Thanksgiving

It was a cold, misty Thanksgiving morning for the Drumstick Dash! Kim, Willow, and I jog-walked together, finishing in 37 minutes (I'm not sure I'd ran at all since the run 2 years ago....). Chad, Nana, and the other kids walked, while Grandpa waited in the car for the runners, and Chris tended the turkey in the oven. We gathered for lunch together with Gramps and Gramma at the house with napping, football, and the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. We have so much to be thankful for!

 Of course Owen found a stick...

Young Life camp

Willow has enjoyed attending Young Life, a high school ministry, for the past couple of months. She was excited to get to attend Young Life camp over the weekend at Rockbridge. She had a great time, though it was very cold. My favorite part was that they took phones away for the weekend! :)

Karate: Orange belt

We continues to enjoy karate and has been attending the kids class once a week and adult class twice a week this fall. It's nice to see him interact with the adult black belts in class and they do various other skills when Doug isn't able to be there. One of the black belts named Dave taught them how to use bo staffs.  He did Kechiwa with the bo staff and you could tell it was working a different part of his brain! In the adult class they also took turns being in the middle of the circle for Kechiwa Bonkai. They took it easy on him. :) He took his orange belt test and passed! Here's his Konchu, Saen Chen, Saen Chen test, then receiving his orange belt! All 4 grandparents were there to watch!

Keep working hard, Buddy!

Halloween

I love this maple tree in the fall near our neighborhood. Willow's friend lives there so we stopped by for a quick picture. 

We got a few pumpkins to carve from a local nursery. Owen carved his first successful pumpkin! He usually gets too detailed with it, and tried to this time as well. I also think I'm usually too focused on pumpkins to pay close enough attention to what he's doing. Not this time though!! :)

Owen did the cat and Willow did the ghost!

Willow enjoys making the Raddish Kids recipes that she gets in the mail each month. This month had a recipe for stuffed peppers (cut as jack-o-lanterns).

 We headed to Nana and Grandpa's to trick-or-treat for the first time. We met the Caldwells there for dinner and trick-or-treating. There was a lot of ground to cover and we only made it through a portion of it!

At school, I was Sadness from Inside Out. Many of the other staff (counselor, speech, Encore teachers, etc.) dressed as characters as well. 

Gramps got his fall picture taken as well!

Bake Sale

Willow plans to take an educational trip to Belize and a mission trip to the Dominican Republic next summer, so we told her she'll need to help raise funds for the trips (roughly $7,000). She made "business cards" for babysitting to give out at church (selectively) and has 4 bake sales scheduled. Her first one offered apple bread, apple muffins, chocolate chip cookies, and mint brownies. She had a Google Doc for orders with a flier that included the QR code to the site that she gave out at church and school. I helped her out a bit by putting it on Facebook and emailed the staff at my school. She ended up with 17 loaves of bread, 30-ish muffins, 70-ish cookies, and 30-ish brownies. It was quite an experience to manage the oven time, dishes, and ingredients. 4 trips to the store will make us rethink our grocery store run next time! I'm proud of her getting it all baked, packaged, and delivered! She made about $500, not figuring in grocery costs. We're so thankful for generous friends who ordered and even gave extra money in many cases. One friend from Richmond even ordered for her cousin in our town! We appreciated her creative thinking in finding a way to support Willow, even from out of town!

The kitchen was a busy place!

We did take some extra items out to the street by the elementary school. It wasn't Willow's favorite thing (I'm not as fun as her DR friends at the firework tent!) so we were only out there for 30 minutes, but the 2 people that stopped were super kind and she made $30!

For King and Country Concert

 Willow and I joined the Caldwells at the For King and Country concert in town. They always put on such a good concert! We saw a couple people we knew who had seats in the "pit" and Willow said she wanted seats down there. I told her that's something she can do when she's older and paying for the tickets ;) For their concerts, though, there's never a bad seat in the house! They move around so much!

Before the concert began, we were all curious what was going on with the white curtain surrounding the stage. 

I'm not sure how they got up there!!

I love seeing her sing along!

They always look like they're genuinely having the most fun!

Triple Crown Part 1: Dragon's Tooth

There are 3 parts of the Appalachian Trail known as the Triple Crown: McAfee's Knob, Tinker Cliffs, and Dragon's Tooth. Chris and I did McAfee's Knob when the kids were out of town once, to figure out if they could do it (they could). Willow did Tinker Cliffs with the youth group and swears she'll never do it again (we'll see about that). We joked that we'd finish the Triple Crown as a family if Owen did Dragon's Tooth on his own. ;) The hike is 4.6 miles round-trip but the last mile to the top is pretty intense! Very rocky and steep. Hardly even ledges wider than your foot. I felt so sad for people with dogs who were refusing to go (there'd been a warning sign at the trailhead warning against bringing dogs on the hike).

It doesn't take Owen long to find a stick!

We had to keep our eye out for the trail markers to make sure we were on the right rocks! 

We went through our water FAST!

There's the tooth!

Just when I was thinking, "I'll have to tell Allison we did this!" my adventurous co-worker who had RUN up to the top showed up. What a crazy surprise!

The path to climb to the top of the tooth. It was nuts!

I wouldn't let Owen go to the very top. It made me too nervous!!

We deserved an ice cream treat for having such great attitudes!