Mandy Moore Says She's 'Excited to Figure Out' Her Holiday Traditions as a Family of Four (Exclusive)

The actress shares her two sons — Oscar "Ozzie," 11 months, and Augustus "Gus," 2 — with husband Taylor Goldsmith

Mandy Moore is excited to create new memories with her two little boys.

While chatting with PEOPLE exclusively about her new limited-edition capsule collection with Gymboree, the This Is Us actress, 39 opened up about creating new holiday traditions with her family, her older son's transition to preschool and the special bond between her two sons.

Speaking about the inspiration behind her collection, Moore — who shares sons Augustus "Gus" Harrison, 2, and Oscar "Ozzie" Bennett, 11 months, with husband Taylor Goldsmith — says that it all came down to the time her family spent on the East Coast last winter.

"I had a newborn and a not even 2-year-old, and I think a lot of the inspiration for what this collection became sort of stemmed from our time here and stemmed from getting to experience winter through their eyes, their first real, proper winter because we don't get winter on the West Coast," she tells PEOPLE.

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Related: Mandy Moore Celebrates National Sons Day with Sweet Photos: 'Luckiest to Be Your Mom'

"Getting to witness Gus' first experience with snow and recording his little footprints on the snow and getting to wear all of the winter accessories and understanding why he needs to layer up when he goes outside. All of that," she says, adding that she wanted to design pieces that had a lifeline beyond just the holidays.

Her two boys are already big fans of her collection. "We all got to take photos in them, and they're still amenable to me matching them, obviously, because they don't have the wherewithal yet to object," she jokes.

"So it's so much fun, and just to see even the size difference between the two of them...just how cute things are when they're so tiny like that," Moore says, referring to her younger son Ozzie. "He's getting bigger and bigger every day, but I feel like he's going to eclipse his brother very soon."

Of course, before Moore and her family can show off their holiday best, they have another very exciting day to experience: Halloween.

"I think this is the first year that it's actually going to make sense to him," she says of son Gus. "Last year, I remember he was still too small. I tried to put him in a cute little chicken costume and he was not into it at all. I could barely get a picture out of it, and I was like, 'Okay, well.'"

"But this year, he's been really into dragons, half scared of them, half excited by them. And then he just started watching Peter Pan for the first time and my mother-in-law got him a Peter Pan costume, and yeah, he wore it to the grocery store," she laughs. "I was like, 'Okay, we're in that space now.'"

But Gus' excitement didn't stop with the Peter Pan costume. "When I put the dragon costume on him the other day, I was like, 'Oh this just came in the mail. Do you want to try it on?' Thinking maybe he'd want to put on the tail or the wings or something, and he wanted to put on the whole outfit, and then he went to the park as the dragon that day. And I was like, 'Okay, that's real progress.'"

"So I feel like as long as he's not sick of either of those costumes in the next month, then we're golden. He'll be excited to walk around."

With the rest of the fall and winter holidays just around the corner, Moore tells PEOPLE that her family is looking forward to creating new traditions together. "I think we're excited to figure out what those traditions are going to be," she says. "Honestly, [Ozzie] was so tiny last year, and we were here on the East Coast, which was fun in and of itself, to have that new experience."

"But we're going to move soon, and so I'm excited to settle in and put down roots and figure out what those traditions are going to be."

"Gus just started preschool, and I feel like with all of that comes new community and new things that you do together with new friends and whatnot," she says. "So I'm excited to just continue seeing where that leads us, and being home this year, I think, is going to be especially special."

As for how they celebrate special moments together, Moore says "music is a big through line in our house, and playing music and singing holiday songs," revealing that her father-in-law is also a musician. "Music is a big part of our lives and always will be."

Her boys already have every kind of music at their disposal, but Moore isn't sure that her older son is going to take a liking to it. "Gus is at a phase now where I think he clocks that when Dad plays guitar, it means he's not fully focused on him," she says. "So he is like, 'No Da-Da guitar. No Da-Da guitar,' whereas before he used to love when we would sing and Taylor would play guitar and stuff."

Her other son hasn't come to the same realization as his brother. "Ozzie loves it still," the star shares. "He's very into it, and he is curious, always wants to crawl all over it, and he's starting to understand the mechanics of it, and so that's sweet."

All these new experiences can be a bit overwhelming, but Moore says Gus is handling it like a champ. "It's actually been easier than I thought it was going to be," she says of his transition to preschool. "I was expecting a lot of tears and big emotions, and he's been doing really well."

"He's still so little, and it's for a half day. But it's been a great transition for him. He's been having so much fun and so excited. It already feels like it's made such a world of difference in his socializing and what he comes home and talks about, and it's just so strange!"

"He has a whole life now for a couple of hours without me, that I don't know anything about. It just blows my mind as a parent," she says. "Now he's in school, and he's going to be there until he's 18. That's crazy."

It's already been a big year for Gus, who had a scary moment over the summer with a rash. "We went to the dermatologist. We went to all these doctors, and just not knowing what was going on and that it was only getting worse was frustrating," Moore says. "And he was really itchy and uncomfortable and couldn't sleep. And so as a parent, it's just wanting to get down to brass tacks and figure out what's going on and how you can find a solution."

Although Moore and her husband finally got a diagnosis for Gus, they remain perplexed as to how he developed the rash. "I guess it was just our first entree into parenting, of like, 'Yeah, they get crazy things sometimes and crazy colds and injuries and these things that you just don't think about as an adult that I'm sure our parents had to go through.'"

The Tangled actress also spent the summer potty-training Gus and acknowledges that "it's a process; it's not an event."

"We just keep telling ourselves it's a process," she continues. "And going to school, there have been a few setbacks because he needed to be potty-trained for school, and so yeah, there's been a few little accidents here and there and a little bit of a regression, but that's to be expected."

Moore says that the family is about to take a few trips, so there will be ample opportunity for Gus to try out some of the bigger public bathrooms. "But yeah, we're still cruising around with our little plastic potty in the back of our cars," she shares with a laugh.

The actress also shares that son Ozzie, who turns one later this month, can't get enough of his older brother. "He just wants to mimic his brother," she says of her younger son. "He is obsessed."

Moore says that Ozzie's love for his brother is reciprocated, but there are a few boundaries that she's had to put up between her two boys. "I think the biggest thing now is us making sure that he doesn't squash him because sometimes he just wants to get too close and hold too tight," she says of Gus.

"We're like, 'Gentle, buddy.' It's like, I get it. I want to eat Ozzie too. He's still so squishy and I just want to eat his little legs, but we have to just table that for Gus sometimes."

"They're very sweet," the proud mom adds. "I'm so grateful to have these two very, very sweet boys that love each other."

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