Leaves!

After church Sunday, Matt decided to blow off/rake up some leaves and the kids had a blast jumping in them and having leaf fights.  Gray missed out jumping in a particularly big pile and came in for lunch in tears.  So Matt kindly raked him up another pile later and he was a happy boy!  

Matt called me outside to see him buried in the leaves, which he thought so fun.

He emerges (still in his Sunday suit...and crocs, no socks...sadly he had removed his tie, which he clipped on to his tan, holed, thermal shirt.  Stylin as always!)

 Handsome.  While we're on the subject of this guy, I had a conference with his teacher yesterday.  I just knew she was going to gently let me know that Gray was giving her a fit in class with his antics.  But she didn't!  She said he really rarely gets spoken to and has only had to "take a break" once or twice, which Gray has told me about.  She said he and his friends do tackle each other outside, but they are boys and she lets them be rough.  She said he's very cute, sweet, funny.  He is very involved with and interested in his classmates.  He's above where he needs to be academically.  He is doing great at carpet time now, especially since being moved between 2 girls:)  The only surprise was that the speech pathologist wants to work with him on his "s" sound.  Something about the way he says them is not usually self-correcting.  Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised, especially since he's even been in a little bit of hot water at church lately.  Hopefully he'll settle down all around and learn to really respect and care about his teachers at school and church.

And speaking of leaves, I am going to try a little activity in November with the kids.  While it's nice at Thanksgiving to think about what we're thankful for, it's just one day.  I was really impacted by the 1000 Gifts book (about the life-changing power of being thankful)  and have been meaning to try to incorporate more thankfulness in our family, so I tried to think of how we could do that the whole month of November.  Gray helped me make these leaves and I used some ideas from the blog of the girl that wrote 1000 Gifts to write on them different things we can share that we're thankful for.  They say things like "a gift that's small" or "a gift that's ordinary".

So the idea is that we'll put the leaves in a bowl and draw out one at dinner time, then go around and share something we're thankful for in that category.  Hopefully it will get us in the "attitude of gratitude" and help us see all the ways God shows his love for us every day in the things we enjoy.

The trick for me will be enjoying the activity and not making it some "program" where I feel like a failure if we forget to do it sometimes or if one night no one has anything to say.  Have to remember that I can plan to provide teaching and encouragement all I want, but I'm going to mess up sometimes and also it's only God that can really bring good from it anyway.  So hopefully it's simple and interesting and fruitful!