Snapping Beans

My mom has always had a special interest and touch with plants. I have many memories of our family garden while growing up. The things Mom usually planted were the traditional vegetables: carrots, beans, lettuce, zucchini, squash, peas, etc... The only thing I dreaded coming up were the beans. It just seemed like when they came up, they kept coming...and coming. On the days when Mom deemed the rows "pickable," we would all go out and fill bushels of baskets. Then my brother and sister and I would sit on the porch and snap beans for what felt like an eternity. One would think that I would have an aversion to home-grown beans, but no. Maybe it was all the torturous picking and snapping that made me appreciate the end product even more.
This year, we've been blessed with bags full of beans from a variety of people (who are all sick of processing their beans and the bounty of their crop). So I decided to try the blanch and freeze method with the beans, because I can't do canning on our flat-topped stove. Daniel was so interested and very insistent that he help me. He even grabbed his own bowls after he saw me snapping beans, and got his own station ready on the table. He did a great job snapping beans in half! So I decided, why not make an assembly line out of it and I would snap the ends and he could do all the rest of the snapping. Well that lasted about 5 min. and then he thought it looked like I needed help with my job...and then pretty soon beans were flying everywhere and were being sorted in a very free spirited manner. So, needless to say, I finished the process by myself. :)
Thank you to everyone who gave us beans! We are eating them at almost every meal.