Homemade Lemonade With Olivia

One of the many perks of working from home is being there when my daughter returns home after school. Even though today is Wednesday it’s her Friday due to the Thanksgiving long weekend and upon arriving home today, just like clockwork she spins into my office and begins telling me all about her day.

I feel like the luckiest dad on the planet to have such an opportunity to spend that little bit of quality time with my daughter before she spins off like the Tasmanian devil to her next activity, whether it be dancing, soccer or just hanging out with her friends online playing Minecraft.

Anyway, today she spins into my office after school and after telling me all about her day looks at me with her big beautiful eyes and asks…

“Dad I know you’re busy…but can you make me some home made lemonade…I’ve been craving it all day!”

I immediately think to myself that it’s a peculiar request, seeing as it’s pouring rain outside, but if my sweetie is looking for homemade lemonade…than homemade lemonade she’ll get!

Before I even had the chance to say yes, she blurts out “I’ll even help you make it” which made me quickly reflect on the last few days…have I spent any real quality time with Olivia? Other than our quick little after school debriefings…hummm….no we hadn’t! I’ve been pretty consumed with trying to finalize a proposal and with the work Renée and I have been doing for her TPT business, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends…so I look at her and tell her that nothing would make me happier.

So we head off to the kitchen and round up the things we’ll need. We first start off by boiling up a cup of water and a cup of sugar until the sugars been completely dissolved.

While our water sugar mixture was heating up on the stove we cleaned our lemons and cut the rinds off 4 of the 6 of the lemons.

What? You’re juicing the lemon peel?

We sure are! Did you know that the lemon peel contains even more vitamins, nutrients, and health benefits than the lemon juice itself, but it can be a bit hard on the stomach which is why I only used 2.

Next you’re going to need to figure out how you’re going to extract the juice from your lemons. We…and by we I mean Olivia, used our juicer and from our 6 lemons managed to get a little over a cup of lemon juice, probably closer to a cup and a 1/4. Don’t have a juicer you say…well you could also use a lemon squeezer or you could “old school it” by just using your hands. You’re definitely not going to get as much juice if you’re squeezing by hand…so you might want to grab a few extra lemons.

We then added our dissolved sugar/water mixture to 4 cups of cold water and the juice we extracted to our container and stirred it up.

I decided to make it a bit more special for Olivia by then pouring our freshly made lemonade into 4 mason jars and adding a few lemon slices and screwing the tops on.

Olivia was so excited to be in the kitchen with me making our fresh homemade lemonade and I was just excited to spend a bit more quality time with my special little girl.