Gotta love those sugaring temps that are coming our way!!!!!

Here in Vermont if the temps are getting close to 40 by day and dipping down to the 20s by night, it's getting closer to a busy time of year for a lot of maple syrup producers and we are one of them.

Our whole family is involved.  You could say it's a tradition.  We started tapping today.  We had 3 crews going.  My hubby and Z (our middle son), D (our oldest) and S (our youngest boy), L (the youngest and a girl) and myself.  We tapped for two hours in the morning and came in to recharge our cordless drill batteries, rested and ate lunch then back out for another two hours.  We had to tap with snowshoes since the snow is a bit deep in the woods.  It makes for a much more tiring job and much harder to walk around the tree and under/over pipeline.

We were about an hour in this morning and my daughter fell with her snowshoes on.  I crossed the line to help her and when I pulled her up, she came but her boot/snowshoe stayed.  She fell back down and when she did she fell on my snowshoes, right behind my legs, sending me off balance and I fell backwards over the top of her.  We layed there giggling for quite a while.  Getting up out of deep snow sometimes can be tricky.  It may involve rolling over, lifting your legs straight up to get them alined, anything goes as long as the end result is getting out of the snow.  What a chuckle.  Thank goodness no one was video taping that.  We'd win funniest home video for sure though!


My husband is a diehard.  He outlasts us three to one.  We're in now, recharging our batteries both in the drills and our bodies.  My hubby is still out there going.  Tomorrow, we'll be up and at 'em early, hoping to get a few more lines tapped out.  Thank goodness the kids have no school until after town meeting day.  Hopefully we'll be finished up by the time they head back.  Doing a few lines/sections a day is the only way my body can handle it, using snowshoes.

It won't be long, the air will have that sweet boiling smell drifting up to the house.  A new R.O. arrived yesterday.  We got a size bigger this year.  An R.O. (Reverse Osmosis) takes some of the water content out of the sap, making it more concentrated, which means less time boiling it down to syrup.  Less time also means less wood burned, which means less wood to cut and put up.  So it all around save time and money.  You could definately say it pays for itself over time.

We sell most of our syrup in bulk to Highland Sugarworks.  If you visit our sugarhouse you can purchase syrup direct but we don't get into shipping a whole lot of syrup, unless it's a gift to someone from a local customer.

I love the aroma when my hubby is boiling in the sugarhouse.  The steam as you get closer makes your mouth water it smells so sweet!

Anyway, I'm going to go put my feet up and get rested for tomorrow!



Highland Maple Syrup Recipes From Old Vermon

The Vermont Maple Syrup Cook Book

February School Break ~ Who's more excited me or the kids?!

I am so excited to have 11 days off with my kids!  We can get up leisurely, do stuff together, finish all this room moving around stuff, etc.
I just hope the weather is better this school break than the last one in December.  That break we had very cold temps and very little snow.

We are in hopes to go snowshoeing one day out in our woods.  My oldest likes the challenge of starting a fire with his flint.  We all gather up tinder and wait for those sparks to start taking our turn blowing and retrieving more fuel for the fire.  Once it's roaring we get our reward for all that work.  Hotdogs, warm cocoa and all the fixin's for s'mores.  It's funny, normally I DON'T LIKE hotdogs, but there's something about a hotdog cooked over a fire that is so delicious!  Finding the perfect spot is always fun too.  Usually we scope it out during the summer, seeing evergreens fallen over just waiting to become our new campfire retreat! 

I remember when I was very young, my cousin and I wanted to have a weinie roast but all the adults in our lives were too busy.  We asked if we could go to the woodlot and do it ourselves then.  They said we could but in reality they didn't think we'd dare or be successful at a fire.  She & I took the two snowmobiles and drove up to the mountain lot which was about 2 miles of back road and trails.  We not only managed to turn around the snowmobiles without getting stuck but we also made a fire and enjoyed our campfire goodies.  We were so proud of ourselves and very enthusiastic at telling everyone when we got home.  No one believed us until my aunt noticed we had a bit of char on the corners of our mouths.  My dad had me take him to our spot, claimed he wanted to be sure we'd left the fire safe.  Really, in all that snow that little fire wasn't going to get away.  He just wanted to see for himself we'd done it.  My dad was a hard man to get him to be proud of you.  If he was he seldom told you, you just had to read it in his eyes.  And I think he was pretty proud that we'd accomplished that.  I used to love campfires while rabbit hunting when I was younger.  I still remember that when I hear the fire crackling.  I used to love to put pine bows on the fire to hear them fizz.

Anyway, it's amazing how thoughts can wander away from the original topic.....school break!
We also would like to do some Nordic Quests either by snowshoes or Xcountry Skis.  I thought it would be fun to build a gingerbread house and decorate it for St. Pat's day for the "Leprachaun".  Complete with rainbow & pot of gold.  We'll see.

One other thing I'd like to do is since my youngest has to read 20 minutes a day, I thought it would only be fair if we all take that reading break.  I'm in the middle of a book by my favorite author and once I get started I hate putting it down.  Although, I feel extremely guilty reading at home when I should be doing laundry, cleaning, cooking or some other domestic thing.

If anyone has any exciting ideas of how to spend our time and make memories, let me know!  I'd love to hear them!  I love traditions and fond recollections of touching times of my childhood and hope to create the same for my children.

Books I've read by my favorite author;
































And there is so many more in her series!

Will all the chaos of cleaning & painting ever be done!

So we put on an addition of a dining room.  It was phase 2 in a renovation plan my husband and I put in motion 6 years ago.  We needed MORE room in our mudroom for 6 people to put all their gear during a season.  Fall & Spring are exceptionally cramped for room since we need two seasons of outdoor clothing with the temps and weather varying day to day, not to mention room for guests to hang their coats. 

With us living in Vermont putting on an addition, you have to factor in snow.  I know that sounds strange but for us if we put on a small extension on the back of our home near the existing mudroom we would have a hard time getting by it in the winter to push the snow out of the way.  UGH!  So that option was out!

We decided to shift the house rooms forward which meant the kitchen was to move into the dining room and the mudroom would extend into half of the kitchen area.  It sounds easier than that renovation was but none the less that was done 5-6 years ago.

This summer we decided it was time to do phase 2; adding on to get a dining room back.  I love to entertain and have people over for meals but it had been difficult around the breakfast bar in our kitchen to properly entertain, not to mention sitting at the stools for length of time was killing my back. 

So.....after 5 months of working only in our free time on that addition we were able to have Christmas dinner in our new dining room.  The basement portion of the dining room our children had come up with a plan for the room.  Our oldest would move down to there, allowing our youngest to move out of our middle son's room giving all the boys their own rooms.  My daughter already had her own of course.  So let the sawing, mudding, and painting begin.  It took about a month and....my son has now moved into his new bedroom and slept there for the first time last night!   YEAH!

This morning I have been painting his old room to give my son the feel of a new room as well.  Plus there had been 14 years of posters, and object thrown against the walls, etc. to be in desperate need.  He wanted the same color so it was fairly simple.  One more coat tonight and he'll be able to move his stuff in by tomorrow.

Then it will be on to my middle son moving his stuff all to the middle of the room so I can repaint those walls since he wants a different color and a more mature theme. 

I also repainted during all this our rec. room which was off from the new basement bedroom I did a cool painting technique done with a tool to make it look like it has a wood grain.  After a bit of practice, I'm quite proud of the outcome.















You can also try this

"Death by Chocolate" ...the answer to living up to my reputation!

So I have this reputation to live up to with my kids....they think I'm the bomb when it comes to birthday parties. I enjoy putting them together right down to the littlest detail. So when my son's eight grade birthday came up, the last one before hitting high school I knew I needed to do something memorable for he & his friends.

This could potentially be the last time he celebrates with all his childhood friends. We get a choice of which HS to go to, not all of them will choose the same place.

So, my son & I agree on a murder mystery dinner party. We stumbled onto a kit for a death by chocolate theme.
Now who doesn't relate to chocolate?

The storyline takes place in a ritzy Paris hotel. A chocolate connoisseur'

is murdered...by who? Now that's the mystery!!! Is it the competition, employees, or perhaps a female friend.

I made a 3 course dinner menu allowing his friends to choose from 3 appetizers, 2 entrees, and 4 desserts. I went around like the waitress taking orders, dressed in black & white, tie and all! Each course I served in between rounds of dialogue. There were 4 boys & 4 girls that all came dressed in character.

We had a great time! A party to be remembered, hopefully many years from now when they bump into one another. 
Here are some other great murder mystery kits I found on Amazon you might like to try for your teens;

• They also had some wonderful adult themed parties to pick from, now that's not to say the above picks couldn't be used for adults as well.

As Well as