Maple Sugar Weekend!

Right after Northern Baby's first haircut, we took him on a tour of sugar houses. Every mud season, there is a weekend of tours at maple sugar operations. This means different things to different people: for the residents of Vermont, it is a chance to get out of the house and stop staring at the walls. For out-of-staters and pure city folk, it's a chance to slop around in the mud while wearing totally inappropriate footwear (no kidding, we saw quite a number of people emerging from cars with out-of-state license plates wearing bright white shoes - HEY! The mud is at least six inches deep, what the heck are you thinking? Put on your boots!) But for everyone, it is a chance to watch the amazing art of creating maple syrup.

The above picture shows N.B. trying to figure out why we woke him up from his comfy car seat to stand next to a shed with smoke shooting out of the roof.

Not a good picture of Northern Daddy, but it proves that he does indeed participate in these adventures...and you'd be frowning too if you had to hold on to HEAVY Northern Baby!

For those who don't know how maple syrup is made, here's the short lesson. First, gather the sap from the trees. Stick a tap into the tree and collect it somehow - some use traditional sap buckets, others use plastic tubing. You could even hold it in your mouth and run it down to the collector - but I won't be sampling your syrup if you do! After you have a whole lotta sap, start boiling. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. In the picture above, that's not smoke from the fire, it's steam evaporating from the sap as it is boiled. (Have you tried to explain the difference between smoke and steam to a one year old? I mean, he can't even talk and I'm trying to tell him that the shed is NOT on fire and that we're going to walk over and into that very shed...meanwhile, he's waving his little arms around telling me that only an idiot would walk into a burning building! The good thing about him being little is that I can just pick him up and take him wherever I want regardless of what he says - just scoop and we're off!) That's a real short version of how maple syrup is made. If you want to know more, Wikipedia it.

After oohing and ahhing over the bubbling sap in the evaporator, we headed outside to walk the tractor paths through the sugar bush (for the Southerners, "sugar bush" is the term used when referring to a grove of sugar maples used to produce syrup). In one area, there was a campfire burning, and Levi spent some time waving sticks and leaves at the flames (from fifteen feet away - he was safe, Grandma!)

Northern Baby investigates a sap bucket.

That's all I have to report for now, because Northern Daddy got a cool new cell phone that does all kinds of whiz-bang things, and I gotta go figure it out!