Cousins, Cherries, and Carousels

Whew! We have had a busy weekend around here!! On Friday, I watched my niece and nephew Oliver and Karen in the afternoon. Collette thought it was great! She spent a lot of time trying to crawl over to Karen, who is a little more than a year older than her. Karen thought it was pretty fun, too:

Friday night I was able to have a modified "girls night" with a good friend of mine. "Modified" because we did have Collette with us, but we did still manage to have a nice dinner out and then put her to bed before watching a move! Sorry, no pictures of that, but we had fun. :o)

Saturday morning Taryn and I went yard-saling. Two communities around here had community yard sales, and we both got a ton of great stuff, mainly child oriented. I got an extra-tall-never-opened baby gate, an umbrella stroller for our cruise, brand name baby outfits with the tags still on them for $0.50, and a toy for Collette. Hooray for bargains!

After the yard sales, I came home to 3 boxes that looked like this:

Cherries. Lots and lots and lots of cherries. 36 quarts of cherries, to be exact, both black and white. So LL, Taryn, Gram (88), Great Uncle Barney (91) and I call did cherries for the rest of the day, and some of us did them into the night. Wondering what one could possibly do with all of those cherries? Well, I'll tell you. First, we used our new, nifty, cherry pitter:

Well worth the $17 investment, if you have a lot of cherries to do. And it keeps your hands a lot cleaner! Plus, it's simple. Even Isaac was able to operate it!

Although Gram and Uncle Barney preferred the old-fashioned method of pitting by hand:

Once all the cherries were cleaned, we made several different things with them. Many of them (21 quart bags and 3 gallon bags full) we just froze whole so we can use them later in different recipes. We also made 3 kinds of freezer jam--white cherry, black cherry, and black cherry espresso--that one is a new recipe we decided to try, so we only made 3 pints to see what we think of it. In addition to the freezer jam, we made a batch each of white cherry canned jam, black cherry canned jam, and canned cherry pie filling.

We chopped some cherries up finely and froze it in individual servings for Collette to eat. Collette likes cherry flavor in her store-bought baby foods, but she had never had just chopped cherries before, so we decided to let her have some to see what she thought. At first, I think the texture disturbed her:


Not so sure....


MMMMMMM! Cherries!

Collette also had fun playing is Isaac and Tabby while we did cherries. Isaac wanted Collette to take a nap with him, so he set up pillows for both of them on the floor, gave her his blankie, and got snugglie in front of sprout tv. Precious. You would never know it was almost 90 with crazy-Mississippi-humidity! LOL.

Tabby spent a lot of time loving on "Baby Collette" and giving her hugs in her exerscauser:

Today was LL's work picnic at Knobels, an amusement park close by. It's a free-entry park, and the Animal Hospital had gotten us all tickets for some rides, so LL and I decided to take Collette on her very first rides! We had a great time, and Collette loved the rides! First up, the carousel!!


She loved it!

We also rode 2 trains; one in the kiddie park and one in the main park:



After a full day of church, picnic lunch, and strolling around the park, I thought Collette would be miserable, but she was great; happy the whole time!

Now we are all home recuperating. :o) Hope y'all had a great weekend, too!