Thursday, October 18, 2012

Leaves

A small collection of Stay-At-Home-Mom gems for today:

With our 60+ trees on .4 acres, creating a pile of leaves during October only takes five minutes. Yesterday and today, I took the leaf blower, gathered up an eighth of the front yard and had a pile big enough for a 3 year old to run and jump into. They were absolutely delighted! George always runs and jumps, landing on his knees. Thomas kneels into the pile then flops over forward, bouncing his feet behind him.

Today, some games emerged. George would be chest deep in leaves and suddenly pretend that he couldn't find his feet. Then I would find his leg and tickle down to his ankle and miraculously come up with a foot!

His right shoe kept falling off (I've finally repaired it!) and we would "loose" it in the leaves. He would kick it off sky high and laugh. Or he would be playing and suddenly realize it was gone and we'd have to look for it in the leaves. After a while he would "find" his shoe, dig a small hole in the leaves, and bury it. In mock disbelief, he would say, "oh! where is my shoe?" I would seriously bend over where I saw him bury it, find it under the surface of the leaves, and move it two feet. When he would confidently start digging right where he left it, the surprised disbelief of, "wait, where IS it?" would crack me up and then we'd try to find it again. Thomas loves these games and completely follows along, laughing at the right spots and copying our faces.

Later, Thomas walked into the pile of leaves, scooting his feet under the pile. He would stand there playing for a minute, looking around, then suddenly would look down, be shocked, and say, "FEET!!!" Thomas also loves to lay back and watch the wind in the trees.

I took a good bit of video today. Lots of sweet, silly conversation while they were goofy with leaves. They pick out pretty ones to give to me, beat the pile with a stick, and enjoy all the fluff.

This is the kind of video we'll watch when they're 17 and 15 and we've just had some knock down, drag out about standard teen stuff. That's when we'll bring out these videos.