After our afternoon of berry picking last week, there was quite a bit of jam to be made. The next evening when I got home from work, I made a quick dinner and set to work. The next day at work, my co-workers were all surprised that I could work until 6 pm, stop at the store on my way home and still get roughly a gallon of jam made.
The purpose of this post is not to brag about how I'm such a fantastic domestic engineer that I can get home from my job set a colorful, delicious home cooked from scratch meal on the table, clean up, bathe children read them stories and have them tucked into bed just at the first stars come out. In case you actually believe that, let me know. You can be the president of my fan club.
The reality of making jam on a weeknight is this: my family ate frozen pizzas for dinner, Matt entertained the kids while I sanitized jars and got the ingredients all ready. We tag teamed baths, settled them down in front of their favorite TV show and I got jam cooking. We tucked the kids into bed in between batches, then I returned to the kitchen. At around 10:30, I finished up and shut the lights off on what my dad refers to as a "jam session".
The moral of the story is this. For everything you do, there is a trade off. I chose to feed my family essentially a fast food dinner in order to make our year's worth of raspberry jam. I can't stand store bought jelly any more. It all tastes like melted candy to me. This is the choice I made on that day. In a perfect world, I would have a nice home cooked meal on the table for my family every night, I would never get behind on laundry or forget to pay a bill. However, in the real world, sometimes we eat pizza or fish sticks so mom and dad can get whatever task completed in the short space of an evening (sometimes we just eat sandwiches and go fishing too).
I do things I feel are important for my family. Clearly, homemade jam is not a priority for the majority of people, otherwise there wouldn't be 89 different kinds at the grocery store. I prefer to make as many things as I can. That's just me. Maybe that's not you. That's ok. We all do the best we can. I learn new techniques from others in my community and Pinterest, lots of Pinterest. Sometimes they work out for us, sometimes they don't. I don't sweat it. Ok, sometimes I do, but I try not to. I want my kids to have happy memories of their childhood like the smell of homemade jam, their dad teaching them how to run the garden tiller, our family taking our little boat out to see what's biting. In order to do that, I stay up late when I have to, let them eat cereal for supper once in a while and occasionally go to daycare in their jammies.
As parents we make so many decisions every single day that it can get overwhelming. We're all flying by the seat of our pants here. If somebody tells you they have it all together and are on top of everything, they are either lying or drinking heavily, maybe both.
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