Cookie Extravaganza and "The Great Fall"

April hosted her annual cookie exchange this last week. I love it! So many cookies, so little time.

On the less exciting side of life, we were having dinner last night and everyone heard a tremendous crash. We jumped up from the table to invesitgate the sound and found our lovely Christmas tree had fallen over. We had a 3% survival rate of the ornaments. The only group to have a high rate of survival was the Candy Cane grouping. Sadly, some of the most cherished ornaments were lost in "the great fall".

All that was left was a pile of broken ornaments, needles, and tears. Actually, the tears didn't pile up because we just had to laugh and clean it up. Turns out that the lower part of the trunk is totally rotten. We cut it off, reset the tree and are lucky enough to get to spend ANOTHER evening decorating the tree -- it is like a bonus.

The Christmas Parade

We had a great time with the 41st annual Starkville Christmas Parade. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with a group of MSU students thought April's Day One program who worked with the organizing committee. My group got to help advertise for the parade, put the line-up together, work with the television production, and assist in running the event.

April and kids arrived early to stake their claim on a veiwing area -- trust me, you have got to get there early. They then got to the three bands. Our favourite quote was from Shae as the third band went by: "Oh, I love these guys! they changed their outfits again!" Apparently we failed to let her know that there was more than one band in the parade -- not the same one three times.

Santa even made an appearance to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

Shae's own American Idol

Shae is at that age where she loves to sing . . . and dance. She can make up her own songs or she can sing the songs she learns in primary or school or . . . on the radio. Emoree and Bryton both have their own CD players that they listen to; Em likes to sing along and like all of us, sings a bit off key.
Shae is a total trip to watch so we thought you should all see this.

Bryton's 8th Birthday Party

Bryton had a swimming party for his birthday. A little late as Mom was in TX during his "real" birthday! He had 3 friends over and we built model cars, went swimming, lauched baby torpedos, lots of fun stuff! Here's a photo of his cake. I can verify. . . it tasted as good as it looked!

Pecans, pecans, pecans!

A quick story. We had been driving into our driveway for days hearing this, "pop, pop, pop" sound. We were very annoyed and vowed to get rid of our neighbor's tree that was dropping all these annoying "seeds" on the ground. As we contemplated tree removal, cutting, etc. our neighbor boy came over and picked one up off the ground. He told us that his Dad loved these things. April asked him how his Dad could love seeds. Anthony explained that they weren't seeds and cracked one under his shoe and handed April the nut. It turns out they were pecans! We were TOTALLY thrilled!

April went over to the neighbor's house and made sure it was allright to pick up the pecans on their side of the yard. So we started picking. The kids picked for days and days. Then we decided we'd picked enough. We had 24 pounds!!

Here are the steps we learned in the pecan process:

Step 1, Pick them all up. Children are awesome at this (the smaller the better) as they are closer to the ground. There are also several "pecan picker upper" contraptions you can buy at Lowe's but we did it by hand!

Step 2, Take the pecans and get them cracked at the pecan place ($0.40 per pound). We went to Peoples Pecans and the girls watched the pecan shelling from start to finish. It was awesome!

Step 3, Even though the pecans are shelled, you still have to spend hours sorting them because the entire shell is not blown off. This is time consuming, but can be tasty (especially if you eat lots while you sort -- we had to take Eric off this detail as we were losing the profits of our labor)!

Step 4, Sample the goods:

Step 5, Beg April to make some of her delicious Pumpkin Pecan Muffins and other delicacies!

Here are the photos to go with the earlier post by April.

Here is Bryton's Sweet Potato Circus Seal. Yes, that really is a sweet potato. He only added the tail, flippers and ball. cool eh?

Here is the Anne of Green Gables Project that Emoree created. She won her school-wide competition and we couldn't be more proud. She actually came up with all of the project on her own. Mom and Dad helped type and sew but that was it. Emoree is very artistic. I wonder where she gets it. . . .!

Heiselt Winners!

I realized the other day that you don't have to post a picture to post on the blog so here goes. Last week Emoree took 1st place in her school Book Fair competition. Not only did she take first place in the Historical Fiction category, but then her school decided that her poster (she did Anne of Green Gables as her book) would represent the school at the District competition. Emoree received a ribbon and a medal (pictures to come - sometime soon!). We are so proud!

Bryton also entered the Sweet Potato Invitational last week (I chalk this up to "only in Mississippi") where he had to create an object, animal, insect, etc. out of a sweet potato. So he created a seal. Yes, friends, I found myself finding black paint for my son to paint a potato. He then attached shells (painted black) for the fins and glued on a bouncy ball nose. He attached the seal to a shoebox lid (covered in blue paper of course to simulate the ocean) and he rocked! He won Honorable Mention and received a very large, lovely green ribbon (pictures to come).

Just wanted to let you know what winners my kiddies are! Oh, and I should mention Shae wins for being the cutest 4-year old on the planet who actually asks questions with the word "y'all" in it!

On to the next competition!!!