A love of leaves

I've been wanting to wax some autumn leaves with E for a few weeks now. We finally had a day to ourselves at home and some time on our hands so, after spending the morning reading together, out came the craft supplies.First we painted backgrounds for an autumn tree watercolour that we wanted to do. While those dried we did some leaf rubbings. We've always loved to do these but this year I saw on Mom in Madison's blog a new twist on this old favourite. We cut out and then painted our rubbings with watercolour washes (or splodges depending on what floats your boat).Not sure if this was pumpkin innards smeared on the wall or just paint. In our house crafts = mess. Actually, in our house life = mess.
We melted some wax and poured it into a pie pan. I put the pie pan on the top of a pot with simmering water in to keep the pie pan warm so the wax wouldn't harden. The boys had already gathered some leaves. We gave each one a quick dip in the melted wax and then let it dry on a piece of wax paper.
When W brought his leaves in I looked twice and said that they looked like they were mouldy but he really liked the colours of them. Once he pointed them out to me I took another look and had to agree that they were quite beautiful. They had a really interesting speckle pattern going on and these two below were very different in colour.Hard to tell from the photos but they're lovely. Somehow this started a talk about how different people see things differently...how beauty can mean different things to all of us. Then we talked about how some things or people might be considered physically "beautiful" on the outside (to our society's notion of what beauty is) but may not be what we would consider "beautiful" (loving, happy, kind) on the inside. E thought that people who care about the earth would be beautiful to him. ;-) Then he scored bonus mama points by telling me (in a completely serious manner) that to him I was beautiful inside and out. (Well, at least it gave my husband something to laugh about when I told him about it over dinner) ;-)Anyway, we got some of the leaves dipped and dried and we think they are lovely - dried, waxed, speckled, rotting, composted, we love leaves anyway at all. We've collected many bags of them from our neighbours too. (big plans for even more front yard edible gardens. ssssh, don't tell my neighbours...or my husband)