Hog Bladders and Butter

We started back into our routine this week and we are having a blast. We are reading a chapter a day from the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. We started yesterday with Little House in the Big Woods and today we made hog bladder balloons and butter. I would have rather made the balloons yesterday since they are mentioned in chapter 1, but the local meat store didn't have them available until late yesterday.

As we did each of the activities, we were able to discuss toys back in Laura's time. There was no mass market toy superstore back then. That is why Laura and Mary were thrilled to have a hog bladder to bat around. My plan was for the girls to take the balloons out in the yard to kick them around a little, but we are getting snow/rain /ice today and it's just not a good day to do that.

The bladders did have a little bit of a "smell" to them. I told them that the smell probably didn't bother Laura and Mary when you consider how often they bathed and the lack of things like deodorant.

Starting to get a little tired of shaking the jars.

We were also able to discuss all the work that went into making butter. I poured about 3/4 cup of heavy cream into a jelly jar and let the girls shake until we had butter. It took about 20 minutes and the girls were able to see the physical changes happening with the cream. After about 10 minutes they said they were getting tired. It was a lot of work to go through just for some butter. I explained that is why they didn't have exercise gyms back then either. They got exercise by default and probably didn't have to worry about diets to loose weight.

Mmmmmm...fresh creamy butter!

I hope the rest of the week is as fun as today was.