Family canning

The last time I went to the dry pack cannery (in August) I asked about canning our own food. A couple of months ago one of our local grocery stores had a huge sale on bulk items. After doing some calculating I figured out what would be cheaper to buy at the store instead of at the cannery and we bought several 20 lb bags of rice, 25 lb bags of sugar and one 50 lb bag of quick oats. The cannery used to allow people to bring in their own food and can it there. About a year ago they stopped allowing people to do this. The church cannery does own 3 portable canners that they allow people to check out for free for one day at a time. So I decided to sign my name up for one of the canners so that we could can the food that I had bought. The problem was that each of the canners was already scheduled for 2 months out so the earliest day I could sign up for was in October. The worker at the cannery told me that I would be called and reminded when my day got closer.

I forgot exactly what day I had signed up for (for some reason I was thinking October 13th) but I knew that it was getting closer. Then on Tuesday after lunch I took Baby K to J.C. Penney's to get her 6 month pictures taken and when we got back home there was a message from the cannery saying that I had signed up for the canner for that very day and had to have it returned by 11 a.m. Wednesday morning. AHHH!! I called my husband at work to let him know what we would be doing that evening and then called my parents to see if they were free in the morning and if they wanted me to bring the canner over to their house for them to use. I quickly had to put off everything else that I wanted to get done that day and get the kitchen counter cleaned off completely so that we would have room to spread out the cans there. I then had to sit down and figure out exactly how many bags of everything I had bought and how many cans and lids and oxygen packs I needed to buy to can it all.
As soon as M&M and Luke got home from school we loaded everyone up in the car and drove over to the cannery to pick up the canner and buy the cans and things that we needed to can with. That evening right after dinner the kids pitched in to help us out. I would pour the sugar or rice into the cans and then I had Luke banging them on the counter to get all the air out and then Blondie & Kitty helped to fill the cans to the top. Then they helped put the oxygen packs in the cans (not in the sugar), put the lids on and put labels on the cans while DH sealed the cans using the canner. The oats were a little bit harder to do because the bag was so big and heavy that I couldn't really lift it up to pour into the cans. So I had the kids hold the empty cans for me while I filled them with oats that I scooped out with a bowl. We ended up canning 40 cans worth of food. M&M had tumbling that night so she was only able to help at the very end when we were carrying the cans to the basement.
Then on Wednesday morning after the three older kids left for school I drove over to my parents' house with Kitty, Baby K and the canner and helped my parents can some of their food storage as well. We finished pretty quickly over there and then I took the canner back to the cannery and made it back home before Blondie came home from school.