Leaves

I raked leaves today, which is NOT my favorite thing!! I love fall and I love how gorgeous it gets here, but there is a downside. When you have this many trees, you have leaves (duh). These leaves must be raked. Normally, Justin does all the raking, but his schedule right now isn't really condusive to yard work. He comes home pretty late and, because I'm selfish, when he's home I want him to be with us - not out in the yard working! So, I sucked it up and raked the front yard (the backyard is a monster for a different day). 3 hours and 18 leaf piles later (yep, that's right, 18 piles of leaves) I am done. I haven't bagged them up yet - someone (Justin) hid my leaf bags. It was a pain in the neck and I am not looking forward to having to bag them - bagging them is always harder than raking them in the first place.

Anyway, the boys loved this!! Clayton kept begging me to play in the piles. I kept telling him no - I was working pretty hard and I did not want them to ruin it! However, once I was all done with the raking I picked a pile and told them that they could play in it for a little bit. The boys went nuts! They loved it! So, of course, I ran inside and grabbed my camera to capture some of the fun. This was one of those times when I wish I had a better camera. There were so many fun things going on, but my camera was to slow to get most of them. These were some of the ones I did get:
Clayton loved to jump in the leaves. At first he would only jump and land on his feet, but eventually he progressed to belly flopping in the leaves - it was cracking me up!
Noah preferred to stomp through the leaves. You are going to notice that there aren't too many good pictures of poor Noah. He refuses to look at me when I'm holding the camera.
I thought these pictures were pretty cute. They were playing tag and the tree was 'base'. So they'd take turns running up to it and hugging it. I know that Noah isn't looking, but I love profile shots of him. I would love to crop this picture. I think it would be pretty great as a close up!
Clayton is always willing to 'give a little somethin' to the camera.
These next two are my favorites of the day. Wonder of wonders - Noah is looking at the camera AND smiling!!
Clayton is laughing in this picture because Noah was in front of him making funny noises. I told him to look up and this is what I got. I love it because it's totally Clayton - squinty eyes and all.
Speaking of Clayton - I had his parent teacher conference a few days ago (it's still a little weird to me that he's old enough to have parent teacher conferences). His teacher told me that he is the most polite child in his class! He still prefers to do things by himself rather than join the group - but he is always very nice and respectful about it. It made me happy to hear that he's so polite.

So there was a bonus to raking leaves. My boys had fun and, I'll admit, I had a lot of fun watching them. Their energy and excitement over the simplest things always makes me smile. When do we grow out of that? At what point do we become people who look at piles of leaves and think, "Man - there's another chore" instead of, "Yippee, something to play in"? I love these two little guys - they are trying their best to keep me young!

**After I posted this I went out to start bagging leaves (thanks Missy for bringing me bags) and Troy and Mindi came to help me out!! It didn't take long at all for the three of us to bag the front yard and then they helped me rake and bag a good portion of the backyard. Thanks guys - I honestly couldn't have done it (at least not all in one day) without you!**