thought I had on the situation was the eventuality that we would catch something in the trap that was NOT a chipmunk, which is what you see here.
This is a possum. He's pretty small, but he has a big mouth with a lot of very sharp looking teeth that he was quite happy to flash for us. To our knowledge Mr. Possum has done us no harm, and while we harbor no ill will towards him, it does not seem he feel the same way towards us. I sent my oldest son to open the trap doors so our little guest would be free to vacate at his earliest convenience. Hopefully possums don't hold grudges for very long.

He walks the line

Baby D has been toddling for a little while now. One hesitant step at a time, growing (gradually) more brave every day. None of my children were very motivated when it came to walking; they all much preferred to sit back and cautiously observe for a good amount of time before testing the waters themselves. We can now officially classify David as a fully upright hominid. Now that he's sure that this whole walking upright thing isn't just some fad, he's going at it full tilt, even going so far as to run away from his own dear mama!

Putting things by

There's nothing like spending an 85-degree summer afternoon standing in front of a stove with all the burners going full bore, trying to keep several huge pots full of water boiling. Oh yes, it's canning season!
Yesterday was Pickle Day (actually, it was Tuesday, but whatever.) The big box of cucumbers we bought at the market last week now fills a dozen quart jars, and my house reeks of vinegar and garlic.
I'll probably have to do this exact same routine at least two more times to make us enough pickles to get through the winter. We're not taking any chances, you know, in case there's another Great Pickle Famine. The Becker Family will have pickles a-plenty, by Jove!

Market Day with the Beckers

We loaded up this morning and headed downtown to the Public Market this morning. You can sorta see the shopping cart we bring in the trunk; it does it's job, but stuff on the bottom has a tendency to get squished, so we end up doing a lot of shuffling around of stuff as we go to make sure the heavy stuff goes underneath the squishy stuff.
As is usually the case when we go shopping, our trip was cut short when we ran out of room to haul stuff (this even after sending the boys back to the van to drop some stuff off.)
I was ridiculously, deliriously happy to find a purveyor of sour cherries, and I bought all he had. Further along in the market there was another seller, so I'm hoping there will still be some available when we go to the market next week. Sour cherries are extremely fragile and have a short season; we had picked some a few weeks ago, but weather, uncooperative babies, and busy-ness with other stuff precluded another trip to the farm. We'll get at least a few more cherry pies now!

Gratuitous baby cuteness

Babies are cute and little for such a short time. Fortunately for a pork chop like David, that time has not yet passed.
He's very funny when he wakes up in the morning.
He likes to play hard-to-get, scampering around inside his crib.
If no one is immediately available to free him from his prison, he tries vainly to climb out.
When this doesn't get him anywhere, he goes back to complaining and posturing. If he gets real good and mad, he'll throw his blankets and stuffy bunny out onto the floor. That'll show us.
Good thing he's so cute.

Kicked to the curb

This is a quintessential summer morning, Becker-style. Before the sun gets too hot, the kids drag their bikes out to ride around the circle and up and down the sidewalk, while I sit in my chair with my coffee. It really, truly, does not get any better than this. I've spent the first hour of many summer mornings in this exact spot for more than ten years now. I'd say I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of that $5 white plastic chair.
David is not quite up to Cat-1 bike racing yet, so he's just chillin' in his ride with the windows down, eating some animal cookies.
Our bicycle collection has not fared as well as our white plastic chair collection has over the years. In a big family, bikes (among many other items) get handed down as they are outgrown by the older children. Our littlest 12-inch kiddie bike was finally beaten up beyond repair, leaving poor little Renee without a ride this summer. Lucky for her we stumbled upon a just-right for her bike at a garage sale this weekend for ten bucks. She's back on the road and ready to go!

Lots of firsts for Baby D

Now that David is a year old, he's really starting to experience life. Here we see him at his first trip to the zoo. The big kids were so excited to take him around to see all the animals!
On the first hot day, we ran out and bought a few new kiddie pools (and a new slip-n-slide for the big kids) We created a virtual inflatable water park right in the front yard.
We tossed D into the little pool with a pile of toys, where he played happily for an hour and then went in for a good nap. Besides the bathtub, this was his first time swimming. Once he got over the weirdness of taking a bath outside, he loved it. My poor pale-skinned blond baby has to go swimming in a shirt, hat, and under a big umbrella.
We also took him to the "big" outdoor pool a few times. This was also a hit. I don't have pictures, but we also took him to the indoor pool for the first time recently (no pics because it is, as you can imagine, rather difficult to manage six young children through the locker rooms and supervise their swimming without also trying to photograph the experience.) David kept trying to swat my hands off so I'd let him go, not realizing that since he can neither swim nor walk, he wouldn't fare too well without me.
Here's D kickin it next to his first camp fire. The kids cooked him hot dogs and campfire pies.
He doesn't like grass touching his legs, so he sat happily in his booster seat and ate up his hot dogs.