Holiday Baking with Friends

On Tuesday of this week, a few friends came over for a pie making day. We spent the entire day making pie filling and pie crusts to go in the freezer for holiday use.

Liz Mitchell (cousin), Me, Deborah and Karin (friends from Utah)


We made 4 quadruple batches of chocolate filling and 4 quadruple batches of vanilla filling. (Vanilla is for banana cream pie, peach cream pie, coconut cream pie, etc.)

And we covered the entire table in plastic wrap and rolled out 58 pie crusts. My niece Sheryl showed up to help, too, and made off with a razzleberry pie.

And we made a giant mess of the kitchen.

And when the kids all asked if they could have pie, I said, "As soon as the kitchen is clean, we can have pie!" They were happy to oblige.

All totalled up: 32 pie fillings, 4 razzleberry pies, 2 apple pies, and 46 pie crusts.

What I got to keep for my freezer: 4 vanilla pie fillings, 4 chocolate pie fillings, 1 razzleberry pie, and 20 pie crusts to use for pecan pies for neighbors and home teachers! My holiday baking is more than halfway done!

Halloween

Halloween is over, and we survived. Here's a rundown of the afternoon:

• 4 arguments with kids (3 with the same kid)
• 1 crying child
• 4 blackmail episodes out of which I got clean bedrooms, a clean kitchen and a clean bathroom ("You're not trick-or-treating until your room is clean!")
• several attempts at decent pictures with camera phone because the good cameras are both broken (pictures stink, but I'll post them anyway)
• two hours of FUN and lots of CANDY
• 2 freezing and crying kids
• hot chocolate for everyone
• threats over candy wrappers on the floor
• bed (FINALLY)

All in all, a productive evening.

This is what Sam the pirate looks like without his bottle ("Avast ye scurvy dog! Brin' me me bottle or I'll see ye t' Davy Jones!")

So our only happy Sam picture is with the bottle. ("Arr, me hearty. That be a fine bit o' grog.")

Sarah and Abby, the Cowgirl and Indian. This is the first time since she's had any say in the matter that Sarah hasn't been an animal for Halloween. She still has an animal, but at least she's finally willing to be human.

Matthew as a baby riding on a werewolf's back. He won a couple of prizes at school and at a party. And today at school, they had a "Shout Out" over the PA system to Matthew for having an awesome costume.

He looked especially funny when he was sleeping on a dancing werewolf.

Headless Anna - several people told her that it was the best costume they'd seen all night. She looked awesome! Matthew also heard several times that his was the best costume. Good job guys!

I'm Addicted

A couple of months ago, we had a man come to our ward and talk to all the adults about the new way genealogy and temple work is going to be done. All the changes they're making are going to make submitting names for temple work and tracking what's been done on those names so much easier and more efficient. The project I was most excited about is called Family Search Indexing. The Church is creating a searchable database of all the records pertaining to family history, and anyone who wants to can volunteer to transcribe names from images of old Census records, birth records, death certificates, etc. Go to http://familysearchindexing.org/ to get started. The oldest records I've worked on so far are Revolutionary War Pension records from the late 1700's.

The other day, I was working on a 1900 Census record from Kansas. The last family/household on the record was made up of a bunch of brothers and sisters, no parents. They also had two lodgers living with them. I noticed that the first lodger, a 27 year old man, was from Utah and the second, a 24 year old man who'd been married for 3 years, was from Idaho. So I was curious about what they were doing there, and scrolled over to the far right of the census image where occupations are listed. Their occupations were listed as "Traveling preacher" and "Mormon preacher." It was so exciting to stumble across a couple of missionaries from over a hundred years ago! I felt like I knew them.

I've gotten totally addicted to indexing. I set a goal of doing one Census page per day (about 50 names) which takes me about half an hour or less. So far, I've extracted about 8,000 names. You should do it, too; you can index between games of Solitaire or Free Cell, and then you'll feel good about wasting time on the computer!