We tried to wear them out

Day whatever-it-is of being snowbound with kids and a vacationing hubby.

Determined to escape cabin fever-- which I admit to starting to feel-- I started the day with a giant batch of pancakes for everyone. We had sausage, eggs and orange juice to go with it.

We all went ice-hill sledding again, this time with some inflatable sleds I'd purchased two years ago when I thought we were going up to Hurricane Ridge. Oddly enough, the baby-pull-along sled still fits D-meister and SCREAMS downhill faster than any of the others. The child is fearless, which is a good thing considering our near miss today. With three extra sleds, P-daddy and I were sledding too. We can't aim worth a damn, let's just say, and the three year old is clueless about "off the lane!" I was in one of the inflatables and D-meister was worse than a deer in the headlights-- he was completely nonplussed at my big behind barreling down the hill towards him. As he wouldn't get out of the way and I had no control whatever of the inflatable kiddie sled on a downhill ice slick, I scooped him into my lap as I bore down on him. That motion spun us round and round, faster and faster downhill. It was FUN, even when we crashed into the cliff wall, and the D-man never relinquished his hold on his own sled.

One of us needed to go to the bathroom, so we left. The kids sojourned outside, with P-daddy whipslinging them down our own icy road while I made the royal icing. We did our gingerbread house. Sometime after that we painted glass ornaments, another craft project I've had squirreled away for a couple of years. There was more kiddie craft stuff-- even this evening, when everything is supposed to be fresh on my mind, everything is beginning to blur. Today I chose not to take pictures, mindfully deciding to not have the camera as a distraction.

The big thing for me today though, aside from the sled scoopage, was my canning project at dinner time. Every year my Grandaddy made a mustard-based barbecue sauce and gave it away at Christmas. I suppose to the uninitiated, that sounds like a really weird Christmas gift, but I have first hand knowledge of the ferocity of our friend and family's desire for the stuff. As awful as it was when he passed, Christmas really seemed odd without his sauce on everything from the collard greens to the pulled pork. The last time he made it, my then-fiance was there to help him out. When I inherited the kitchen aid mixer I used to blend it, I had to clean the sauce splatter off of it. For beekeepers, the honey gets everywhere. For us, I guess it's the BBQ sauce.

My Grandmother gave me the recipe some time ago but I haven't had the heart to make it. Grandaddy had scribbled it down on a little spiral memo pad in his distinct script with no instructions. As far as I know, he never canned it. He funneled it into leftover ketchup or mustard squeeze containers and stripped the labels off. Heavy on the vinegar, I suppose the sauce didn't really require canning(we still had some of it when we moved to Washington) but I wanted to make sure. I made ten pints of it this evening while I roasted some chicken. (Only D-meister tried it but then he lapped it up like a little guinea pig.) I'd like to send these jars home to Charleston and brighten some kitchens, and maybe remind them of some Christmases past.


From yesterday-- the igloo is finished: