What I've been up to the past week

So anyone who knows me well, knows that I love to stock my house with groceries and tolietries. It's not enough to have an extra or spare item, I want like 20. At least of the stuff I use all the time, right. People think I do it now because we have 4 kids, but no I really started way before. I think it could partly be due to my parents who actually shipped me cases of toliet paper and shampoo and things like that when I was in college.

One of my favorite memories was the day after we were married, and Ken took me to a Food 4 Less and totally let me go wild buying everything I thought we could need for our apartment. Never mind that we didn't have a dining room, table, or couch, or TV. But we at least had food and cleaning supplies to last us for a thousand years! Ken was very tender and caring walking with me up and down every single row, especially since I knew in his head he was mentally calculating if he could afford to let his new wife go grocery shopping for the next 30 years.

And you know, most people purchase an extra freezer after they have 2 or 3 kids, yeah we got ours when our one child Darin, was 16 months, it totally felt like a necessity at the time. Like I just had to get a freezer because I couldn't appropriately store all of our frozen goodies, or enough chicken, roasts, pork chops, etc. Now I know what a necessity it truly is!

Anyway, so since I have a passion for hording food... Well, I'll just show you the pictures.

Here they are: 1500 glorious, shiny cans! And about 2500 lbs of food. Since we were flying to London on Memorial Day, Ken's boss told him to take another day when we got home. So he did a week later, but Ken thinks it should have been called Labor Day. Since I put him to work big time.

We showed up at the Cannery later then we had wanted and only had 40 minutes to load up the food because we had to get back for the boys' end of the year award assemblys. I didn't realize what a huge miracle it was that we (okay, Ken) was able to load the food so quickly. I just showed up in flip flops and we had Rose and Ginger sitting in a stroller just doing our thing, not realizing that most orders are half of what I picked up and it should have taken us 5 hours to load up.

However thanks to my Super Man, literally. He loaded 3 pallets with nearly 500 cans each into the back of the trailer with the help of one older gentlemen who runs the cannery and that saved us all of the time it takes to assemble boxes and put the cans in to transport them.

We made it to the 1st Assembly 30 minutes lates, but in time to see Nathan get his award. We drove straight from the cannery to school and stayed at the school until the boys got out. When I picked them up from their lines, I pointed out our Suburban and told them they had serious groceries to unload. Watching their eyes bug out was truly worth it! The teachers were just like what in the world!

It ended up taking all of us 3 hours to unload everything into the house since the cans had to be packed in the boxes. And we had major help from my Dad.

For the record, this is not just for my family. It's for my ward since I'm new to being the Provident Living Specialist, I thought "Hey let's do a bulk order." Well after adjusting our order 3 times, because the Cannery put limits on everyone's order because they are having a hard time keeping stocked. We finally recieved half of our order. Our first order was over $8000 and 9000 lbs. of food. This one I picked up was $3000 and 2500 lbs. of food. At the moment I am glad we did not recieve our ward's whole order since my theory was I'll just slap a trailer on the back of my Suburban and were good to go. Yeah, well even with a trailer my car can only haul 3 tons of food, not 4 1/2.

The past week I've had the equipment set up at my house and I've had 3 open houses for families to come and can their food. It's gone really really well. I only have 1 more family left out of 37, oh plus my own stuff. My goal was to be done before Ken get home from his trip to North Carolina and California that he went on this week.

The Bulk Order has taken over my two front rooms. The food is in the Dining Room, and the Cans are in my Living Room. Good thing I don't really need those two areas. It's been fun getting to know families in our ward a little better, and my kids have helped out tremendously. They have been keeping track of how many perfect seals they get on the first try and they are way over 100 can a piece. It's been good to see them interact with other adults and instruct them on what to do. They really have turned into canning pros. And everyone in my ward who comes over has been graciously accepting their over-eager at times help. I'm pretty proud of them. My Sister's girls have been really helpful too, especially since they are being put to work when they came to our house to have fun with their cousins.