Well, fast forward to now and I am in fact a stay-at-home mom and plan to be so indefinitely. I am slowly building up my domestic skills, though I have to stay that trying to hone them while learning how to be a parent is rather difficult. Fortunately, I have some help.
Last week, my good friend/second mother Lendie offered to teach me how to can. I jumped at this proposal as it seemed to fit in with my efforts to become domestic. Also, I am pretty terrible at food storage, and this seemed like a good jump start.
So, Lendie came and picked Cyrus and me up and took us out to her house where she had several pounds of peaches, a steam canner, and a few dozen canning jars. Although it takes some time to process all of the peaches, I was shocked at how easy it is. Admittedly, I spent most of my time entertaining Cy and seeing to his needs, and Lendie really did most of the work. However, I peeled a good few peaches and got the general idea. After peaches, we made several jars of blackberry jam, and that was REALLY easy.
Now I have all of the beautiful jars of food that cost much less and taste much better than if I had purchased them in the store. I feel so proud of my little food storage stash, and now I have peaches to feed my baby in a few months and extremely delicious jam for my toast!
Now, I'm about to expose the really dorky side of me. I got so excited about canning things, that that night I had a hard sleeping because all I think about were the canning possibilities: other fruits, spaghetti sauce, apple sauce, maybe even soups and stews??? Unfortunately, my current kitchen situation makes it impossible for me to can on my own, but if Lendie will let me use her kitchen again, I'm all about more canning!
Next on my list is figuring out how to clean my house in spurts of 30 minutes at a time. Maybe some day I'll attempt things like sewing and crafts...or maybe not.
