"Doing Things That Are Hard"

I think we might have gotten a little "over our heads" on this pomegranate pick. In the past, Mindi and I have driven through the streets of Gilbert asking people if they cared if we picked their trees. This year we had a couple of nice neighbors offer their fruit so between those and my friend Sandy's two trees, and my three trees, we got a huge crop. We started juicing our little red "apples" (that's what Troy calls them, ) at 9:00 a.m. yesterday morning. We started out with Julie and her Mother Maxine, Me, Mindi and my parents. My sister Mell showed up a little while later and we had four Bosch's juicing. It took us about an hour to get our first 2 gallon container filled with beautiful red juice. We then had other family members come to help and it started going faster. Ethan's wife Jenn and my nieces Victoria and Alisha also came and helped. It was fun to sit and visit and work together. We only do this once a year, so when we do it we try to get as many pomegranates and helpers as we can. By the afternoon the young mothers all started to leave to go pick up children from school and Julie and her Mom were long gone, she had to go to Pine for Stake Youth Conference. We still had wheel barrels full of fruit to juice and I started getting discouraged. It seemed like we would never get done. Then Mindi's kids got home from school, Dave got home from work, Jenn brought her kids back and Rich even pitched in. Anyway, after we broke for dinner and went back outside, Rich put a light up so we could work in the dark and we finished juicing at around 9:00 p.m. My parents are such troopers. They were so tired but kept on working. After we were finished cleaning up my Dad commented on how by all of us working together as a family it builds relationships and it was special for him. Who knows how many more years they will be physically able to do this, but it was nice to all be together doing something. In Primary a few weeks ago they were talking to the kids about "doing things that are HARD". As I crawled into bed last night I definately thought that we had accomplished that goal of doing something hard. Now next week we will start making all our jelly. Now that's another thing that is hard, but I guess everything that is worth anything is hard.