Doodle Acres

My daughter, Hope, and I returned last night from a whirl-wind trip to beautiful Lancaster, Pennsylvania and the F-C Learning Conference.   We headed out Friday morning and arrived at our hotel about three hours before the Family Picnic at a local park.  After taking a quick tour of the area, we arrived about 10 minutes early at the park.  For those of you that know me in real life, you know that I am an early bird.  What a thrill it was to have Michele Quigley, the organizer of this extraordinary conference, pull up in her SUV and give me a great big hug!!!  Meeting Michele after getting to “know” her on-line was such a thrill!!!

Michele and I

Maggie Quigley blowing bubbles - it was quite a test of my poor photographic skills to finally capture a bubble on film 

Other thrills included meeting some of the bloggers that I “know” through their blogs.  However, I came home and added some new blogs to my Bloglines subscriptions after having met those bloggers in person.   Here are some more picnic pictures:

Margaret (Minnesota mom) and Maryellen (Tales from the Bonny Blue House)

Michele and Tim Quigley

Michele with a beautiful St. Anne’s chaplet (made by Kimberlee of Beads of Mercy), given to her by Alice Gunther (Cottage Blessings)

Margaret, Karen Edmisten (Karen Edmisten), Meredith (Sweetness and Light), and Diane (Journey of a Mother’s Heart)

The next morning we arrived early (of course!!!) at the Liberty Place Conference Center for an inspiring day of talks.  The day just flew by as I participated in the opening mass, listened to so much wisdom, shopped at the vendor tables, visited with old and new friends, and of course ATE!!! 

Maryellen (one of the wonderful speakers) with her very best friend, Chris Volpe (and my friend IRL)

Alice Gunther (Cottage Blessings and featured speaker), Meredith (another of the gifted speakers) , and Kimberlee (Pondered in My Heart and Beads of Mercy)

Hope and I

Sweet Erica Sanchez from CA - not a blogger YET!!!

So at 8 p.m. we hit the road to head back to Long Island.  We arrived home at midnight after experiencing heavy traffic in NYC, stopping at a most hideous gas station bathroom (I didn’t take a picture of that!!! Ugh!!!), and listening to the Mets lose a heart-breaking game in 14 innings.  But most of all, Hope and I arrived home happy that we had gone and looking forward to our next trip to PA to visit the Quigleys and next year’s Family-Centered Learning Conference (hint, hint, Michele!!! ;)).

We took a wonderful trip with some friends to the Bronx Zoo last month.  My husband is an avid amateur photographer and boy, does he take some terrific pictures.  His zoo pictures over the last few years have been just stunning and this year’s do not disappoint.  You can view a slide show at Flickr.  Here are just a few of my favorites.

We have been very busy over the last month or so.  My sweet 16 year old daughter, Hope, was the costume seamstress and left stage manager for the home-school production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  She is very talented and I am quite the proud mama.  You can check out pictures at Alice Gunther and MacBeth Derham’s blogs.

Well our final morning in Wisconsin was certainly eventful. It started at 7 a.m. This was the first morning that everyone adjusted to the time change and of course, it was the one morning I had to wake everyone up!!! LOL My three oldest children and I headed out the door to All Saints Day mass at the local parish. It was very nice. The priest reminded us of the many saints there are to emulate. He also explained the difference between All Saints and All Souls days - something I had been wondering.

Then we returned to find a beautiful brunch awaiting us - complete with stuffed french toast (they call it “Joan of Arc” french toast), sausage, orange juice, and fresh fruit served on china and in crystal.

Julie had prepared gift bags for each of us with special treats!!!

Julie is such a wonderful hostess. I learned a lot about hospitality from this sweet lady. We ate like kings and queens. She whipped up treat after treat and we never went hungry!!! Her ability to cook and bake for twelve children and three adults was truly awesome. She has inspired to improve in this area of hospitality.

Finally it was time to say good-bye and hit the road. Unfortunately, one of my tires was nearly flat. Fortunately, Julie has a compressor and we were on our way in a few short minutes.

We were on the road for the rest of Thursday, spending the night at a Comfort Inn in Ohio. By Friday at 4:30 p.m., we pulled up to our Home Sweet Home. My hubby worked from home that afternoon and we were all happy to see his wonderful smile upon our return.

Here are some pictures taken on the field next to their home:

The second day of our journey went very smoothly. After a 10 hour trip from Long Island to Michigan, the 6 hour trip from Michigan to Wisconsin seemed like a breeze!!! We arrived at Julie’s house and saw eight little heads peeking out of the various locations to survey their new house guests.

This trip was really a leap of faith for all involved. Julie and I “met” about a year ago on a Yahoo group called “Magnum Opus” for large Catholic families. We have enjoyed sharing our lives through that group, our blogs and email. However, meeting in real life (and spending four days in the same house with someone) is quite another matter. As an aside, Julie had someone tell her that I was probably coming to rob her and I had someone suggest that we were going to be their Halloween dinner!!! LOL But things couldn’t have gone better!!!

Julie and I were already friends but it didn’t take long for the children to become friends. They spent hours playing in the beautiful autumn weather with my children soaking in the rural surroundings of corn fields, hay bales, and chicken coops.

Chess was big hit with the older children. Lenny, the chess king in our family, enjoyed taking on opponent after opponent:

On Tuesday, we went to a corn maze with a tire playground, a great slide, and a corn bin:

On Wednesday we made our spoon saints:

And then had our All Saints Day costume party because we needed to leave at midday on Thursday (Lenny had a soccer game on Saturday morning at 9:30 - Praise God it didn’t get rained out. They played in the rain, winning 5-1 - Lenny scored two goals!!!).

These are Julie’s delicious cookies which are featured in Cay Gibson’s Christmas Mosaic:

Each night after saying the rosary (it touched my heart seeing the children praying together) and putting the children to bed, Julie and I enjoyed our time of uninterrupted conversation. What a joy this was - sharing our stories, our faith, our challenges, etc. God is indeed good and He demonstrated His goodness to us every day in so many ways!!!

More to come…

Well we arose at 5:30 Sunday morning to get ready for our departure (Don’t worry, we went to 5 o’clock mass on Saturday :0) ). At 6:15, the car was packed and we had completed our good-byes to “Daddy” and the doggies. Everyone piled into the car and I made the last seat-belt and bathroom check. Yes, everyone was snapped in with empty bladders. But horror of horrors, when I started the car, it would start but not stay started. What disappointment!!! So we piled out of the car, sure that our trip was over before it began. My husband said he was pretty sure it was moisture that was causing the problem. We had just had a ton of rain. Well at 7:15 I arose from the couch and determined to give it one more try. Well I guess the wires had dried out because it started and stayed running for 10 minutes (Given the length of the trip, I wanted to be sure that it was really going to stay in running order!!!). So we headed out on the first leg of our two day trip to Wisconsin with many prayers of thanksgiving. Suddenly the ten hour trip to Michigan (that day’s portion of the trip) didn’t seem so dreaded as we now realized the tremendous blessing we were given in just being able to go!!! God is good!!!

This is a picture of my children with my father’s first cousin, Lois. Lois was our wonderful hostess in Morenci, Michigan for the first night of our journey.

I’ll be blogging about the rest of our trip as the weekend/week progresses…

The children and I are headed away on a roadtrip tomorrow a.m. We are off to visit Julie in beautiful Wisconsin. Please pray for travel mercies. Hubby will mind the homefront and our tribe of doggies!!!

Just returned from seeing “Bella”. It is truly a must see for teens on up!!! Please don’t take the little ones. Wish I had time to tell you more but I need to finish packing and get some sleep!!!

See you in a week!!!

I have been a homeschooling mother for 8+ years but I am fairly new to Catholic homeschooling.  In fact I did not know that there was a Catholic homeschooling group in my area until this time last year.  Well what a blessing this community of home-schoolers has been for my family and me - the answer to MANY PRAYERS!!!  Well the leader of this merry band is none other than Alice Gunther of Cottage Blessings. 

Well dearest Alice has a new column in the Long Island Catholic called “The Catholic Home”.  You can read her wonderful article here.

Alice is such as special person.  When I was going through my cemetery crisis (For details - see “Bizarre” - September 23rd and work your way forward), I decided to take the children to the park to de-stress us all.  The park that I chose is nearly 40 minutes from my home but very serene.  Well we arrived there to find out that it was closed that day.  Ugh!!! This park is near to Alice’s house so I took a chance and showed up at Alice’s house unannounced.  Despite the fact that she was on a deadline for the above mentioned article, this dear sweet lady welcomed us into her home for several hours of blessed fellowship - just what I needed.  Thank you dearest Alice for your wonderful hospitality and most of all your friendship!!!   

Len and I took the children today to the Long Island Fair.  The children had entered some projects into the fair competition and were anxious to see if they had won a ribbon.  My motivation in entering them was the six free tickets we received for their entries.  So Cheap-o mom was the real winner!!!

Hope won second place for this dress and honorable mention for her drawing.

Lenny won first place for this Lego creation.

Lily’s beautiful picture did not receive a prize and I was very proud of her for being a gracious non-winner.

We had a great time as a family and with friends from our home-school group.  Peter and Lily loved the carousel.

We all enjoyed the Rough Riders demonstration although Peter had the best seat in the house - on Daddy’s lap.