The girls are soon to be 7 months old and my son moved over to Poland before Thanksgiving. He comes back here every few months but plans to stay there until the immigration applications for his wife and babies are processed so they can all move here. He's quite the Mr. Mom now that his wife has gone back to work. Of course he has his mother in law and a twice a week nanny to help but he's falling into the routine rather effortlessly. Something about this younger generation of parents..the Mom's expecting full participation by the Dad's. Weird. I couldn't wait for my husband to go back to work after we brought the baby home.

Or maybe glib was serious, but is now too embarrassed to come back to this thread after getting such dire responses. I don't think s/he was pulling our leg. I can certainly imagine a large family, maybe living a prairie-style/homesteading life, where the canning is done all at once. No, I don't think it's safe to can in such big jars, nor can I imagine having that many old two-quart jars, since they're not for sale anymore. But the method itself seems close enough that it's believable. So glib, if you're still out there, I don't imagine your mom wants to hear that current canning guidelines say no canning in two-quart jars (except juice). But I'd say one small step you can take is to be sure the tomatoes are sufficiently acidified, and maybe do those in quart jars. That's the one thing you described that seems most likely to cause sickness. As for horror stories that can't possibly be true, here's one for you. My friends used to make apple butter in a big 50-gallon pot over a fire, and open-kettle can it (they would boil the lids but nothing else). In quart jars by the way. But here's the part that raised my eyebrows...they told me that one year as they started giving away the jars over the next couple days, none of them were sealed. They realized that stacking the boxes of hot jars back up was insulating the ones on the inside, and as soon as they spread out the boxes, all the jars started pinging. So the apple butter was kept warm but not hot for days in unsealed jars. To me, follower of food safety guidelines, that sounds awful. To someone doing things the old way, it's a minor setback that was easily solved. That doesn't mean that people doing things the old way are bad people. Our job on this forum is to present the information and let people make their own decisions about risk. That's all we can do. Melissa Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP approved methods for tomato products

HI Brittnee! A daughter is much different than a girlfriend. Always remember that. If you've been dating your boyfriend for a long time and know his parents well, and they knew it was your birthday, ....and she does buy birthday gifts, it was kind of rude. But she may be the type who doesn't buy gifts for boy/girlfriends, only sons and daughters in law. This is something you need to discuss with your boyfriend and see if there's a problem you're unaware of or if this is the norm. As for me, only boys here....short term girlfriends gets a smallish gift. Long term girlfriends gets a nice gift, a DIL gets spoiled more than I do my boys! :)

I call her both my sons girlfriend and his wife, just as I call my daughters boyfriend her husband and son-in-law to me. My son and his wife have a child and have lived together for 7 years. Legally, common law spouses, just not "married". Same with my daughter and her boyfriend/husband. Both my son and my daughter will have the same legal parting of ways if they should ever split up. Without paying for an actual divorce. ;) I'm okay with that.