Apple Sch'mear and a trip to Norway

If you've ever watched one of my favorite movies, "Cheaper by the Dozen", you've seen the game Apple Sch'mear. We had gone apple picking several times in August and made all sorts of goodies with them. We also had a bunch of the smaller apples left over that were starting to attract fruit flies in our laundry room...

... so we decided to try our our own game of Apple Sch'mear. It involves a willing volunteer pitching an apple to someone who is waiting to turn it in applesauce with a tennis racket. The juice goes everywhere and the kids have tons of fun (so do our animals as they clean up the mess).

Our trip to Norway
For the last two weeks, and the next month or so, we'll be traveling around and studying Europe. We just finished our "two week stay" in Norway, the Land of the Midnight Sun. We ended our tour with an authentic Norwegian meal. Since my not too distant relatives are from Sweden and Paul's great grandpa is from Norway, we felt "at home" with these cultural foods.

If you haven't figured out by now, our dining room was transformed into a Norwegian restaurant. The meal consisted of Norwegian meatballs (yes, they really were Norwegian style. We found out the slight difference between Norwegian and Swedish meatballs is in the gravy) and potato soup. It deliciously filling. No fruit soup for dessert this time, though.