New month, time for a new book nook! There are so many good books for fall and Thanksgiving books.

It was so fun putting this little book shelf together. Here are some of our favorite books:

Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn

Pete the Cat Falling for Autumn

The Golden Acorn

In the Middle of Fall

How to Help a Pumpkin Grow

Thanksgiving in the Woods

Thanksgiving in the Woods

You’re My Little Pumpkin Pie

Leaves

Olaf Gives Thanks

Peyton Picks the Perfect Pie: A Thanksgiving Celebration

Shelves – Banners – Shelfie Sign – Kids Custom Chairs

**I own some of these books but also check many out from our local library, it would be very expensive to add all of these titles to your collection in one year. We are building ours with a few new favorites each year. This year the kids really loved Olaf Gives Thanks and The Golden Acorn after we borrowed them from the library so we added those to our collection.

Monthly Book Nooks:

January – Arctic Animals/Winter

February – Love/Valentines Day

March – St. Patricks Day/Spring

April – Easter/Spring

May – Emmy’s birthday theme

June – Cannon’s birthday theme

July – Camping/summer

August – Back to School

September – Fall/Harvest

October – Halloween

November- Thanksgiving

December – Christmas

Now that we have our book nook up and running I thought I would share some of my favorite Halloween books. This is still a work in progress, not all of my favorite books were in to be put up and I think we need another shelf!

Bonaparte Falls Apart 

Pig the Monster

The Good, the Bad, and the Spooky 

Pick a Pumpkin 

Room on the Broom 

Bone Soup 

 The Scariest Book Ever

Little Blue Truck’s Halloween

How to Make Friends with a Ghost 

B Is for Boo

Pete the Cat: Trick or Pete

You’re My Little Pumpkin Pie

Gustavo, the Shy Ghost

I LOVE picture books and add some to our collection every year but also don’t want to go broke so we check out lots of these from our library as well. Visiting the library and getting themed books is one of our favorite things to do!

Monthly Book Nooks:

January – Arctic Animals/Winter

February – Love/Valentines Day

March – St. Patricks Day/Spring

April – Easter/Spring

May – Emmy’s birthday theme

June – Cannon’s birthday theme

July – Camping/summer

August – Back to School

September – Fall/Harvest

October – Halloween

November- Thanksgiving

December – Christmas

We are pretty far into the season already but we always have a fall bucket list to work through so here is this years:

• Run a family 5k hopefully a real turkey trot
• Go to a pumpkin Patch

• Drink Fall themed beverages from Starbucks
• Share hot chocolate with the kids
• Spend Saturday playing soccer games
• Get lost in a corn maze

• Attend a fall festival
• Carve Jack-o-lanterns
• Get dressed up and go trick or treating

• Bake pies
• Make Boo Baskets for the kids

• Make fun halloween themed snacks
• Go for a hike in the mountains

• Play in a pile of leaves
• Go camping
• Make fall crafts with the kids
• Put up Fall/Halloween/Thanksgiving Book Nooks

Previous Falls:

We have had bucket lists for Fall 2022 Fall 2021  summer 2021 summer 2019  fall  winter and spring.

We had a pretty typical winter day.

We spent the morning at one of our favorite playgrounds. It was a little cold and grey but these kids have fun no matter what.

We broke out some of our fun Valentine’s Day snacks (there will be many)

In the afternoon Cannon had school and then we hit up the library, it’s time to refresh our book nook!

We have been talking a lot about skiing and how we are bad Coloradans because we don’t currently ski. We are thinking that we should all start ski lessons and learn together. I ran across this article about how you can build skiing into your training.

Do you ski? If you have kids do they ski?

We are adding a couple new Christmas traditions this year and I am so excited!

I checked How Winston Delivered Christmas out from the library not knowing anything about it. When I got it home and realized it was an advent story I knew I wanted to buy a copy so we would have one for years to come. You read a chapter a night for December and there are crafts or activities listed that you can do as well.

This book is seriously beautiful!

We are also adding the Cinnamon Bear to our traditions this year.

I grew up listening to this with my family every year. I found it as a podcast and can’t be more excited to share it with my family. You listen to an episode of the story a day until Christmas. I can’t remember all the details of the story so it’s fun to listen to it again!

Along with our new traditions we are enjoying some old favorites like time outside and reading books:

If the kids are ever having a hard time behaving sending them outside will almost always turn things around.

We spent the rest of the day doing chores and getting the Christmas decorations out.

Emmy has really been into the new book nook, I love when she “reads” to herself.

What are your favorite Christmas traditions?

Cannon took his second rapid Covid test and it was negative!

It’s so nice having these rapid tests, even if they aren’t as reliable as the PCR test.

I can breathe a little easier knowing that with symptoms Cannon is still testing negative.

In non-COVID news I have been collecting books for our Christmas Book Nook. I love this little Christmas Cookie board book.

I also grabbed The Little Reindeer, LOVE! I have to use a lot of restraint not to buy all the books, I love them so much. Thank goodness for the library, otherwise we would have to live in our books.

Do you have a favorite holiday book?

I was up too late again and didn’t get up early…I really have to get better about getting to bed at a decent time.

We took a break from school in to visit the doctor and Cannon got his Covid booster shot. None of us are sick at the moment but it feels like that won’t last long.

We came home, finished school then had breakfast burritos for lunch.

We visited the library to add books to our snow/polar book shelves. I really like THIS list if you need more winter/snow/polar books.

And because of my bad life choices I was running on the treadmill in the late afternoon.

Do you have any bad life choices you just keep repeating? One day I will get it together.

The last month of the year is here and I am so excited for all the magic!

Things I am most looking forward to this month:

• Everything Christmas obviously
• Our big Christmas Cactus trip
• All the fun baking
• Having Cannon off of school, he gets lots of time off and we love more time with him!
• Disneyland at Christmas time

My goals for December are to:

• Enjoy time with family
• Get my long run up to 6 miles
• Make our Elves of the Shelf as much fun as possible
• Take time, slow down and enjoy this time.

November was…..fine. It felt a little like the in between of a magical October and a hopefully even more magical December. Cannon was out of school for 18 days so we did a lot of homeschool. The Covid exposure was stressful but we did get to spend a lot of time outside given our very dry warm fall. In happy news Cannon got his first dose of the vaccine and we got to celebrate Thanksgiving together with my parents and brother.

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We met our goals of 1000 hours outside for the year and 52 hikes in November but we will still spend as much time as possible outside this month.