A craft and lots and lots of Autumn leaves

Since my previous babysitting gig ended (he started preschool), I've been praying about a way to make a little money.  We can get by on Scott's income alone, but even a small amount of income from me helps, as we budget all but about 50 cents of Scott's paycheck.  I ran into a friend from church at Walmart last week, and later that week contacted me to see if I would be interested in watching her kids.  Her husband works first shift and she works second shift, so they have about a 2 hour overlap in the afternoon where they are both gone.  So I am now watching 2 of their kids (3.5 and 14 months old) for a couple hours in the afternoon 4 days a week, and then their 6 year old rides the bus to our house and is here for about 30 minutes as well.  Five kids under the age of 6 is pretty crazy!  If I had that many kids I would never get any housework done!  I might be making a lot of crock pot meals!

The weather has been beautiful this week--in the 70's in late October!  I'll take it!  We took a couple trips to the park with all the kids.  I put the 2 littlest in the double stroller and let the older three walked.  As they walked, they picked up lots and lots of lovely autumn leaves from the ground and put them all into the bottom of the stroller.  So I decided to use those leaves to do a craft.  It didn't turn out quite as pretty as I hoped (or as pretty as my last "window suncatcher" project, probably because the dry leaves are opaque), but the kids had fun and got to take home something they made.

I made some seasonal snacks.  The kids thought they were awesome.

I cut out outlines of leaves and owls from construction paper, then stuck them to a piece of contact paper.

I was hoping M would be a little more involved, but he just sat there and didn't actually pick anything up.  I think he was just waiting for his snack.

L didn't like breaking apart the leaves.  But I gave her some little pieces of construction paper (from Laurel's "scissors practice") and she put those on her owl instead.

In the past week Nicolas figured out how to hold a pencil or crayon and actually make marks on paper.  Now all he wants to do is draw!  This has worked out well, because I rip off a big piece of paper from my giant roll of while paper, give the kids the crayons on the kitchen floor, and they will draw for extended periods of time.  I have a few drawing instruction books, so I can draw some cats and rocket ships for them to color.  This week they have wanted to color volcanoes, so I am working on my volcano drawing skills.  And I always make sure I include some little stick men running away with their mouths wide open.

He looks just like Scott! 

Enjoying some outside coloring time.

Leaves on the tree in our back yard.

Our neighbor's beautiful tree.