It is fall, it is fall....the leaves are falling everywhere...THAT MEANS IT'S FALL!

Fall is my favorite time of the year.  Christopher truly enjoys it too as his favorite outfit is shorts and a hoodie.  It's such a beautiful transformation to winter and it's so nice to see all the changes and feel the cool breezes before the snow flies.  Mallory enjoys watching the TV show Yo Gabba Gabba and two years ago they released an episode about fall.  One of her favorite songs, one that we sing all the time, was discovered during that show.  You can hear that song and watch the video here....

This year has been filled with fall activities because the weather has been remarkably mild giving us the opportunity to be outside almost every day, all day.  Nothing like oodles of fresh air to give you a good nights sleep!  That is the other benefit to having such a nice fall, Mallory is OUT at the end of the day!  

Like years past we started our fall by heading to Barten's Pumpkins.  I CANNOT praise this family run farm enough for all of their FREE activities and HUGE selection of pumpkins.  Two weekends in September and two in October they have Pumpkin Fun Weekends where they offer FREE face painting, caricatures, hay rides, pony rides, bean bag toss, corn shelling, and plenty of scenery to take in.  Mallory just LOVES going to the pumpkin patch and is always sad to leave, even after hanging out there for two hours.  This year they had a small petting zoo which included white bunny rabbits!  

A Mallory sized wagon for her Mallory sized pumpkin! 

A brand new hay ride wagon!

Mallory absolutely LOVES the hay ride out into the pumpkin fields! 

Here is a video of her on one of her many pony rides!  

Of course she's riding the pony with 
purple and pink accent colors!  

After a Pumpkin Fun Weekend, we didn't have school this past week due to MEA.  Always a challenge to find something to do when Mallory is not in school, we are lucky enough to have a membership to the Minnesota Zoo.  Since the weather gods have decide to let us prolong our fall season into late October, we were able to take advantage of everything the zoo has to offer this time of year, inside and outside.  One of the zoo's fall features is a scarecrow contest.  The entries and winners are on display near the Wells Fargo Family Farm.  There were about twenty scarecrows total.  We checked them out one by one and Mallory decided this Spider Web was her favorite.  

    

This past weekend gave all the neighborhood kids a chance to have one last hurrah outdoors.  By the looks of the forecast, it's going to get cold, quite cold this coming weekend, so once again we took full advantage of the sunshine and set out to clean up all the leaves in our yard.  In past years we do a little here and a little there and then it doesn't seem too overwhelming, but this year we've had plans that took us away from home almost every weekend for the past three weeks, therefore leaving the bulk of the work to be done in one weekend.  Our yard is an average sized suburban yard, but we are in an older neighborhood flanked with several mature trees.  These leaves us with A LOT of leaves to clean up, in both the front and back yard.  The highest number of leaf bags we have filled in the past was eighteen, so far this year we've had twenty-one.  That's mulched bags of leaves.  It would easily be doubled if we didn't mulch them.  Personally, I think that's a few to many for, what feels like, our tiny yard, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.  The canopy on our block before the leaves fall is nothing short of amazing.  Mallory was right there to help us with the leaf removal.  I took this picture of her to show you the sheer amount of leaves we collect.  This pile was about six inches taller than Mallory (she's about 39 inches tall) and it was one of SIX piles that sat awaiting their demise.  That's right SIX giant leaf piles.  

Whatever the task or adventure, fall is the time for us!  As Halloween approaches and Mallory counts down how many sleeps she has before she has her party at school (which happens to be on the Halloween holiday this year) we all get giddy.  Mallory has decided to be a witch this year.  Stay tuned for more on that at a later date.  Until then.....

Our Little Pumpkin!