Welcome, Fall!

Fall is my favorite time of year - hands down! My husband and I have always loved, "turtleneck weather" as we call it. It's such a cozy time of year - I love the smells of fall -- cinnamon, apples, pumpkin pie (mostly the votives that I burn almost non-stop this time of year!). The sounds -- crunching of leaves under your feet. And the colors -- bright orange pumpkins; red and green apples; yellow, orange and red leaves on the trees. It makes me want cook, snuggle up with my family, and decorate our home!

I did all three of these things this past week while my mom was in town. We had a great visit, I cooked up a bunch of our family favorites like a Thanksgiving dinner, homemade chili, and my grandmother's traditional "Saturday night hot dogs, baked beans & brown bread" (yes, as my friend Chris would be asking now, "Bread in a can?" Yes, Boston brown bread in a can -- delicious!) 'Course we had the Saturday night dinner last night on Friday, but Mom's plane left this morning! We spent a wonderful week visiting, the kids thoroughly enjoyed getting Nana's undivided attention during all of their waking hours -- my littlest one was still looking for her today -- I afraid she thinks Nana moved in with us! Mom flew in Sunday night and flew out early this morning (my older daughter and I woke up at 5:30am to drive her to the airport!) and since my girlie was at school all week while Nana was here, and because she was feeling very sad about Nana going back to Florida, I decided to pick her up from school at noon on Friday.

We spent the afternoon going out to lunch and then enjoying the beautiful fall day by driving around to different farm markets to pick up pumpkins, apples, mums, cornstalks and hay. Let me just say, the minivan was LOADED! I put the backseats down (stow and go) and covered the back with a tarp and loaded it to the gills! I even had to put the seat next to my girls' down, so that we could accommodate the long cornstalks! The girls enjoyed running through a hay maze, and hiding inside of a cornstalk tepee. They each picked out 2 pumpkins and Nana treated the little one to a ghost-shaped cookie and the older one to her favorite Jelly-Belly jelly beans (butter popcorn!). It was definitely an adventure, and we had lots of fun! I had hoped to make it to one last farm market, but when I sat my littlest girl on the counter (to keep her from running amuck in the store...) while I was checking out, and she said to me (as she leaned back to try and lie down on the counter) "You change my diaper?" Right here on the counter? Time to go home!

My girls love when the house is decorated for Halloween (ok, any holiday, but right now it's Halloween!). I hung up the dangling pumpkin lights and filled the candy dish with candy corn. Put up the Halloween signs and the silly-faced pumpkin figurines. And of course, I brought out the Halloween candle holders and burned some cinnamon scented votives -- now that says "Fall" to me!

What does your family do to celebrate the start of the holiday season?