There are probably about a hundred reasons why I love fall. The weather is getting cooler and I can break out a light jacket or sweater, without having to wear a big bulky coat. The air smells crisp and the cool mornings lead to warmer afternoons. There are so many yummy, comforting foods to enjoy, like apple pie and big crockpots of chili. There are family trips to the apple orchard and pumpkin patch and getting ready for Trick-or-Treating. And of course there are the many fun children's books to read and cute craft ideas. But I think what I love about fall the most is all of the beautiful colors. The leaves changing to orange, red, and yellow and rustling around in the breeze sometimes takes my breath away.

Today when I got home from work, I took my kids outside to collect leaves so that we could look at the colors and maybe get creative. What I got in return was priceless. I told my four year old son that we were going to go for a little walk to look for leaves so that we could do a leaf rubbing. I could tell by the look on his face that he was taking our task very seriously. His little furrowed brow came out instantly and the reasoning started coming out of his mouth before we got his shoes on. First he said, "We're gonna need dat raker sing from de wall to get de leafs" as he pointed to the rake on hanging on the garage wall. I said, "Well, we aren't going to rake them because we might mess them up and we are going to need them whole for leaf rubbings." To which my son replied, "I won't damage dem wif de rake." Of course not. So after a couple more minutes of me insisting that we didn't need the rake, he finally agreed to leave it, but instead decided we needed to bring his "wheel-roller thing" also known as a wheelbarrow, you know to put the leaves in.

So finally, we set out with my daughter in the stroller and my son with his wheelbarrow. My son says, "I sink we should make a tree picture wif de leafs." "Great idea!" I said. So we walked to the corner of our street and found a few leaves. Then my son said, "I sink we should get some leafs from de backyard. So we walked back to our yard and the three of us picked up leaves and my son and I talked about what colors they were, while my daughter walked around picking up leaves saying, "pitty" which is how she says pretty. Then they played on the playset for a while before we went back inside, we had to enjoy the weather of course.

Once we were back inside I pulled a big piece of white drawing paper off the easel we have and put it on the kitchen table. My son brought all the leaves inside from the wheelbarrow and we talked about what colors the leaves were and what color crayons we would need for the leaf rubbings. He came up with brown and green and "lellow". I threw in red and orange. Broken crayons with no paper are the best for this, which we actually have a lot of. (I think my son enjoys breaking crayons more than coloring with them.) My son and I each chose a leaf and put it under the paper. I showed him how to place the crayon on it's side and rub it over the leaf to make the print. We talked about the veins in the leaves. My daughter did her best scribble coloring and threw in a couple, "No, no, no's" when we got too close to her space on the paper.

After our paper was completely covered, I pulled out some more white paper and clipped it up to the easel. I showed my son how to draw the sides of the trunk of the tree with two straight lines down, then he turned the crayon sideways to color in the tree trunk. I told him he needed branches too, so he drew some lines coming out of the trunk. Next I got out a glue stick and my son glued leaves on the tree. The end result was a beautiful fall tree, that wasn't even my idea to make. Like I said before, there are probably about a hundred reasons why I love fall. Today was one of them.