Chocolate and Diamonds

Still in the midst of a house for sale..which means our house is (hopefully) perpetually clean!  That is quite a task when I have a teensy on-the-move boy.  He can open drawers, cabinets, and climb stairs if I forget to put up the baby gate!  He is a one-man tornado if I'm not careful.  Whew..I've started tying all the cabinet pulls together.  I started tying them in knots, but then I'd have to cut the knots, then get more jute string and retie..until I figured out (shh...he can't untie a bow yet!)  I feel so smart. ha!

And now that the weather is warming up, we have this afternoon routine playing with the big kids outside-on the TrAmPoLiNe!  We love it..but it gives us so much static.

The kids are now home on spring break, so we took them south to Murfreesboro to hunt for diamonds.  Yes, real ones!  It is the only public diamond mine in North America.  They turn the soil over once a month, and people still find diamonds.  Three were found on Friday, the day before we went.  They were small ones, but big ones are found too!  I took them in too-small, really old (like trash clothes!) just in case we got super muddy.  It had been dry for about a week, so it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be!  I took a box of trash bags (for all the dirty tools and clothes afterward), an extra suitcase of clothes and shoes to change into post-dig, and our regular stuff for our adventure and hotel stay.  Lovely in their fashionable clothes:

 

And for fun, I took a video of Carter pushing an aluminum chair around while the boys were still digging.  He had so much fun! (until a park ranger came upstairs and told me he had to stop..it was too noisy downstairs!)  Oops.  (I know we are such hillbillies.  But it was 85 degrees, and I didn't bring him any flip flops or shorts...it was HOT!)

 

And.. he LOVED unpacking.

But wait!  Spring break is just getting started.  Today we played and ate lunch with friends at the park!  Then we went to our local Hershey's office and stuffed Easter eggs for the annual hunt.  They only needed 25,000 stuffed!!  Wow.  We only made a teensy dent with our two trashbags full.  It's a community give-back for our local JDRF, mainly for the ambassadors (Mary Claire!) and their families.  They really enjoyed it..and even managed to stuff some eggs, ha!  Seriously, they were all about organizing the eggs/candy/tape, making assembly lines ("methods"), making sure the blue eggs held blue wrapped candy/pink held pink candy, etc. and a little healthy competition. 

These were the bags of eggs we filled, they each held a gross of eggs (totally not gross..filled with Hershey's!!), and we probably did about 7 bags.  I looked up on Oriental Trading, and they are $8/bag, and we had to fill them with Hershey's candy..so can you imagine..Hershey's bought 174 packs of eggs ($1392) and filled them with candy ($2083), paid for pizza and drinks for workers, told them they could eat the candy, so they will donate over a week of work (oh yeah..we didn't put a dent in the total needed, it's a week-long event!), and over $4000 for this Easter Egg Hunt.  This is why we love Hershey's!  (well..that and the c-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e!)  Thank you, Hershey's, for investing in our community!  If you are in our area, here is the webpage for the Easter Egg Hunt, the proceeds of the event benefit the NWA Children's Shelter!

Clay has started baseball practice, and he's helping a fellow boy scout on his Eagle Scout project at our church.  I've been holding little Carter through his throw up virus (picked that up in Little Rock, yay..a souvenir), got him back to formula (soy now), and we are expected to get some freezing rain and/or snow by the end of the week.  (Welcome to Arkansas!  85 to 26 degrees in one week.  Don't worry, it'll be back to the 70's within a week.  We keep a variety of clothes handy.)  Hopefully, we can still fit in a few more adventures before they go back to school.  Have a great spring break, ya'll!