Welcoming Fall

Happy 1st day of fall, everyone! Here in our household we have been pre-gaming the arrival of fall by learning different things about fall. I love fall in early childhood because you can really engage all five senses, which is very fun.

As usual, we started out by hitting the library to borrow some books!

We learned about the Mid-Autumn Festival a few weeks back from Grace Lin's book, and even had a little celebration the day of with some of our good friends, but sadly because of Silly Bean's allergies, he can't have mooncake. I decided to start a family tradition instead of making homemade dumplings and noodles that I think will be part of our family for years to come, even though it's not really traditional. Oh well, Silly Bean likes it! ;P

Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin was a good read for Silly Bean as well, especially because he knows how to spell the word "no" and "pumpkin," which comes up multiple times in the book and Silly Bean enjoys pointing to the words he knows. Duck and Goose in the end went to a pumpkin patch to get their pumpkin, and the other day we went to a local farm and got to see a pumpkin patch and relate that back to what we read in the book!

Silly Bean absolutely loves Mouse's First Fall and has pretty much memorized all of the words by this point. He learned about the different shapes and colors of leaves in the fall. The other day we were walking outside around our neighborhood, and Silly Bean noticed a leaf that was green on the verge of turning red. He also found a yellow leaf which he was also excited about because he saw it in the "Mouse and Minka" book. We brought them home and I "preserved" them with packing tape, so they should last for a while and we can keep looking at them and talk about leaves changing colors.

And lastly, I was very excited to find pumpkin pie spice at our local Trader Joe's for only $1.99. Guys, for someone who loves deals, this is the best! And also perfect for the pumpkin spice waffles I wanted to make this weekend (I just substitute flaxseed meal for the eggs)!

It was also fun because Silly Bean got to use his senses of smell to smell the spice before we put it in, taste the canned pumpkin and the actual waffle, which was a huge hit. We are definitely going to make more in the coming weeks! (Though, we definitely need a bigger waffle iron and not just the mini Dash one we have!)

Excited to collect more leaves for our sensory box as the weeks go buy, make some pumpkin spice play-doh, go apple picking, and pumpkin picking! Fun times to be in early childhood, indeed :)