Strawberries!

We have been so busy around here lately! My mentor (we will refer to her as MG) and I made plans a month or so ago to conquer our fear of canning this summer. We decided that our first feat would be to go to a local farm and pick strawberries and then can some jam for our families. This would be fun and save us some money on jam that doesn't have any weird stuff in it. Well, MG and her family are also in the middle of their second adoption journey and found out that at any moment they might be able to go to Ethiopia and pick up their little girl. Then about 10 days ago we found out that they would be leaving in two weeks. So, the last two weeks we have both been going around like crazy people trying to get them ready... and by them I mean mom, dad and three children under five! It has been so fun. In the process I found out that there were strawberries ready for picking but I figured this would super duper stress out MG and didn't want her to feel obligated to go and so I decided not to worry her and that I would just go and can some for the both of us. Well, I get a call Tuesday night from MG saying, DID YOU KNOW THERE ARE STRAWBERRIES?!?! Umm... yes? So she is game on and wants to go and so we go the next day with her three and my one and pick 30lbs of strawberries in 30 minutes.... with four children! That has to be some sort of record. This was by far SJ's hottest life experience to date. She was a bit cranky but overall she did really wonderful and even drank some water from a sippy cup to stay cool. Then the next day we started canning at 11am and I left her house at 630pm with still a batch or two to go. We canned about 30 jars of jam plus had more that we froze and more that we are dehydrating. It was crazy! I am so excited to see how our jam turned out.
In other news, Stella has two teeth starting to poke through! Her bottom left front tooth is pretty much completely broken through and the right one is about half way through the gum! I am so glad after 2+ months of teething to see her getting some progress and hopefully some relief. On the other hand, I hate seeing her grow up. I LOVE gummy grins and would have been fine to wait on those teeth until she was closer to a year. But like I said, I am happy for her to hopefully have some relief. I guess it's because of the teeth but she has been a terrible napper lately. Her already short naps have become even shorter and she is super fussy during them. Sometimes I'll put her right back to bed after getting her up and feeding her b/c she is just so obviously tired. I'm hoping to resume our schedule once these teeth are in but we'll see.
We are finally finishing up some long over due presents to the gmas and here is a sneak peek at the second half of SJ's photo shoot.