Fall

Lovely fall weekend here.  We've spent it small-grouping, birthday-partying, family-timing, churching, and...NOT RAKING!!!  Last year Reuel and I bought each other this for our birthdays and Christmas:

Now, that's not to say that there isn't still a load of work to do to get the leaves up, but when there's a lawn-covered acre to manage, it makes getting up a *whole lot* of leaves quite a bit more efficient.  We noticed a neighbor up the road has one now too...maybe he saw ours??  It's a lawn sweeper, and you pull it along behind a riding mower and then pull the handle to dump the leaves (in the tiny patch of woods behind the house).  It really leaves the lawn quite clean.  Awesome investment.  Reuel and Owen ride the mower together (disobeying the 15 gazillion warnings posted all over the mower), and have a good old time.

We teach Owen's Sunday school class this year, in a team with two other teachers.  Owen is the only boy in a class full of girls.  Too bad he is too young to appreciate it!  Actually, I don't think he notices one way or the other at this stage of his life, but we teachers do.  There are two girls who've paired off and can be a little naughty, but for the most part the girls are very straightforward and heed directions to a tee.  Then there's Owen!  Today's naughty list: when the circle-time rhyme that Mrs. Kara does when we sit down for our story says, 'Bring them (your fingers) to your little mouth...but do not put them in!' all the little girls are following the rhyme, but there's Owen, fingers jammed into his mouth as far as they'll go.  Then, when the teacher is making a game of getting a girl's shoes back on after she's taken them off, Owen watches the whole thing, then looks her in the eye and takes off his shoes.  Next, the baby Isaac craft.  After putting a paper diaper and hair on a paper cutout baby Isaac Mrs. Kara said, 'Okay kids, time to wrap up the baby in a blanket!'  Owen loudly replies, 'Paper babies don't need any blankets.'  While the girls are all decorating and mothering their babies, Owen is getting bored and snip, snip, progressively trimming baby Isaac of his fingers and toes, then his hands and feet, and wait, isn't his head looking awfully small?  When it's time to decorate the door to the tent that houses a laughing Sarah inside, Owen is sticking stickers all over Sarah's face and saying, 'Mommy, now I'm making her face go away!'  OK, so he was being pretty funny and we were all snickering, but I know what that cute defiance looks like at home.  I start to worry when I compare him to the other kids...but try to remind myself he's the only boy, and also that if I think of him and treat him like he's a troublemaker, he's more likely to become one!  So I tried to ignore him :}  (But the baby amputations were making Mrs. Kara laugh, so he got some of the attention he was after).