Autumn leaves are falling down...

We were blessed with an unseasonably warm, amazing weekend.   Today was a perfect day to go outside and jump in a pile of leaves.  We do our best to keep weekends screen free ( TV and computer) during the major portions of the day - at least for the kids - I can't deprive Trent of watching his beloved Spartans.   So the weather today helped immensely with our goal.   I don't know if Mother Nature is just giving us one last hurrah before the pounding, but we will take it - I still can't believe that in less than two weeks we will have a Christmas tree up in our house!  

I loved so much about this day, but I mostly loved how well all three kids played together.  No fights.  No tattling.  No begging to do something else.  They played together and had a ball.   

I have to confess that we hire out part of our raking.  Our front yard is usually pretty leave free or can easily be so be running the mower over it and bagging the leaves it picks up.   We rake the part around our house that we call the "U" - that includes the sides of the house and the upper back.   Our yard has a WAY back that fills - I mean FILLS with leaves.  For years we did rake and bag all the leaves we would have over fifty bags of leaves - most of the time HEAVY bags because the leaves wouldn't all be down until the first fallers had sat wet and clumped for weeks.   That wasn't even the worst part.  We would have to haul all those fifty bags uphill to our front yard.  It might not sound that hard, but I assure you it is the worst.   To top it all off, because the leaves don't usually all fall until after November 30th, our trash carrier would no longer take our fifty plus full bags and the city's leaf disposal sites were also closed.   It is well worth the one hundred dollars we pay to have the people tarp up our leaves and take them far, far away.   I bet we spent almost that much in bags and our backs are definitely thankful.

I know these pictures are not very good, but they are images of a day that I always want to remember.   Three smiling, happy faces having fun on a warm fall afternoon.