Feeling Better

I wrote a blog post about the miscarriage, but I don't think I'm going to post it.  It was good for me to write it out, an exercise I've done since I was a little girl.  I wrote about it, and now the story is out of me, and I feel ready to move forward a little bit more every day. 

I will say that it was much more dramatic than I had expected.  When I miscarried at around 5 weeks, it just felt like a slightly heavier, slightly crampier period.  Miscarrying at 12 weeks is a whole different animal.  After being in severe pain all day, pain that a Percoset prescription didn't touch, Jason took me to the ER, where I praised the staff who got me in and hooked me up to a Dilaudid IV within 20 minutes.  A miracle.  I even wrote the hospital administration an email telling them how great everyone was.

I think the experience scared Jason pretty badly - I couldn't talk, I couldn't do anything except moan.  It's made me rethink whether I'm really going to have a hippie no medication birth after all. 

It feels monumentally unfair that I went through the first trimester and essentially experienced labor, and in the end we're left with nothing.

Still, we're moving forward.  It's put a bit of a damper on the holidays.  I've been moody, as Jason will tell you.  Tears are right under the surface for the entirety of my days.  Not just sad tears, though.  As we move toward Christmas, every hokey attempt at sentimentalism that in past years I might have been able to ignore has been making me well up and think, "That's just so lovely!"

So if you see me crying, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

We got a Christmas tree and decorated it, and that helped.  Jason filled the house with poinsettias like he does every year, and I pulled out my stuffed snowmen and teddy bears dressed in Victorian Christmas garb (they're adorable!), and that helped.  A couple of days ago, I felt like myself for the first time in ages.

We're moving forward and we'll keep trying, because it would be nice to have a child or two to share this life with.

Where I've Been

I haven't written anything very substantive on my blogs for a little while now because I've been preoccupied.  I've been waiting until an appropriate time to share some news here, and in the meantime I've been drafting posts about what's been going on to post once I could talk about it.

But now there's nothing really to share except this: I'm waiting to have a miscarriage.

I've written a bit about our struggles to have a baby.  As of next January, we will have been trying for 3 years.  We've been to doctors and the problem has been figured out and essentially fixed, so we've only been really trying with everything working well for about 8 months or so.

In September we planned to do an IUI at the fertility clinic, only it seemed like I never ovulated, which is weird since I'm like clockwork.  Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when I got two positive pregnancy tests.  After all of the doctors and appointments and everything, we had done it on our own!

For the last month I've been experiencing pregnancy symptoms - all-day nausea, bloating, gas, sore boobs.  These things were irritating on one hand, and exciting on the other, because it meant I was growing a baby.

Only, no.

Thursday night, Jason and I went to the hospital for my first ultrasound.  I was 9 1/2 weeks pregnant, so we expected to see our teeny baby for the first time and to hopefully hear its heartbeat.  Instead, there was nothing.  A yolk sac, indicating that things had started out well, but no baby.  The fetus never grew. 

The technician couldn't tell us what it meant, because that's not her place, but it was clear from her face, and painfully obvious that there was just no baby.

We left the hospital devastated.  At 9 1/2 weeks, I had already imagined telling family and friends in a few weeks.  I was so excited to be able to share this right before Christmas.  Based on the conception date, baby would have arrived around June 15, which meant having the summer to spend together.  I envisioned possibly, once I got coordinated enough, taking baby to sit on the beach with me.  We have had a dramatic shift in how we envisioned the next 8 months (and after) since Thursday night.

As much as I would like to close the chapter and have it end immediately, I'm just going to let nature take its course, which could take a couple of weeks. I spoke to my doctor on Friday afternoon and she was so kind.  She even gave me her cell phone number in case I need to talk.  I feel good about choosing her as my OB even though we've only interacted a couple of times. 

Jason was emailing with a friend on Friday, and it must have been on his mind because she's expecting a baby, and so he told her.  It turns out the same thing happened to her and her husband.  She went in for the ultrasound at 9 weeks, and nothing was there.  I honestly didn't know this was even a possibility.  I thought if there was something wrong like that, surely you miscarried much sooner than almost 10 weeks.  I can't say that I'm glad it happened to her too, because it's terrible, but it's nice to feel not so alone.

Which is really why I am writing about this.  The more I talk about fertility issues, the more I realize we have lots of friends who have also struggled with having a baby.  And the more we discuss miscarriage, the more friends we realize have also dealt with this.  No one talks about these things, because they are personal and the hurt is deep, but it's nice to know we're not alone.  Knowing there's a friend I can email when I am sad or if things get hard over the next couple of weeks who knows what I am feeling, is really a comfort to me.

I'm supposed to be 10 weeks today, but I'm just waiting for it to end.  We're going to try again, of course, but today we are sad.

Once Upon A Time

(This isn't a story, but is about the ABC show, which is blatantly steeped in Disney)

All right, this will be a ridiculous post, but I've been stewing over these few things and just need to write them down so I can stop thinking about them.

Jason and I just finished season 2 of Once Upon A Time, which, I have to say, took a precipitous drop in quality from season 1.  Yeah, the sets and costuming are still gorgeous, but the story is taking this meandering path and the show has decided to co-opt every imaginary world or thing ever written or put on screen ever, which is getting a little annoying.

But the main problem for me with season 2 is this whole trying to make Regina (aka the Evil Queen) sympathetic, while at the same time continuing to show us how EVIL she is.  So I guess she sort of loves Henry, kind of, in her weird, twisted way.  And she kind of feels qualms about doing the evil stuff she does.  But she still does the Evil!

This woman has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people, including a whole village and her own father, the only person who cared about her.  At the very least she should be locked up in the Storybrooke jail.

Also, I don't buy that Mary Margaret has any sort of black anything on her heart for indirectly killing Cora because Cora was even more evil than Regina, and, really, Mary Margaret was doing everyone in every world a big favor.

ALSO, I have a general beef with this show for RUINING Maleficent, who is the best villain in the Disney world and is not some lame-o, untalented witch hack with frizzy blond hair!

Okay, I'm done with this ridiculous post.  Thank you for letting me get it off my chest.

Kitchen remodeling

This is Jason guest posting on Kelly's blog.

About three years ago we moved into a single family house, which we subsequently purchased from our landlady last spring. The house is a Tudor revival (subclade Cotswald Cottage) that dates from the late 1920s or 30s. I figure there will be a lot of people from the western states reading this, and to many of you that probably sounds very old. I'm not sure the town I grew up in even existed in the 1920s. In New England, the vast majority of the housing stock is pre-war, and the build quality was superior back then to a lot of more recent stuff. Old growth timber, detailed mosaic tilework in bathrooms, six inch thick door casements, interesting alcoves. We really like living here, in fact about the only downside is poor insulation and high heating costs, as well as fewer bathrooms than newer houses (our entire neighborhood is 3BR/1.5 bath). Here is our house, a little obscured by the plum tree, but you get the idea:

The kitchen is not super huge, but we came from a much smaller apartment with a galley kitchen, so it was a big improvement. This is also only the second place I've ever lived that had a dishwasher. When Kelly and I were purchasing the house, we had it in our minds that we would like to redo the kitchen cabinets at some point. The kitchen had a nice granite countertop, and the dishwasher and fridge were in good shape and relatively new, but the cabinet doors were cheap plywood painted white. And not a very good paint job either. The cabinets themselves are solidly built (and much nicer than the 1979 house I grew up in), and look to be original to the house. I didn't get tremendously good "before" pictures, but here's what the kitchen looked like.

Fine, but not amazing. One day I was shopping at the Home Depot, and I was approached with an offer for a free estimate for kitchen cabinet refacing. Normally I don't go for these things, but Kelly and I had talked about it, so I signed up for the estimate. The fellow came over a few days later, took some measurements, and came up with a quote of $10,000 to reface the cabinets with MDF doors (in other words, fake wood). We thanked him and sent him on his merry way, since we didn't have that kind of cash to blow on kitchen fixups, although he protested that anywhere else we got a quote from was going to be at least twice as much. He was probably right, we didn't bother getting any more quotes. I figured, like most things, the internet must have a way to make this cheaper. So I went online and poked around, and there are quite a few places online that will sell you new cabinet doors and the supplies you will need to install them yourselves. I finally convinced Kelly this was a project we could do ourselves, and even if we had to hire someone to do the installation work, it would still be a lot cheaper. I talked to my dad, and he said he would be willing to come out for a week and help install. He's a pretty good carpenter, and has done a lot of projects around their house (including installing hardwood floors), so he and I both felt confident we could get the job done. Also, I calculated that we could do the project for no more than 25% of the Home Depot quoted cost, and get solid wood doors instead.

In hindsight, I have to say that this project was significantly more difficult than the websites selling you do-it-yourself supplies would have you believe. However, it was also significantly easier than the websites trying to sell you complete installation services would have you believe. Kelly really likes the look of cherry wood, but we both agreed that with it being such a small kitchen, we needed to keep it bright and a lighter wood would be better for that, as well as matching the existing white trim and appliances. I found a few websites I liked and we ordered some sample doors. We looked at maple, beech, and alder wood, and all were beautiful. Frankly, any of them would have been an improvement. Here are a few of the doors we looked at:

We ordered a few sample doors from Barker Door, which has a lot of options, as well as Kitchen Reface. Kitchen Reface is an interesting site. I liked their no-nonsense pricing approach (flat price of $55 per door and $30 per drawer front, regardless of size), but the only have 8 set styles to choose from. Originally when looking at the website, Kelly wasn't wild about the style options, but we actually ended up going with them in the end, and opted for the "Classic" style, which was a nice traditional style with a fairly light stained maple. It was a close call between maple and beech. As a bonus kitchenreface.com offered free shipping (which the other site did not) as well as free hinges. After choosing the style, I measured all of the cabinet openings, ordered the doors, and bought my dad a plane ticket.

Most of our drawers had broken slides, so I decided to replace them entirely. Kitchen Reface doesn't offer drawer boxes, so I ordered these from Reface Depot, who somewhat hilariously drop shipped them from yet another manufacturer in Lousiana. They had very affordable hardwood birch drawer boxes for the same price as plywood. I also opted for the fancy underdrawer soft close slides, which were sort of expensive at about $30 a set, but well worth it. It took about a month for the doors to be manufactured, and I had everything shipped to work, because we live in the city and UPS won't leave things at the house without a signature. Surprisingly, it all fit in two carloads in my Hyundai.

Fast forward a couple of months and my dad arrived to help out. Our first task was removing all of the old doors. This was actually the physically most challenging part of the project. The hinges had been painted over several times, and many of the screws were stripped. It took us an entire day to get everything off. On several of the doors we were able to get three of the four screws out but not the last one. After several hours, my dad figured out if we just wrenched the door off physically with the right leverage, the hinge would rip right off over the screw and then we could back the screw out with pliers.

Here's the pile of doors.

And the high quality drawers:

The pane of glass in this door was held in with a thumb tack:

The next task was attaching the plywood end panels I had ordered to the exposed ends of the cabinets. In theory this is straightforward, just glue them on and secure with finishing nails. However, a few of the cabinet ends were in somewhat poor repair, and most of them had face frame overhangs, where the front of the cabinet overlapped the side of the cabinet by about 1/8".  Here's an example:

The faces all need to be flush, so we had to build this up by cutting a piece of 1/8" hardboard to fit the side of the cabinet, then fit the panel over that.

Attaching the rest of the panels went pretty smoothly, although all of them had to be sanded and shaped to account for the walls not lining up quite right in an 85 year old house. By the end of the first day we had gotten all of these attached.

The next task was to prepare all of the faces for the veneering. Everything had to be sanded smooth so the pieces matched evenly. In addition, there was also some minor carpentry work that had to be done, mostly to repair damaged spots, and to remove some interesting extra pieces of wood that had been nailed in random places for some reason. The painted surfaces were also cleaned with TSP in preparation for the veneering. My dad did most of this work while I was at work one day. I imagine with a newer kitchen, not as much of this stuff (which is very time consuming) would need to be done.

When I ordered the doors and drawer fronts, I also ordered two rolls of matching veneer, which is very thin sheets of wood attached to an adhesive backing (about the thickness of light cardboard). This is what you attach to the face frames to make them match the doors. I ordered a few tools for this job in advance, including a veneer scraper, water based contact cement, and a glue roller to apply the cement. I got all of these from veneersupplies.com. We first cut the veneer into carefully measured strips using a pair of long handled scissors I got from Job Lot. A good pair of scissors (with long sharp blades) is imperative for cutting veneer. I also had to purchase a paper cutter for making good straight cuts on the edges.

After we cut and dry fit the pieces, we applied contact cement to the surfaces, let it dry for about 30 minutes, then peeled the backing off and attached the pieces. It sticks instantly and pretty much irreversibly, so it's really important to line it up exactly right before pushing it down. The veneer scraper looks sort of like a giant putty knife, except with a very sturdy rigid blade about 4-5 inches wide. Basically you push down on the veneer as hard as you can with this tool to set the adhesive, which is pressure sensitive. Here is me applying some veneer, as well as the finished veneer (untrimmed).

We cut the strips with about a 1/4" overlap in each dimension, which then had to be trimmed flush with the cabinets. We used a razor knife for this, and it was a little scary at first. I did most of this work, and admit I made a few mistakes with trimming a little too close, but got better with practice. I think they might make a flush trimming tool for work like this, but we did it all freehand. On the exposed corners, where one veneered face met another one, we used a drywall taping knife to make the cuts without damaging the other surface. This is basically a large putty knife. I held this taping knife between the blade and the end panel, which prevented the blade from digging into the finish. For the most part this was pretty easy other than one non-right angle junction where I got a little too cavalier with my cutting and trimmed it too close. We patched it up with some stain and putty though. After flush trimming the veneer, we used a wood file to take the final edge off and leave the veneered face completely flush with the frame. We had read online that this method was quite a bit quicker than sandpaper and that proved to be the case.

The hardest part of the veneering is putting in the cross pieces and getting good butt joints. There are a few different methods, but we just cut them flush with a paper cutter, and dry fit them repeatedly, leaving a little extra play in the veneer (which goes away nicely when you smooth it down). If things don't match up 100% perfectly a little wood putty does wonders. After the veneering and filing was done, we painted the inside of the frames with matching paint that we bought at home depot. I had ordered some matching paint from kitchenreface, but they accidentally sent stain instead. This turned out to be fortuitous though, since it allowed us to stain some finishing molding pieces with the matched stain, and paint is pretty easy to match anyway.

After everything had been veneered and painted, all that remained was to attach the actual doors. This was the easiest part of the process. We just screwed the hinges into the doors, then drilled small pilot holes in the side of the cabinet, then held up the door and screwed in the hinge with an impact driver. The hinges have about 1/8-1/4" adjustment in each direction, so it doesn't have to be exact. These are the first doors we got hung up:

We soon hit a snag. There's a weird cabinet above the cook top that has two openings (the smaller one we use for spices). This had been open in the old kitchen, but I decided to enclose it behind a single door when we refaced. Unfortunately, the sizes of the openings do not match, and the middles do not line up perfectly, so I had measured incorrectly and the doors didn't fit the opening quite right. You can see the problem in this picture:

Ultimately, I'm not sure it would have worked even if I had ordered the door wider, because the hinges wouldn't have lined up properly. Luckily my dad came to the rescue, and we built a little insert piece out of some scrap wood he had cut elsewhere in the kitchen, glued it in, and veneered it. It worked perfectly, all that was left is a small seam which is covered perfectly by the door when attached.

We finished up this side of the kitchen, then turned our attention to the other side, where some of the trickiest bits awaited us. First the cabinet above the fridge had been broken, presumably when they installed the fridge, so that had to be rebuilt.

We rebuilt this with a 3/4" length of poplar I found at the home depot, and it was good as new.

Second, we had to deal with this weird end panel between the oven and the fridge, which makes up the side of a recessed alcove.

I had neglected to order a plywood panel for this section (which probably would have been a good idea). So instead we decided to try veneering a section of 1/8" hardboard that we custom cut to fit in this space. We had to do it in three pieces, but the seams are near the back and not very noticeable. It took a lot of sanding and filing to get the piece shaped right so it would fit in there, but we finally got it. I applied some Liquid Nails, and the piece popped right in, and ended up looking pretty good.

Finally, we had to deal with veneering around the oven.

This is a master veneersmith's worst nightmare. We toyed with the idea of removing the oven, but eventually decided to just slide the piece in behind the oven. The strips were almost 8 feet long, so it took a lot of care to get them lined up properly. I carefully cut out notches for the screws that held the oven in place, as well as a few other places that needed more clearance. Then we carefully maneuvered them into place. They turned out well.

After that, all that remained was to attach the rest of the doors, install the drawer slides and drawer boxes, and screw on the drawer fronts, all of which was pretty easy. I decided to replace the two very shallow drawers that were located under the oven with one deeper, more functional drawer, which came out great. We still have to attach hardware to the drawers and doors, and figure out something to do with the toe kick, but otherwise we are already enjoying a brand new kitchen which looks really nice. In the end we paid about $2000 even for all of the doors, drawers, veneer, etc. as well as another $300 or so in supplies and necessary tools. We ended up paying way less than what we were quoted originally, with much higher quality materials. Plus, it was fun to learn how to do a project like this, and satisfying to have done the whole thing ourselves. You care a lot more about the workmanship in your own house than some random contractor does, who is just trying to get done and get out of there as quick as possible. Here is the final product:

This took pretty much a full week of work to finish. I am very grateful to my dad who was willing to take the time to help with this. Not a very fun "vacation," but he is a good sport. Plus, I think he enjoys work like this.

Jason

Sometimes A Flower Is Just A Flower

Yesterday at church I Took A Stand and now I feel kind of dumb about it.

Actually, to be more precise, I didn't take a stand - and after I finish my story, you'll understand why that's a very bad joke.

Every year for Mother's Day, the bishop gets flowers for all the women in the church who are over 18.  At the end of Sacrament Meeting, he calls the little kids who are under 8 up to the front, and he has all of the adult women stand up, and then he instructs the kids to give a flower to every woman who is standing, so they dash around, handing out carnations wrapped in plastic and a pretty ribbon.

The first year we were in that ward, I felt silly standing up, because I wasn't a mom and I didn't have any thoughts of being a mom quite yet, but I stood and took my flower.

Yesterday was a different story.  Yesterday I just Wasn't In The Mood.  See, we've been trying to have a baby for 2 1/2 years.  I think almost everyone we know in real life knows this by now, since we've been steadily answering "not yet, but we're trying" for at least a couple of years whenever anyone we know asks us about the whole kid thing.

The first Mother's Day after we started trying to have a baby, I just smiled sillily and I took the flower. Last year, I was feeling a little more down about it and I actually left the room right before, just figuring I would avoid the topic altogether.  This year I had to conduct the music, so I was essentially trapped there until the bitter end of the meeting.  And I just Wasn't In The Mood.  So I stayed seated, and I grabbed some papers out of my bag and started pulling things together for the Sunday School lesson I would need to teach in 10 minutes.  

Then a cherubic little boy thrust a fuchsia-colored carnation in my face despite the fact that I was not standing up, so of course I took it and I smiled at him brightly and I said thank you.

Sigh.

When we got home, I told Jason it was probably silly for me to stay seated.  What was I taking a stand against exactly?  A nice gesture?

(OK, there are also some vaguely feminist reasons rattling around in my head, but those are really just a strident cop-out because mainly it was the baby thing.)

As Jason said to me, "Sometimes a flower is just a flower."

I'm not going to go into the details here, but yes, we've been to doctors, and yes, we're working on solutions.  Overall we're optimistic that it will happen, but time keeps passing, and we keep getting older.

On the upside, though, we've been able to save some money, we've been able to buy our house, and I've been able to really find my groove professionally.  None of those things would have been so secure if I'd had a baby a couple of years ago, and I feel like every little bit of stability that I can give our future children and our future life is a plus.

Released

(Posted on both of my blogs, in case you think you're seeing double)

In my church, we have lay clergy and everything is done by volunteers. For example, my bishop has a day job - he's a doctor. I'm a lawyer, but for the past almost 4 years, I've been working with the 12-17 year old girls in our congregation. It has had a huge impact on my life and has taken up a lot of my physical and emotional time and energy.

Some of our girls come from tough backgrounds. One of the girls was 13 when I started, and now I plan to help her with her college applications in the Fall. Two of our girls are starting college in the Fall. Some of them are the first (or second) in their families to go to college, or to even think about college. I'm so proud of the goals they've set for themselves and the things they've accomplished, all while being active with Church and just all-around good people.

I won't lie, I've been feeling kind of burned out. I've tried not to let it show to the girls, but I worry that it has. We have lessons every Sunday that I coordinate. We have weekly activities, sometimes on Saturdays a long ways away. We have other activities in other states. There is a lot of driving (a LOT of driving) and coordinating. And then there's just generally being concerned about the girls and wondering if I'm doing enough for them.

(The answer? No. It's never really enough, but sometimes I have to set limits for myself.)

Last Sunday the Bishop called to ask if he could come by. I had a feeling either Jason was getting a new calling, or I was getting released from mine. It was the latter - I was getting released as the Young Women's President.

Yesterday, I was officially released, and the new Young Women's presidency was put in place.

I've spent the last week feeling alternately relieved to not be in charge anymore, and near tears as I think about not spending as much time with the girls. I've also spent a lot of time pulling together resources and information for the new Young Women's President. We got together Friday night and I went through my typed, page and a half outline with all of the things I wanted to discuss with her. And I realized this morning that I still forgot something. I wanted to tell her a little bit about each of the girls, and also about how we've done things in the past. I'm hoping she might still want to do some of the fun Summer activities I had started to plan. I know she'll want to do her own thing, but she is brand new in our congregation and in the Young Women's program here, and she seemed to appreciate my thoughts.

The good thing is, I'm not moving away, so I'll still be around to help if anyone has any questions, and I'll still see the girls.

Jason and I are driving 5 girls to upstate New York this Saturday for a giant regional activity and then I'm officially done. I feel completely confused as to what I'm supposed to do with myself. Concentrate on my job? Exercise more? Dedicate more time and effort to the two local organizations who just put me on their boards?   Clean the basement?  Probably all of those things, really.

I still haven't been given a new responsibility at church. Jason speculated yesterday that maybe Bishop is letting me rest. My swimming buddy told me this morning to enjoy it. I still feel like there's an emptiness where I used to be so consumed with something so important - the girls. Now they're someone else's official responsibility, and it's hard to realize that and relax.

On the other hand, yesterday I conducted the music in Sacrament Meeting and I had a flashback to my huge student ward in college where all I had to do every week was pick the hymns and wave my hand around in front of the congregation and no one really cared if I was right or wrong because half the people never even glanced at me, and the other half didn't know enough to know if I was making mistakes. Sometimes an easy church job with extremely low stakes sounds appealing.

The Latest Craft Project: Maple Syrup

One of Jason's favorite economy bloggers lives in New Hampshire and started tappng his maple trees and making maple syrup a couple of years ago.  Jason (who hopes someday we have a house in the woods of New Hampshire or Vermont, or, really, even southern Massachusetts) thought this was the coolest thing ever.  He forwarded me links to the maple syrup blogs and I read them with interest.

So we have this huge maple tree in our backyard.  The maple is probably at least 50 years old. It has fiery orange-red leaves in the Autumn and Jason suspected it was a sugar maple.  As the weather got colder and we couldn't go to the beach anymore, he started researching tapping the maple tree and determined that we could put 2, possibly 3 taps into our big tree.  Because Jason always needs a project.

It takes the right kind of weather for the sap to flow.  Basically, you need it to get below freezing at night, and above freezing during the day, which means that mid to late February here in Rhode Island is a good time to start.

The day after Winter Storm Nemo, Jason got started.

(Btw, this is my favorite)

The day after the blizzard was actually pretty warm and sunny (relatively speaking), and the coming week's forecast was for 40 degree days and 20 degree (and colder) nights.  Perfect!

First, Jason drilled a small hole in our tree and inserted a tap (which he had already ordered special to be prepared for the perfect day).  Then he attached some tubing.

Then he tapped in the 2nd tap.

And attached the tubing, and snaked the tubing into 2 gallon jugs we had saved.  The sap immediately started flowing.

This was the first day's haul.  1 gallon, plus a little bit in a 2nd gallon.

We tasted it.  Well, Jason tasted it, and after assuring me it was fine, I tasted it.  Turns out maple sap tastes like slightly sweet water.  Not so bad.

Then, THEN the sap really started flowing.  Jason brought home a 7 gallon bucket from work and while we were gone for a couple of days, the bucket overflowed!  So he brought home 2 more buckets.  As of last Friday night, he had collected around 24 gallons of sap and decided to try boiling it into syrup.  Usually sap cooks down at around the rate of 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup.

Jason used my large roasting pan and 2 stock pots for the boiling.

Boil, boil, boil.

We figured it would costs us a lot in natural gas, but that this would be a fun experiment and worth a higher utility bill.  Jason checked the gas meter during the boil and turns out, we probably spent $4 or $5 total.  Not too bad for the amount of syrup we got.  Real maple syrup is expensive!

Ideally we would be doing this over a wood fire with a fancy evaporator and such.  And we would have a 20-acre farm.  But we work with what we have.

Jason monitored his sap closely and topped it off periodically.  We had a few taste tests along the way and marveled how the taste gradually took on the familiar maple flavor, and started turning a pretty golden color.

14 hours later, the syrup was ready to bottle.

We wound up with 90 ounces of  syrup!

That's more than we were expecting.  We have a grading sampler that we bought in Vermont a few months ago that shows examples of the 4 grades of maple syrup: Fancy, Medium Grade A, Dark Grade A, and Grade B.  Our syrup is closest to Fancy, but just a little darker.  Turns out, the earlier in the season, the more sugar in the sap.  And the more sugar in the sap, the lighter the syrup because you don't have to boil it down as far to get the final syrup.  I'm really excited to see how it changes as the season progresses over the next month or so.

Not only does it look pretty, but it tastes so, SO good.  Really yummy.

I mentioned on Facebook today that after our successful syrup, we might be in the market for a sugar bush in Vermont or New Hampshire.  I might not have been completely kidding...

Knits

This blog is kind of becoming my "show everyone who isn't on Ravelry what I've knitted lately" blog.  But this morning a friend of mine sent me an adorable picture of her daughter in the sweater I knitted, so I just have to share:

Adorable, right?  I also made her a little hat.  This is a yarn called Paton's Beehive Chunky and it is a super soft acrylic.  After making this sweater, I stocked up the next time Jo-Ann had a sale.  It is SO soft! 

(Since I have my own wool allergies, I usually make baby stuff out of acrylic just in case baby is allergic too.  That way my hands don't itch, and neither does baby.)

I made this sweater over Christmas for one of my counselors in Young Womens. 

The gauge on this is pretty small (size 4 needles, for the knitters).  Usually I shy away from finer knitwork because I just don't have the patience for it, but we watched a lot of movies with my parents over the holidays and it was the perfect time to knit something more time-intensive.

Finally, I whipped up this little cowl for myself after going for a walk with a friend on a cold and blustery day.  I commented that I would love to have a cowl because my neck was cold, but I didn't want to go all out with a scarf.  She knits as well and said, "You could knit one up today!"

She was right.