Fall Leaves

I struggle with fall decor. I’d like to decorate my house for the season, but most of it is Halloween-scary and I don’t do scary. This is also why my kids may not wear scary Halloween costumes and I don’t care what their friends think about that. Anyway... This means that for fall decorations my options are limited to pumpkins, harvest and leaves.

A couple of years ago, Bella amd I started collecting leaves every year and making stained glass leave pictures for the windows. We did it every year until last year when our house was on the market and I was pretty sure that if the realtor was going to make us take down family pictures from the walls, she wasn’t going to thrilled with the leaf project...

This year I decided that Gabe was probably ready, so Tuesday, when we were all home because Josy was sick, we walked around the neighborhood collected pretty leaves. We washed them, dried them, and pressed them in the biggest books I could fine, which in this case was Harry Potter, since Pat’s theology books are still in a box...

After dinner last night, we made our leaves. Um, I’d forgotten how long it takes 3-year-olds to do anything. Wow. And he insisted that we do each leaf individually, rather than doubling up on the little ones. And we only had one pencil sharpener, so I couldn’t do some on the other side while he slowly worked on his leaf. About two leaves in, I started thinking that maybe this project was above his head. But as we went along, I realized that he was actually the perfect age for this. He loved picking his colors and he did shave his crayons. I wouldn’t let him use the iron, but he did the rest of it and he shaved colors on all 17 leaves. I just needed to adjust my timeframe. I also did have to convince him to pick other colors rather than just blue, sparkley red and brown...

And now we have beautiful fall decorations up.