a tree, a repost

The beginnings of fall. . .

Well, Aunt Sue asked for more. . so I'll give you some backstory. First of all, pinterest has renewed my interest in paper towel rolls & toilet paper rolls. Do you know how many cool things you can do with them? I have made a neat numbers learning craft for Rachel, & had some extra tubes lying around, so I thought Kate and I could make a tree. Well, you know how those things go. At first it was going to be just the tubes with some green tissue paper stuffed into the ends of the tubes. Then, I thought maybe we could glue some sticks to the tubes. . .then Kate suggested collecting the leaves. My real brainwave came when I was looking for the hot glue gun & found the green fabric & assorted "fall" fabrics. We decided to cover our trees base with the green for the grass, and I had Kate cut out some "leaves" that had fallen to scatter around the tree. We created our bark with sticks from the yard, and we found some really pretty leaves that had recently fallen to flesh out our fall tree. The cream was Kate remembering the nest she's had in her room all summer. We found it in our blueberry bush after the bird family had left it behind. Best of all, our project tied in pretty great with this new book I'm reading with Kate, Among the Forest People, by Clara Dillingham Pearson. It's a delightful book full of tales about owls, squirrels, crows, and all of the "people" within the forest. Each tale is chock-full of information about the habits of each animal, and contains a good deal of wisdom about real people as well. Kate has really enjoyed them, and we're both learning a lot!