Leaves Leaves Leaves

My little Monkey has been praying for trees ever since he started praying on his own. The house we used to live in had one solitary tree, a beautiful river birch in our front yard that never quite yielded enough leaves for much fun during the Fall. As soon as November's breezy weather took over, our river birch leaves would blow away from our yard.

Well, prayer answered, our new house lots of trees! And lots of leaves on these lots of trees, and during the Fall,lots of leaves on lots of trees means lots of raking.

Now, our children have never experienced the joy of jumping into a pile of leaves, in fact, my first attempt to get them to play in leaves was a failure, they instead started to load up their dump truck to take the leaves to the curb for yard waste pick up. So, you can imagine their confusion when they saw that Daddy had raked up a large pile of leaves in the middle of our front yard and then told them to play in it!

We all had a blast running to the pile and jumping in, and making caves and letting Daddy bury us!

I love these precious moments, when you get to share with your child some treasured childhood joy.

Jumping into a huge pile of leaves.

The carefree play of rummaging around in the hastily constructed leaf mounds (with me, normally terrified of even the thought of spiders, but instead caught up in the moment).

The feel of Froggy's chubby toddler hands trustingly clinging to my own as we rush towards the leaf mountain and jump in together.

The laughter of my children as we all play in the leaves until dark, in our front yard, uncaring of what it looks like to the neighbors or people driving slowly by.

Little Bear's interesting methods of investigating: crushing leaves in hand, shoving bits of decaying plant matter into his mouth, flailing about happily on the outskirts of the mighty leaf castle.

Slowing down, enjoying these moments, before they're gone with the Autumn breezes.