Sugaring

For as long as I can remember, my Uncle Dale has been making maple syrup. Some of my favorite memories with his kids - my three closest cousins on my mom's side - have been at the sugar house in early spring, although I haven't been there in years. This year, Dan planned to take a day off from work to travel out to Uncle Dale's, instead of hoping for a decent weekend like we did last year. So when my Aunt Joan called on Tuesday afternoon, we packed up the three kids and the dog and left a couple hours later. The next morning, we headed over to the sugar house with my uncle, aunt and cousin, Pam.

Although Uncle Dale now uses the modern method of sugaring (plastic tubing), he had cleaned up three buckets and tapped a tree for each of the kids when we got there. (Aiden had been scared of the noise when Uncle Dale tapped the trees. He backed away from the sound and worriedly asked me, "That tree going to bonk down?")
The boys helped by putting the lids on their buckets. Then we headed back inside the sugar house to wait for the warming temperatures to pull the sap up from the tree roots and into the buckets.
After a decent amount of sap collected, we went back outside with some paper cups to try a taste of sap, fresh from the tree. It was Dan's first time trying sap too.
Besides getting to taste sap and drink still-warm maple syrup,
Aiden and Seth also had a lot of fun playing in the lone remaining snowbank,
and splashing in the mud!

Aiden took a few long walks - one with Pam and one with me -
while Seth enjoyed checking out how things worked inside the sugar house,
and helping get logs ready to put in the fire.
After lunch, Pam had to leave, but the rest of us took a walk up in the woods so Uncle Dale could show us his plastic tubing system, which spans 30 acres and connects 1,100 maple trees.
Although we didn't walk far, the woods were a maze of tubes to be stepped over or ducked under.

Uncle Dale avoided the camera for most of the day, but I had to get a picture of him carrying Cora through the woods on our walk while he wasn't paying attention.
We left around 3pm with the smell of boiling sap and woodsmoke still on our clothes. It had been a beautiful day for sugaring and a wonderful new experience for all three of my boys!