Fingerprinting Appointments and Plenty of Pumpkins

We leave for Sweden in three days, and will be staying there until after New Year's Day. I feel a bit stressed with trying to prepare for Christmas, prepare for a trip, and set up my family child care business all at once.

Yesterday I decided to do something about all the pumpkins strewn all over the house. I threw a pumpkin-themed baby shower in October for my best friend, and used real pumpkins (2 regular-sized, and 60 mini) as party decorations. When we put out Christmas decorations, all those pumpkins everywhere started to look silly. I felt bad just tossing all of them, so I started researching them online. It turns out that ALL the pumpkins I had, including the mini ones, are not only edible, but rather tasty(the least tasty would be the kind used for jack-o-lanterns, which we didn't have). So in my menu planning this week, in an attempt to use things we already have and purchase as little as possible, I planned pumpkin soup. So yesterday we had pumpkin soup for lunch, and my plan was to puree all the pumpkins and freeze the leftovers. Well, I started shortly after breakfast, and (with the exception of making the soup, eating lunch, and making and eating dinner) worked all the way until 11 p.m.!!! I now have TONS of pumpkin puree in my freezer. January and February we will have quite a lot of pumpkin. I have over 2 gallons of pumpkin puree in my fridge waiting to be frozen.

I also saved a handful of seeds from each of the pumpkins and will try to grow them in our future garden. They are now drying, and we will plant them sometime next spring.

So our next step in the process, since we received our acceptance letter on Friday, is to set up fingerprinting appointments for my husband and me. I called Community Care Licensing this morning, and they still have me in the system from when I worked at a daycare center, so I don't have to get mine done. But I made an appointment for Sven, so he'll get his done Wednesday, the day before we leave for Sweden.

Once his fingerprints have cleared (and I've heard this could take a while), we can get our home inspection, and we will officially have the license in hand.

Once the new year is here, I will have to focus my attention on the yard, starting the garden and getting things ready for planting in the spring.