Andrea has been OBSESSED with fall leaves ever since last fall when Paul got out the leaf-blower and piled all our leaves up in the backyard before blowing them into the forested part of our lot. She had so much fun that ever since the first leaf fell this year, she’s been asking if there are enough leaves to go pile them up and jump in them. And pretty much every time we go anywhere, we have to bring at least one leaf home with us. According to Andrea, each leaf she finds is the prettiest, most perfect leaf she’s ever seen. We have a whole box of dried leaves that she’s been collecting.

So today was a slow day, and the weather was beautiful, so I decided to take Andrea out this evening to play in the leaves. My ulterior motive for suggesting this is that I wanted to try a fall photo shoot as the sun was starting to set. I’ve been working on my photography skills, and I figured if I let her bury herself in fall leaves, she might actually cooperate. And the fact that I let her throw a bunch of leaves at my head helped a lot, too. 😉 For some reason, nothing makes her smile more for pictures than something gross being dumped/tossed on my head. Paul often stands behind me and pretends to pour water on me or sprinkles mulch on my head and such. It leads to the greatest smiles. Haha.

Here are some of the best pics from today’s shoot… The first three are from our backyard, the rest are from a park a couple blocks away. We don’t get much late day sun in our backyard, so I wanted to try a second location.

I hate that her hands aren’t in the picture, but I still love the cute look on her face. She’s just thrown handfuls of leaves into air all around us and was pretty darn pleased with herself. 🙂

An outtake just to show she really was winding up to throw leaves right at me!

At the park…

Getting grumpy towards the end, and still adorably cute. 😉