Doodle Acres

I was the sponsor for my cousin as she was confirmed into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil!!! YEAH!!!

My children in the Easter clothes…

Lenny, at left, serves as an altar boy for the high mass…

Lenny and Father McCartney

Hope and Lily…

Just a quick picture of my three oldest children from the Christmas tableau from Christmas Eve mass.  Aren’t my two angels and Joseph cute???

This is indeed a glorious feast day but one that is unfortunately often misunderstood by both non-Catholics AND Catholics. The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is where we celebrate MARY’S conception - not Jesus’ as is often thought. It is Mary we recognize as being immaculately conceived. But what does that mean? It means that Mary from the moment of her conception (which happened in the normal way between her parents) was preserved by God from the stain of original sin . She was instead filled completely with divine grace.     - Michele Quigley at The Family-Centered Life

I had always found this feast day a bit confusing.  I won’t bore you with my misconceptions but I encourage you to read the full post.  It is well worth the read!!!

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…

  Today is the Blessed Mother’s Birthday.  Well last night for Lily’s birthday, her grandparents took us all out to dinner.  While walking into the bathroom, Lily lovingly looked at me and said, “You’re the best mom in the world for me.”  Then she seemed to be thinking for a moment and added, “I guess the best mother ever was the Blessed Mother.”  I had to agree with her.  It is amazing when you consider that God the Father picked Mary out of all the women who have ever lived to be the mother of His Son, Jesus.  Having been raised as a Presbyterian, I didn’t grown up thinking much about Mary.  I didn’t think ill of her.  I just never gave her much thought.  As a converted Catholic, I am glad to have come to know Our Lady.  She is the Queen of heaven and I am happy to call her “Mother”.

Hail Mary, full of grace.
Our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen. 

Recently when I posted about my liturgical calendar, I referenced a post by Katherine of A Living Education. This led to a series of emails between Katherine and me about how we could make our calendar reusable year to year with the changes in the liturgical calendar (i.e. some feasts are not always on the same date). Well Katherine has come up with a terrific idea. I encourage you to check her new liturgical calendar!!!

As far as my children are concerned, my major resolution concerns celebrating more fully the liturgical year and the feast days of the Church and becoming a more prayerful family. I see this taking several forms:

1_ Using both the picture books from Catholic Mosaic and activities from A Year with God: Celebrating the Liturgical Year, I hope to show my children the richness of the liturgical year and the life of the saints.

2_ Today I started making a calendar with some of the feast days from January using pictures and information I gathered at Catholic Culture. Also included on the calendar are the anniversaries of my family’s sacraments of initiation (Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation). I want to make these anniversaries into days of celebration. In addition, I have each box of the calendar marked with the color that corresponds to the liturgical season (say that last sentence 5 times fast - it’s quite a tongue twister!!! LOL)

3_ All my children have names that can at least loosely be associated with a saint. I am planning to have Name Day celebrations to celebrate the life of the saint with whom my children share a name. I am the only one with a name that isn’t even remotely associated with a saint (Heather). Any suggestions would be appreciated.

4_ Also I randomly (using our Christmas cards) picked a family to pray for each day. I put their names on the calendar as well.

I had been sort of waiting for the perfect idea to come to me regarding how to put together this calendar. However, I decided that even a flawed attempt was better than none at all. So I purchased a large calendar at Staples and jumped in. I am sure that this year’s calendar will help me to figure out that perfect calendar for next year - perhaps one that be able to be used from year to year - something more durable that can easily be adjusted to accommodate the changes in the church calendar from year to year.

A special thank you to Katherine at A Living Education whose post on Liturgical Wheels and Calendars inspired me.

I GET MANY PEOPLE FROM THE REAL LEARNING FORUMS CHECKING OUT THIS POST. IF YOU WILL CHECK OUT THIS POST, YOU WILL SEE THAT I IMPROVED THIS IDEA TO MAKE IT REUSABLE.

I can not adequately express the excitement my children and I felt as we drove in the pouring rain yesterday to meet Alice of Cottage Blessings and her family.  We were not disappointed!!!  Alice and her children put on a wonderfully meaningful Guadalupe Tea which helped us to visualize through food the events of Juan Diego’s life and his encounters with the Lady of Guadalupe. 

As Alice mentioned in her blog, we also created St. Lucy ornaments in honor of St. Lucy’s Day. (We are in the process of migrating to a new computer - so I will post my pictures as soon as I am able - you can see photos in Alice’s photo album).  These ornaments were inspired by Dawn’s post at O Night Divine.

It was great to meet the woman who has so deeply inspired me with her creativity and vision for her family over these last few months (I am new to the blogging world).  Her children are just as lovely as you would imagine from her blog.  AND they were all very forgiving of my cranky and inquisitive  2 year old.  God is good!!!

Well we completed the first of our projects for Advent.  This beautiful Advent Wreath (see 10/15 entry) was lovingly created by my three oldest children (Hope -14, Lenny -almost 11, & Lily - 6).  When I told Hope that we were going to do the project, she declared “I love unschooling!!!!”.  While we are not unschoolers, I have been trying to embrace the things I’ve been learning in Elizabeth Foss’ book, Real Learning and become more of a “Relaxed Homeschooler”.  Apparently, Hope is enjoying my transformation from rigid to relaxed.

P.S. My daughter Lily is dressed in last year’s sheep costume for the Christmas Nativity play at church.  I’ve been asked to make a new one for this year’s tableau - one that doesn’t have packing peanuts attached to it (not my creation).