North Carolina leaves

North Carolina has a lot of really tall trees, which results in a lot of leaves in the fall.  The city provides a fall leaf service to help manage the volume.  The leaves need to be collected in the front of the house and then on 2 days in the fall/winter season they come by with a truck that sucks them up with a big tube.  There were many days used to collect the leaves from the back yard to the front.  Matt used a tarp to move them.  The pile of leaves was a great place for the kids to play.  Brayden jumped in the pile one day with his flip flops.  He ended up loosing one of them in the pile and there was no way we were going to find it.

Beautiful colors

On Veteran's Day the kids had the day off from school. I wanted to go outside and enjoy the beautiful fall day.  The trees are red, orange, and yellow right now.  I love to see all the different colors.  The change didn't seem to last that long this year.  The leaves started falling off before the colors all changed.  Katrina and I took our kids on a walk to the park from her house.  The trail goes through the trees with the ground covered in leaves.  We are going to miss these neat trails when we move.

There is love

Between all the crazy fighting the kids do, sometimes there are some sweet signs of love. Brayden has had a little obsession with Pokemon cards. I mentioned earlier that he has wanted to get some to the point that he began making his own. On Fridays, for good behaviour, Kylee gets to pick something out of a treasure box in her class. For the first few weeks she was able to get something for herself and then get a Pokemon card for Brayden with an extra coupon. Then, I found out that her teacher stopped letting her get two prizes, and that Kylee had continued to get Pokemon cards for Brayden without getting anything for herself. I asked her why and she responded that Brayden really wanted the Pokemon cards. That made me teary eyed. How sweet.

Kylee also spent most her day recently making a crown for Julia.

Election results are in ...

Kylee was elected to the student council. After a month of Kylee asking me if she could turn in the permission form to be in her elementary school student council election, Matt convinced me to let her try if she wants to. There was a preliminary election with 6 children from her class. The top 3 wrote a short speech to give in front of their class. Then, on election day they voted again. Kylee didn't make any false promises unlike the kids running in Brayden's kindergarten class. That night when we were celebrating with root beer floats Brayden was telling us who he wanted to win in his class.

Brayden "I hope James gets elected because he is going to build a pool by the slide."
Kristel "Who else was running?"
Brayden "Luke and Trudy"
Kristel "Why didn't you vote for them?"
Brayden "Luke said he was going to build swings, but I can't go back and forth." (translation - he doesn't know how to swing)
A few days later when Brayden found out James won he was so excited. Who is going to let him know that James is probably not going to be able to deliver on the pool?

Halloween

Ghost and Witch

Snow White and Sleeping Beauty

C3PO and R2D2

With a busy week of worrying about Kylee's baptism Halloween kind of snuck up on us. The week of Halloween we had not decorated the house yet and we did not know what everyone was going to dress up as. I like doing a family theme, but with limited time I didn't think that was going to work out. The only person that was decided early was Julia as a princess. She has a lot of practice since she wears 5 different princess dresses a day. Brayden said that he wanted to be R2D2. I didn't think that I would be able to find a costume for it so I was trying to convince him otherwise. I found a lego costume on family fun that looked easy to make. I talked to him about doing that and he told me, "Why can't you let me be R2D2? I already told all my friends that I was going to be R2D2." So I decided to see what we could do. I found an example of homemade R2D2 costumes and decided that Matt could probably do it. Kylee decided to be a witch and we wanted to have Blake do something related to Brayden, so C3PO it would be. With a long week at work, Matt was left with Thursday night to get the costumes ready. (He is our local costume and cake maker.) Matt was spray painting gold and drawing on poster board until 1 a.m. I think that he did a great job. Blake was only in his costume briefly because the gold paint on the sleeper was rubbing off on whatever it touched. We spent the night eating chili at Aunt Katrina and Uncle Joey's house and then trick or treating in their neighborhood.

Kylee's Baptism

On October 25, 2008 Kylee Elizabeth Caldwell was baptized. We were happy to have GraMindy, Whetten Grandparents, and cousin Christopher visiting for the special occasion. Baptisms in our ward are usually done by the stake on the 1st Sunday of the month. Kylee's landed on Conference weekend, which wasn't going to work for our family. We were lucky enough to schedule a combined baptism on an alternate weekend with another little girl in our ward, Sadie Johns. With the baptism being on a ward instead of stake level, our family was a part of the program. GraMindy gave the baptism talk and Grandpa Whetten and Mamaquel bore their testimonies at the end. Kylee was very excited to get baptized and asked to go first. Kylee says she was happy and a little nervous before it started. Everything turned out great. We celebrated by going to lunch at Red Robin.
(In preparing for the baptism I was talking to Kylee about what she needed to take, Brayden jumped in the conversation and asked seriously, "Can I bring goggles at my baptism because I need to see in there":)