The Leaf Project

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Every fall, we do our leaf project. This year I managed to almost forget about it until Gabe brought it up. Opps. It probably doesn’t help that it’s been so wet that the leaves haven’t been very good...

On Tuesday we had some time, so after school we stopped and picked up a whole bunch of leaves. Josy thought it was great because he just took off running. I’m definitely not ready for this phase of life... Anyway, we were going to wash and press them before I want to my meeting, but then Gabe got his foot squished by the garage door and the rest of the evening was spent making sure that no actually foot damage had been done and trying to convince him to stop trying to run and jump on a hurting foot. He’s fine, but the leaves ended up getting forgotten. 

On Wednesday I found some pretty leaves that didn’t look anything like the ones we’d already gotten, so I picked them up. Good thing I did, because the other ones had already curled and Gabe ended up throwing the old ones outside. We put the new ones in a book and forgot about them.

Yesterday Gabe remembered them, so we added that to the list of projects for the day. I got everything ready and then he started sharpening the crayons.



After a moment, I came back and Gabe was in tears because “I don’t want to ruin my crayons.” It was all I could do not to laugh because I had literally just thought “I don’t want to ruin the crayons!” as I was getting them out. Then I remembered that we do this every year, most of these crayons are crayon pieces anyway and we have the ability to go buy new crayons if need be, so I let it go.

So as my poor baby was crying about something that I know I would have been crying about at 4, since I was almost upset about it as an adult, I told him that we didn’t have to do it if he didn’t want to, but maybe we could come up with another solution, like only using crayons that we’d sharpened last year, or only using crayons that were already broken and didn’t have a sharp point. He finally settled on that one, so I found all the crayons that were broken on both sides so we could use the pencil sharpener to give them a sharp point again. As soon as the crayon had a point, he put it back in the basket and got a new crayon, so he felt much better about the whole project.



And now we have colorful leaves on our windows. (Although I forgot to take a picture when it was light out...)




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