what's up weekly. (photos of butchering a hog - look away.)

Last Friday when I left you, I mentioned that the boys were off to a hog butcher day.  A family we're friends with at church raised hogs for a few families this year, with the understanding that we'd all participate in turning them to meat when it came time.  Since we butchered them ourselves, we basically got them for the cost of feeding them.

They went Friday morning, and Atticus was the one who killed our pig.  I saw video of it, and I was so thankful to the Lord that it was so humane.  Atticus was a dead shot with the rifle, and the pig went down so quickly and without pain.  The guy who was walking everyone through each step of the process, who estimated he'd personally processed tens of thousands of pigs in his lifetime, said to Atticus, "Nice shot, kid!"  Of the four pigs done that day, ours was done the smoothest and Atticus held his own with the men.  He felt really proud of himself, as he should.

After that came the gutting and skinning and all of that loveliness.  Then the meat was hung up overnight, and the boys spent a little time practice shooting at our friend's range before coming home.

The next morning they were off again, this time to part the meat out into usable cuts.

The younger brothers were in charge of bagging the cuts.

I got two giant hams (which I'm going to cure and hopefully smoke before Easter), twenty pounds of bacon (again, the plan is to cure and smoke it), pork chops, bones, lard and a tonnnnnn of ground pork (we eat a lot of sausage).  I lost count of the bags as I was loading them into the freezer, so I need to go back and count them to find out just how many.  But I think we ended up with about 200# of meat, and we only paid $300, plus we know how our pig was both raised and killed.  I'm really happy with how it went, and I think we'll plan to do this again next year.

So far, I've made pork chops..  The flavor was really good - not "piggy" or "farmy", you know what I mean? - but I overcooked them so they turned out dry.  Wamp wamp.  After all that work the boys did, I dried out the meat.  Luckily we have plenty more for me to practice on.

On Sunday, we all made it to church, and it actually went well!  We are in a season where church is really hard for us.  The babies don't do well missing nap, and it's hard for me to wrangle them both.  Todd has his hands full with the other eight in service (most of whom do fine, but the littler ones need a lot of supervision), and Penelope has been having some health issues that make church difficult for her to manage.  But while the babies did cry for much of the morning, by the time service was over, they'd calmed down, and Penelope felt well enough to stay a bit longer, so we all stayed for the fellowship meal instead of some of us needing to come home early.  So that was really wonderful.  As the babies get closer to a year old, and as we learn more about managing Penelope's health, I'm starting to catch little glimmers of normalcy returning.

On Monday, we kicked off Spring Break!  It's been a nice breather, and the weather has been beautiful, so we've been soaking it in.  We had some friends over for a play date, and another family over for dinner.  I went grocery shopping and had an eye doctor appointment.  We washed and deep cleaned the van.  Atticus started some spring yardwork for some of his mowing clients.  We cleaned up our own yard.  This morning we're going to go to the yard waste site to get some compost.  This week has been both restful and productive, which I feel is the best way to spend break because you don't feel like you squandered it by the end.

The kids wanted to ride bikes, but they need supervision out front and I often don't have time to just sit there, so I decided to multitask and fold laundry while watching.  I was quite the spectacle to the neighbor kid, who just calls me Ten Kids Lady and who wanted to know how much laundry I have to do each week.  A lot of laundry, Twenty Questions Kid.  A lot of laundry.

Today I need to get some school planning done, because Finneas is skipping to the next grade starting on Monday.  When he started school, it took him a little while to get his feet under him, so we moved slowly.  But how he's really accelerating, and I think it's time to move him forward.  It's kind of a weird time of year to make major changes, but I think we'll be happy we did.  So I need to print off our syllabus, pull out our books, and rearrange my daily schedule to fit in yet another grade level of instruction - he's currently working in the same grade as Laurelai, so now that they'll be in two separate grades, I'll need to carve out more instructional time.  I don't know where it's going to come from, but we'll figure it out.

The younger kids have nine weeks of school left, the three oldest have twelve.  We are getting very close to summer break and I'm getting excited!  Okay, now I'm off to figure out how to smoke these hams.  Have a great weekend!

Lunchtime spent in the front row of this gentlemen's duel.  Nonplussed.