Gloucester for Easter

This year, Easter seemed to take second stage to all the other major things going on around the same time.  We put our house on the market, which involved lots of minor home improvements, staging, and boxing up 50% of our stuff.  We're constantly filling out some kind of paperwork or dealing with the latest issue in buying a new house.  And we're leaving for Costa Rica tomorrow at 4am.  So Easter?  It was the least of our problems.  Despite trying to keep the house spotless, we did manage to color easter eggs and have a small egg hunt outside Saturday.  And on Sunday we headed down to Gloucester to get someone else's house messy and overloaded with food!

Egg hunt at our house saturday

Hike at Low Plain for Kimball's birthday

Micah and Becky hosted over 20 family members for the day, including most of Becky's family and ours and Grandma Sally.  It was a gorgeous day (luckily) so all the kids could play outdoors, when they weren't swinging on the indoor rope swing Micah rigged in the upper portion of their garage.  It was chaos, but  lots of fun. The boys had squirt gun fights around the house, and we had a bon fire over which everyone roasted their favorite color peeps.  The peeps roasted quickly- just a few seconds until the sugar on the outside browns and the marshmallow gets jiggly - and I think I liked them better than regular roasted marshmallows. The kids ate plenty of both.

The most favorite activity at Easter this year was sailing home made wooden boats on the vernal pool in M&B's back yard.  There aren't any amphibians in the pool, that we could see, so it was fine for the kids to go tromping around in there with various pairs of adult muckboots, all seven sizes too big for them.  They all overtopped their boots a few times, but no one tripped on a stump and completely face-planted into the muck like all the adults were waiting for!  It was some good, (not so) clean, spring fun.

Grandma and the big girls

roasted peep!

Micah and Finna

Boats in the pool

Haley after she ate a chocolate bunny from Grandma Chris

Preparing for Big Changes

Grandpa Dada came up for several days last week to help us prepare for a big change that will happen later this spring.  We're moving!  Okay, just a few miles down the road, but still, it doesn't matter if you're moving to Tuscaloosa or the house next door ... it's still a major ordeal.  Right now we are preparing to put our house on the market, and Grandpa Dad was a huge help with some long-overdue projects- updating part of the kids' bathroom, touching up our paint inside and out, fixing closet shelving, and the like.  Between staging and preparing our house, working with the mortage and legal people toward a closing on the new house, thinking about what the new house will need, and the fact that this is my absolute busiest time at work... I'm more than a little stressed.  It seems INSANE to leave for a week in the midst of this chaos, but we planned a vacation back in January before we knew we were moving, and now it's here.  So we're off to Costa Rica in 3 days.  I really am excited to go and explore the rainforest, but I just hope we can actually relax while we're there!

 
While Grandpa Dada was here, we also found some time for fun activities.  On a beautiful Saturday morning we went to an Earth Day celebration at Massabesic Audubon where the kids enjoyed making bird feeders and crafts, getting faces painted, constructing a bluebird house, poking around a vernal pool, watching bird banding, and roasting marshmallows over the fire.  We also went to a very chilly Fisher Cats game on Sunday.  The kids didn't seem to mind the chill at all, and happily ate their popcorn and cotton candy and took various excursions around the stadium when the tedium of actually watching baseball (tough for a 3 and 7 year old) got to be too much.  The Fisher Cats lost, but that really doesn't bother us.  It's the spring-ness of  being outside in a stadium and watching a game that matters.  Two days after that baseball game, it snowed 2 inches.  So, we're not quite there yet, but we're getting closer...

Haley putting the finishing touches on the painted quilt square we did together

Aiden's square- a pelican, fish and crab

Syrup

Finally, the sap did come.  After march was just a memory, after all the helpful visitors had left my mom's house, the sap ran for three days straight.  By the weekend Mom had collected enough to start boiling, but we were down to the skeleton crew of just me, Mom, and the kids.  Well, we figured, its now or never.

Boiling was really my Dad's domain, he was the sugarmaster in charge of the evaporator's systems and gauges...everyone else and especially my Mom, helped out... But we weren't running the show, Dad was.  So I can say with certainty that we were a bit intimidated on Saturday morning as we ran through the checklist of everything we'd need to do to boil down the sap.  Luckily my Dad, like many sugar makers, kept meticulous notes, and luckily my Mom read all those entries in his journal over the winter.  We fired up the evaporator.  Wood, wood, more wood...every 7 minutes...watch the float valve, monitor the stack temp, sap levels inside and out in the tanks.  We boiled all morning and into the afternoon, taking turns to spell each other for bathroom breaks, to feed ourselves or the kids, or retrieve things from the house.  The kids ran around on the driveway most of the day, chasing the dogs and helping occasionally with keeping wood splits stacked by the arch.

By mid-afternoon, the hydrometer indicated that we were ready to draw off the first syrup.  It was less than a gallon on that first draw off, but I don't think I've ever been prouder of anything I have helped produce, with the possible exception of my beautiful kiddos.  With Dad gone, and taking a year off from sugaring, then converting the whole sugarbush to tubing last summer, and this terrible spring weather, the odds have certainly been stacked against that syrup ever happening.  But we did it, and Mom and I stopped what we were doing for a few seconds to high five and appreciate the moment.  We even got out the last of Dad's sugar house cigars, and though we didn't light it - neither of us like the taste- we chewed on it and posed for a few photos while boiling.

Drawing off syrup!

All told, we made just over 2 gallons of syrup that day of boiling, which we bottled as pints.  I don't know if Mom will get another sap run before the season is over or not, but even if she doesn't, I'm calling this a success.  And I'm going to savor every last drop of my pints this year, in a different sort of way than before.

Moths are out already

Aiden graded it at Medium Amber

Still no Sap! (or...The Winter that Never Ended)

We've had two more weekends up in Vermont, and STILL NO sap.  At least not in the quantities we need to start boiling.  About 220 gallons is required just to "sweeten the pan" on the size evaporator in our sugarhouse- and all that is before you even pour off one drop of sweet maple syrup.  The last time we sugared, in 2012, we had processed over 1400 gallons of sap by this time (late March).  This year... we have less than 200 gallons.  The weather has just been too darn cold.  It warms up for maybe part of one day, and then freezes solid for 4 more.  The ground is still solidly frozen, with a good two foot blanket of snow, and any sap that has come out is frozen solid in the buckets, tubes, and tanks.  So, suffice it to say, we are in a sad state.  

Hanging out watching Frozen with the Munson/Cameron clan

Haley enjoying Grandma Sally's birthday present

But... we are finding other ways to occupy ourselves on these days with no sugaring work to be done.  On the first weekend, Larrie, Mary, Memorie and Newt were up, along with the whole Cameron clan.  So Ciara and Aiden and Haley had a great time building forts for stuffies and watching movies and creating elaborate crafts.  We ate like kings, jambalaya, pulled chicken tacos, ribs, maple baked beans... nothing to complain about there. And it was great to see family even if the main event was on hold.  We went to visit several other sugarhouses for the Open House weekend-- most were either not boiling or just boiling water for effect and to show how the equipment works.  But there was still maple coffee, donuts with maple cream, maple candy, hot dogs boiled in sap, sugar on snow, and maple cotton candy.  I, for one, was totally sweeted out by the end of the afternoon.  My favorite sugarhouse is the one at the Green Mountain Audubon right near our old house in Huntington.  It's a pretty location, and they still use buckets (600+) and have killer sugar on snow with extra crispy dill pickles.  They had hammered a "golden tap" into one of their trees somewhere in the sugarbush and hung a bucket on it.  If you found it and sent them a cell phone photo as proof, you get entered into a drawing to win some prize.  Aiden and Andy and I looked for a good hour, I felt like I checked at least 400 buckets, but we came up empty handed.  Still, it was fun post-holing around the woods searching.

Kimball hiding in the teepee

Haley and Ciara looking for the Golden Tap

Haley and Ciara

The only sugarhouse that was boiling that weekend!

Andy and Glen fixing more coyote chew damage

Aiden and Ciara nosh on Jeni's cake pops (Olaf... no!)

What we should be doing!

At Audubon where they were boiling water

Haley digs into her sugar on snow

The sauna is getting quite a work out too.  With nothing really to do, we keep it well stoked and the kids love to run out there in their skivvies and boots several times a day.  They stay in only about 5 minutes (as long as spraying the stove with a squirt bottle will keep them entertained) and then run outside to jump and play in the snow with no clothes on.  I suspect that is the real reason they like the sauna.  Meanwhile, the adults who really would like a nice hot steam, end up with a lukewarm sit because the door is opening and closing every two seconds!  Good fun.

The next weekend was just us, and still no sap, so we made the best of it by taking a trip into Burlington for lunch at A Single Pebble.  We did the "Tasting Menu" where the chef selects a lot of small dishes for the table to share, which was delicious and saved us the trouble of having to choose from among all the amazing sounding authentic chinese dishes.  The only bummer was that a noodle dish wasn't included this time, and the kids love their noodles.  Still, they were very adventurous and tried everything that was delivered to the table.  Stuffed shrimp, double garlic broccoli, and several chicken and beef dishes were favorites.  After lunch we walked Church Street and stopped at the Outdoor Gear Exchange and Lake Champlain Chocolates for dessert.  On Sunday we actually did dump the sap buckets before heading home to NH, but really it was more for show than anything else, as they were only about 1/4 to 1/2 full.  And with big frozen ice chunks in the bottom of most of them.  Will it ever warm up this spring?  And if so, will the sap flow?  It's seeming less and less probable with each passing day.

A Single Pebble

Lake Champlain Chocolates

Haley bought a pink leash for Kimball