Somebody hold me... My oldest is 14! 😲 How do these years go by
so quickly?! K is blossoming into the most loving, and nurturing young woman. Who knew when she was my little spitfire that she would be discerning becoming a nun once she finishes school.
She has been looking forward to this specific birthday ever
since she was 4 years old. For reasons we can no longer remember, Kevin
told her then that he would let her drive on her 14th birthday. Every
year she would remind him of his promise and every year it seemed like
14 was a lifetime away...yet here we are. Kevin kept his promise and the
two of them spent a good chunk of the day in a mall parking lot driving
our van and they ended with a special father daughter coffee date. Later on we had the family of her closest friend (a family we all love and are close to, actually) come over for some delicious sugar free, gluten free, dairy free, egg free chocolate cake. I promise it was incredible! They brought her the sweetest rose plant which was really quite the perfect surprise. She had told me nearly a year ago she wanted roses on her 14th birthday in honor of St. Terese. I love when things work out like that.
This year she requested that I knit her a gold shawl instead of our traditional birthday sweater. I had her pick the pattern herself because I wanted to make sure she would really like it. Knitting for teenagers is different than knitting for toddlers who have no opinion on what they wear. Ha,ha. Thankfully she still loves my knitted gifts. She chose the
Afterglow shawl. I made a couple of modifications to make it the way she wanted. My rav notes on it are
here. Shawl pin is of course by our favorite makers -
Wooly Moss Roots.
Okay, I need a minute again. My
baby is so grown up! 😠I am not ready for this!! Wasn't she 4 just
yesterday?! Days like this remind me of how grateful I am for our
birthday ring tradition. I can look at all the ornaments we carefully
chose each year to represent our child's growth or interest and
instantly be brought back to that year of their life. It rather eases
the pain of their growing. This year's ornament was supposed to be a car
but I somehow forgot to order it 😵 so one of L's train ornaments is
temporarily in its place. Oops. Oh well. It will be there for her next
birthday along with all the memories of this one.
**You know your daughter loves you when she will wear her birthday crown for you...then she goes to put it on and it doesn't fit. D'oh! Guess I need to loosen the elastic. Her head has grown since I made it when she was just 2 years old!
The big 14th birthday promise
This little homestead of ours made another dream of mine (and my family) come true - harvesting our own maple syrup. Last fall the children and I identified 3 large sugar maple trees on our property (and apparently we have a lot more! I'll share more on that later on). I told my mom about them and then for Christmas she got us this tree tapping kit. About mid-March we tapped our trees. We decided to do a trial run. We didn't have all the supplies (like buckets and boiling pans) so we thought it best to start small and only collect 10 gallons of sap. That took us about one week. Once we had the full ten gallons we made a make-shift set up to boil it outside. We spent the whole day outside watching the sap boil and adding more as it got low. You can see in the photos that one of the pans got too low (the dark one) and the sap started turning into syrup too soon - we are still learning. Once it was all down to about 1/4 of what we started with, we filtered it and in I brought it inside to finish the process. I watched numerous videos on how to tell when the sap has turned into syrup, each one saying it is pretty impossible and you need a special thermometer. Even so, our syrup boiled a bit too longer and was slightly on the sugar side. We weren't discouraged though. It was our first try and besides, it tasted better than any syrup we had ever had. We ended up with a pint of syrup after all was said and done and we enjoyed it that night over waffles and pancakes. I don't think we'll ever forget that experience and are already making plans for a real sugar season next winter - hopefully with gallons upon gallons of syrup to put away for the following year.
I planned on having my spring book post up by now but wouldn't you know it? I can't find our spring books! They are in one of these boxes here but which one? I'll be digging through them this week but in the meantime I thought I would link to some of our past springtime/Easter crafts in case anyone wants to get a head start!
I know, I know. You are sick of seeing this blanket, but I haven't had a whole lot of knitting time so it has dragged on a bit longer than I anticipated. We tried something new on our homestead today and are ridiculously giddy over it. Any guesses as to what it was??? I'll give you a tiny hint - we references The Backyard Homestead and Back to Basics as we prepared.
