Farewell to Autumn

Maria 1y.5m.

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter. ~Carol Bishop Hipps

I love autumn… It is so beautiful and quiet… It is such a peaceful time for mind and soul, indeed as a pause between heat and cold. It encourages to think a lot, it encourages to take care of everyone and everything, to start smth new… It is definitely a lovely time to be either outside or at home..

We are often walking with Maria outside, observing how the nature prepares for the hard winter: birds are flying away, leaves are changing colour and falling down, people around putting on warmer clothes. She seems to be interested in the whole process but possibly not as much as I am. She loves much more to touch things, so we gather acorns and chestnuts; we make bouquets of colourful leaves (pity, that they shrivel so fast); we run in the puddles and walk when it is raining…

At home we try to catch the breath of autumn on the paper, too. I drew the tree and Mary glued the leaves to show the shedding of leaves. Here, she drew the rowan with her fingerprints.

We also made men of acorns: I was doing the first, Maria repeated what I did; I just helped her in the end with mouth and an eye. Then, she had a task to insert matches into piece of clay to make a hedgehog. She loved it so much that I made a fir-tree, where Maria also inserted matches. On the hedgehog’s needles we put some apples (violet, though =)) prepared by Mary.