Randal – 4 Weeks

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Randal is 4 weeks old now! He is eating and sleeping a lot. He has recently started standing/pushing off his feet. He has been holding his head up a lot more as well as wiggling a lot.

2022 In Review

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Dear Friends and Family,

Welcome to our 2022 year in review letter! We are trying something a little different this year. We have decided to start a new blog for our new family adventures.  The old blog, if you were familiar with it, is still up for now, but will probably go into archives before long.

This year’s letter is a bit later than we would have liked.  The story starts at the end of 2022 when we sold our home in New Jersey and hit the road in the RV.  The last few months have been very busy and some unexpected family issues came up which contributed to the delays. Then, after the family matters were handled, it was on to the move.  I spent February back on the road moving our household goods out of New Jersey. That took pretty much all of February and we had some other affairs to settle in early March.  That is all done now, and so without further delay, let’s get to 2022 in review!

We took over 10,000 pictures in 2022.  Below is a small selection of them and some notes about events that occurred.

For each of the below pictures, you may click through to a higher resolution picture.  Click once to go to the picture comment page, a second time on the image for the high resolution image.

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January 2022

 

Jarek and Arya standing next to their tower
Jarek and Arya standing next to their tower

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A Pressing Matter! – Making homemade cider

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Today we processed some apples into homemade apple cider.  We combined the event with a Cub Scout requirement for the Bear Den.  The kids had a lot of fun sorting the apples and removing the bad apples from the bunch.  This was a smaller batch than what we did last year, due to the upcoming move.  Last year I made 15 gallons of cider which I fermented into hard cider, on top of some additional regular cider.

Once the apples were washed and sorted, then it was time to grind them up.  I don’ have a picture of them using the grinder, but you can see it on the ground in the pictures below.

The grinder, known as the “maximizer” grinds the apples into chunks which increases the juice yield.

Our friend and fellow Cub Scout, B, pressing his apples.

Garrett enjoyed some frozen blueberries for a snack before his nap.

Evan took a turn cranking down the press, followed by big brother.

Out of the three bags of apples, we got about 4 gallons of juice.  The bags of seconds were $8 each, so not a bad yield.  The kids asked what we were going to do with the rest of the apples.  I said we were going to convert them to eggs!  The chickens were quite thrilled to get the pile to pick through.