Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Happy 3rd Birthday Luke

 My dearest Luke,

Three years old!  How did we get here so fast!  This year your little personality grew and grew into a spunky little boy!  You are filled with energy and you LOVE to laugh.  You are very thoughtful, caring and always want to cuddle.  You bring so much joy to our entire family and we are so blessed to have you in our lives.

You adore summer time!  You would live in the water if you could and when you are not swimming, or boating you want to be at the park!  This year you have started finding your own interests instead of just following your brothers around all of the time.


 
You jumped right in with our homeschooling as you do not want to be left behind in anything.  You are such a good little boy and love to participate with crafts, songs, story time and when your big brothers are doing more formalized work you will play with blocks, puzzles or trains.  You already know all of your letters, letter sounds, colors, shapes, and you are learning all of the days of the week/months of the year and weather always helping us out with our morning board.  You repeat everything and gain information so quickly.  While coloring the other week you wrote an "L" all by yourself with no prompting and no help and said "L is for LUKE!"   Your other favorite thing to do would be to cuddle up and read books.  Your favorite books are "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie", "We're Going on A Bear Hunt" and Pete the Cat. 
 


 
 
This fall we spent our days at the pumpkin patch, picking apples, riding our bikes and getting prepared for little Peter to be born.  You were Woody for Halloween and love playing Toy Story with your brothers. 


 
 
Winter time came and we still could not reel in your energy.  You would play outside for hours and when it was too cold to play outside we would bring the fun inside!  We went skiing this year and you tried to ski for the first time.  What you really loved was the chair lift, and you would have much preferred if you just could have rode the chair lift around and around again without the actual skiing down the mountain!


 
 
You love Jesus.  You are truly our little priest.  It is common that the first thing that you put on in the morning is one of your little priest vestments and you usually take one to bed with you as well.  You also already know what liturgical color you should be wearing based on what liturgical season we are celebrating!  You play Mass all of the time and are always so particular about how you set everything up on your altar.  You know all of the words and will stand there saying "My ciborium goes here, the chalice goes here, my cruets go here, etc."  You walk around our house singing "Jesus Christ is Risen Today", "Alleluia" or songs that your brothers teach you from Catechesis of the Good Shepard.  You love learning about all of the stories about Jesus and all of the Saints.  Your favorite saint is St. Luke and whenever there is a reading from the Gospel of St Luke you exclaim "St Luke was a doctor!" 
 

 
 

You LOVE your Bobie, which is what you named your little bike/scooter.  Some days it seems like it might simply be attached at your hip!  You can ride it all around the bike trail near our house and play races with it all of the time.  You have started to learn how to ride a real bike, but you still much prefer Bobie!


Your brothers are your very best friends.  You have such special relationships with all of them and play a very important role in each of their lives.  Ryan is your role model, you look up to him and everything that he does.  You love when Ryan reads you stories and plays army with you.  This year you and Connor have truly started to play together cooperatively.  Your imaginative play is adorable and we will commonly find the two of you on your own adventures.  You are incredibly protective of Peter.  You love him SO much that often we find you just SQUEEZING him!  You make Peter laugh so much and have been such a big helper learning how to feed Peter, sing him songs and read him stories.  You told us this year that you want us to have 100 boys in our family!

 



 
My darling Luke, I cannot wait to see what this next year brings to you and how you continue to grow and change.  I love you so much and am so blessed to be your Momma!  Happy 3rd Birthday Luke!

Love,
Mommy



 
 
Monday, May 30, 2016

Feast of Corpus Christi

 
We celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday (in the United States the feast day is transferred to the next Sunday).  On this feast we celebrate the institution of the Holy Eucharist.  It is a great time to help our children understand the true presence of Jesus at the Sacrifice of the Mass and in the Tabernacle. 
 
To celebrate this feast on Thursday we did the craft and activity in Seton Art 1, where we cut out a Tabernacle and when you open the doors there was an image of Jesus in the Eucharist!  It really helped the children visualize Jesus' true presence in the Eucharist within the tabernacle.
 




 
Then on Sunday we participated in the Corpus Christi Procession in our city.  It was a 1.4mile procession from the church that my husband and I were married at to a church downtown in our city.  Our kids were SO excited when the procession began and they saw Jesus in the Monstrance and were so proud to walk with Jesus.  It was such a wonderful and profound way to show the beauty and significance of Jesus within the Catholic Church to those in our community.
 
It was hot, there were a few tears from little ones by the end, but Jesus was there, so it was all ok!  Happy Feast of Corpus Christi!
 







Friday, May 27, 2016

What We've Been Reading - May 2016


"What We've Been Reading" is a series here at Children of the Church to both keep track of what we are reading and to share with others what we have been reading in our home.  Reading is such an important part of our daily lives and also our homeschooling journey.  Thank you for following along and please feel free to share what you have been reading as well so we can all learn together!

May 2016

Children's Book List (Our children are 6 years, 4 years, 2 years old, baby):
  • Chapter Books
    • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
  • Children's Stories
    • A Rose in My Garden by Lobel Arnold
    • Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes
    • The Blessings and the Beasts by Ethel Pochocki
    • Maybelle The Cable Car by Virgina Lee Burton
    • Herbert Hated Being SMall by Karla Kuskin
    • The Emperor's New Clothes by H.C. Andersen
    • The Star Spangled Banner by Peter Spier
    • The Rag Coat by Laruen Mills
    • Little Toot by Hardie Gramatky
    • The Little Island by Margaret Wise Brown
    • Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say
    • The Caboose Who Got Loose by Bill Peet
    • The Bears on Hemlock Mountain by Alice Dalgliesh
    • The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh
    • The Emperor and the Kite by Jane Yolen
    • My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett
    • O Say Can You Seed?  by Bonnie Worth
    • Oh, The Things They Invented! by Bonnie Worth
    • Once Upon A Mastodon by Bonnie Worth
    • Where Do Garbage Trucks Go?  by Benjamin Richmond
    • The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson
    • A Pair of Red Clogs by Masako Matsuno
    • Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews
    • Who Owns the Sun? by Stacy Chbosky
    • Ten Boys Who Didn't Give In by Irene Howat
    • McBroom and the Big Wind by Sid Fleischman
    • The Little Red Hen by Paul Galdone
  • Catholic Mosaic Books
    •  Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue by Joan Andrews Bell and Susan Andrews Brindle
    • The Weight of a Mass by Josephine Nobisso
    • The Caterpillar that Came to Church by Susan Andrews Brindle
    • Pascual and the Kitchen Angels by Tomie dePaola
    • The Boy Who Became Pope by Fabiola Garza
    • The Twelve Apostles by Marianna Mayer
  • Homeschooling Books (which our 6 year old reads aloud during structured school time)
My Book List:
Thursday, May 26, 2016

Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real


Linking up with (Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real) for the first time today to share with you some ordinary moments from our week.
 
Pretty

Our garden and flowers all around are full in bloom and it is truly beautiful!



Happy

I am going to be a Spiritual Mom for a Seminarian at The Institute for Priestly Formation this summer.  I think that it is so important to pray for vocations; for myself, my husband, our children and others.  When I attended Creighton University for my undergraduate education I had the opportunity to get to know many Seminarians during my summers there.  Now years later, having four sons of my own I see the significance and true importance of praying for these young men and their learning and discernment.   

As their program is beginning the spiritual moms had an hour of Eucharistic Adoration to pray for the Seminarians.  Afterwards my little one and I went to the prayer gardens for some quiet reflection time and it made me truly happy.  That garden is where my husband and I first saw each other on our wedding day almost 9 years ago when we were choosing our vocation as husband and wife. 




Funny

The kids set up their first lemonade sale this past weekend.  It was adorable and hilarious and truly a treat!



Real

Our 4 1/2 year old had been crankier than typical and finding a way to bother someone in the house every 10 minutes or so.  When I had not heard from him in over 20 minutes I went upstairs to see if he was looking at books in his room (one of his favorite past times) and I found him sound asleep (and he stopped napping over 6 months ago). 
 
 
Later that night, I was putting the baby to bed and asked the big boys to find something quiet to do.  I expected that they would go downstairs and play for awhile, but when I came out of the nursery I found them all together on the top bunk bed with our 6 year old reading them a bedtime story.  These real moments are the ones I will want to treasure and remember!
 
Monday, May 23, 2016

Trinity Sunday

We celebrate Trinity Sunday the Sunday after Pentecost and remember this day the gift and mystery of the Holy Trinity.  We did a quick craft from Seton Art 1 and prayed a prayer together!  Quick, easy, liturgical living!

 

Organizing Our Children's School Work

 
As we are finishing our second year of homeschooling, I quickly realized that we needed an effective way to sort and organize our paperwork before it got out of control!  With homeschooling I want to keep a lot of our workbooks to show proof of our work for the state if needed, but I also want to keep some of the cute art projects, letters that the children wrote, etc.  Here is what we did to organize all of the children's school work!
 
Throughout the year I use these Keepsake Portfolio's from Lakeshore Learning that my mother in law got and personalized for each of our children.  They are huge and are like big file folders to separate papers/art work by year or by subject!  Each child has their own Keepsake Portfolio that I keep in our school room so I can conveniently just throw things in all of the time as we go!  This makes it really easy to not feel like I am constantly trying to choose what I want to keep or organize it.  Just throw it in and go!
 
 
Also, after each of their birthdays I take all of the cards that they received and put them in a ziplock bag and label them with their name and the number of their birthday.  These ziplocks with cards also go into their bins with each corresponding year!
 

At the end of the traditional school year, I will go through and make two files for the year to go in their personal bins.  One file I include my Teacher's Plan Book for the year with all of their lesson plans as well as all of their completed workbooks.  The second file for the year includes the best of their art projects, letters and fun stuff.  Going through their Keepsake Portfolio I only keep the best/cutest/most important projects for the year so that it does not get too overwhelming. 

 
Each of them have a clear plastic file bin so that I can easily see the labeling and stackable for easy storage.  Even though our little ones do not really have paperwork yet I wanted to make sure that they all have a similar system so I made them each bins now for consistency!  It feels great to have this project done for the year and ready to continue for many years in the future.
 
 
I got this awesome idea over at Team Whitaker and printed the labels over at IHeartOrganizing!  Check them out for more ideas!