Is Christmas Here?

The day started in the wee hours of the morning as I finished sewing a hat onto a snowman:

Then, at a far more decent hour, we finally took down our fall season wall so that we can start our Winter and holiday crafts. I have a pretty grand idea for our "tree" but I need to get to work on it. Hopefully I will have it up in a few days :)

Beyond the tree, though, we have lots of winter crafts planned, plus our ornament advent calendar.

Today, we started some snowflakes and a Christmas countdown chain. 

For our snowflakes, I got the idea off pinterest to use coffee filters. These work ok, though they're a bit too flimsy for young children. We'll probably do other ones with normal paper. Blue's scissors are missing, and her purple spring-loaded ones are not nearly as "preschooler-friendly" as they claim. So I let her use my scissors, under our sharp (pun intended) eye. She did good, but enjoyed hanging the snowflakes up the most. We put them up on the windows of the girls' room. Between those and the Christmas lights, it's looking quite nice!

While Blue and daddy worked on the snowflakes, Baby Bear did some coloring. She bored of that quickly, though, and moved onto tasting the crayons. So, we switched her to playing with the fall leaves we had taken down.

I worked on the Christmas countdown chain, with Blue helping me count. Blue is "getting" that Christmas "is coming." But is having a harder time realizing that we'll be waiting a few weeks... not hours. I think the chain will help with that, as well as making our wall even more festive :)

Fall reading

We hit the library this week to check out some books about fall, seasons, and of course, Halloween. We have a few books about Halloween and fall, but I've been wanting to add in a few more to read. Plus, it was very hot - 92F - and we don't have air conditioning at home. So the library was a nice place to go for the afternoon.

Over the summer, we went to the library a lot. The visits kind of decreased in frequency as the end of summer approached and we were busy in the chaos of other things. It was good to go back though. The local library is amazing - they have great kids programs (a reading program in almost every language - really! Even  Russian and Chinese), a lot of seasonal events, and a great children's room complete with coloring pages, puzzles, and some toys. 

Wednesday was our first time visiting during the schoolyear, though. The children's area had a ton of toys out! I don't know if they've added more toys or just bring  out more during the schoolyear, but it was great! Blue put on a puppet show for Baby Bear, and the baby loved their Zany Zoo.

I found several great books about fall and Halloween. We also found some books about owls - something Blue has been having a lot of nightfears about.

Between those books and the fall and Halloween books we already had, we have a great assortment of things to read. And just in time, too, as a nice fall storm came in and finally broke the temperatures! So we've been enjoying some great fall afternoons, snuggled under blankets and reading while the wind and rain blow outside.

Baby Bear also found a book she loved at Target about Halloween. It's our first Katz book (aside from a Potty book we have) and baby LOVES it! She lifts the flaps, squawks at the pictures, turns the pages, and claps whenever we read it. I think we may have to add a few more of these books to our future library trips :)