Sunday afternoon one of my internet friends, justacoolcat, invited a few folks over to pick some strawberries out of his awesome garden.  The berry picking was top notch, but the highlight were the DeRusha boys.  Seth and I quickly buddied up for some exploring around the yard and two awesome games he invented called Stick Break and Stick Stop Hop. 

Stick Break is pretty much what it sounds like.  You find a stick and then you break it.  Stick Stop Hop required a little more finesse.  First, find a stick.  Key here is to find a stick a little smaller in size.  As soon as you find said stick, immediately run up to a group of people and yell “STICK STOP!!”. Here’s where it gets tricky…  you have to throw the stick up in the air (hence the reason for picking a smaller stick) and then immediately yell “HOP!!!” and jump in the air.  Pretty soon this all becomes one fluid movement and that’s when the fun really begins.  At least it seemed so to a three year old.  Seth and his little brother Sam were super fun. 

Now on to the jam… 

 I’ve never made jam before and was a little nervous.  Luckily JACC’s wonderful wife sent me out the door with jars, lids, and a box of pectin.  (yeah, I don’t really know what pectin is either).  Monday night I got to work slicing, dicing and mashing…

 

Zach offered to help…

Needed to make sure the berries were ripe…

This is where I started getting nervous. It seemed really watery for jam.

I boiled it down, dispensed into jars and gave a water bath to seal the lids.  This morning when I got up each jar looked like syrup.  Needless to say, I was a little disappointed.  The good news was when I got home from work everything seemed to have firmed up nicely.  Now there are 8 jars of homemade jam in my fridge.

The kicker here is I hate strawberries.