In 100 Years...

We have been growing lots of carrots all summer long in hopes of a great harvest to can this fall.  Friday was our harvesting day and what we thought would take a few hours ended up taking a lot more!  We had tons of carrots!  In the end, we had 24 quarts and 17 pints of sliced carrots!  YUM.

Canning these carrots came with a trip to the ER though! 

We had a perfect set up.  Kermit and Miss Piggy would wash carrots, hand them to Master Chief and he'd do a second wash, he'd put them in a bowl and Baby Girl would carry the bowl over to me and I'd slowly and carefully slice them on our mandolin slicer. 

It was a perfect set up!  I could see why families have lots of kids... to help with canning, lol!  I had 3 pints full, so just the beginning, when I came upon a rather large carrot.  I got to the top of the carrot and because I was going so slow in my slicing to stay safe I couldn't slice through this large carrot.  I turned my hand and used my thumb to push it through, gave it a good push and realized that my middle finger made it to the slicer before the carrot did. 

I said, "This is bad, this is really bad!"  We couldn't get the bleeding to stop no matter what we did and Master Chief thought it went to the bone.  Since I'd already hit my deductible this year I decided I'd better go get stitches. 

3 stitches later (And we found out 3 days later that I needed at least 4) I was good as new! 

This created a problem when it came to canning though.  I couldn't get my hand wet and I couldn't bend my finger so I couldn't slice carrots.  What were we going to do with all these carrots! 

We ended up putting Kermit and Miss Piggy on the job as scrubbers and Master Chief was the slicer, while Baby Girl still carried carrots back and forth and I carefully prepared the jars.  This worked out very well! 

As the night progressed, the kids were being hilarious!  They'd give each other break times and treated it as if they were at a real job.

Then Kermit said something to Miss Piggy that we are still snickering about...

Kermit - "In 100 years we can get together and say, 'Do you remember when we had to scrub all those carrots!'"  LOL!!!

Thank you to my sweet children for helping us out.  Without your help, Master Chief would still be canning those carrots!