A Month of Thankful

Well, today is a new day! And for that I'm very thankful. I'm glad Halloween is over, and now I can focus on Thanksgiving. As I mentioned in my post last night, we are starting to count down to Thanksgiving here. To do this I started a family activity. Yesterday afternoon we all painted some coffee filters. This morning Hazel and I cut them into leaves and did our first "I am thankful for" sticker. We appropriately decided today's would be "I am thankful for Fluffy coming home safe." After last night I thought that was a good one. We then punched holes in them so we could make a garland, but when I thought about where to hang the garland, I got the idea of taping them to our French door windows (this is also where we hang our Christmas cards).  This way we can enjoy the watercolor painting from both sides. To do this activity you need some coffee filters, watercolor paints and paintbrushes, some leave shapes (I used a maple I had from somewhere and a real oak leaf from Hazel's nature table) and some clear address labels so you can print the labels out (or you can write directly on the leaves) and if you are printing you can download the document here. (I used Avery 5160 for the format.) I also wrote in numbers on the labels so it would work as a countdown.

I can't wait until we have a few more days so this leaf won't look so lonely on the door! What a nice way to begin each day...talking about what we are thankful for. Hmmm...maybe we should continue this all year.

The other thing we did this morning was to bake. We made Oatmeal Pumpkin Muffins. I found the recipe here. I had made these with the pumpkin we cooked when my parents were here. We loved them. Today I used canned pumpkin and less chocolate chips (since they take over the entire taste). I used the whole can of pumpkin instead of measuring it out which was about  a bit more than the recipe calls for, but I didn't notice a  difference.