Celebrating Presidents' Day

On the third Monday in February we celebrate Presidents' Day in the United States.  It started as celebrating George Washington's birthday (which is actually February 22nd), and President Nixon started calling the holiday "Presidents' Day to honor all past presidents!

 

Our children LOVE to learn about United States history and with that comes the love of our Presidents.  Even our two year old can recognize presidents like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and a few more.  To celebrate President's Day this year we plan to do a few fun things for learning and enjoyment!

 

First, as always is reading fun books about Presidents!

 

The Big Book of US Presidents by Todd Davis

Our Countries Presidents by Ann Bausum

A Picture Book of Benjamin Franklin by David A. Alder

Let's Split Logs, Abe Lincoln by Peter and Connie Roop

Let's Play Soldier, George Washington by Peter and Connie Roop

 

 

Being in a year when we are electing a new President all of our children have been following along to some degree with some of the Candidates.  You can tell when marketing and commercials is good when our two year old will say "These Hands" while holding up his hands after seeing the commercial for Ben Carson!  We found this great resource on Kids.USA.Gov on with a poster and lesson plans of How to Become President of the United States!  There is also lots of additional information on this website all about U.S. Presidents!

 

 

For some learning fun we got and put together a 3D puzzle of the White House from Kids Authority!  This was a lot of fun to work on and really cool to see when it was completed! 

 

 

If you are looking for games to play, here is a fun game called Presidential Portraits!

 

We also LOVE to watch this song about all of the U.S. Presidents.  Our 6 year old is trying to learn it to memorize all of the U.S. Presidents in order!

 

 

One of my items on our homeschooling Wishlist for quite some time has been the US President Blocks from Uncle Goose.   These would be perfect for celebrating President's Day and to help learning about the U.S. Presidents!  They look like such an awesome learning toy and also a really special statement piece for any home! 

US President Blocks

Humbled by my Little Valentines

 

I am so humbled today by my little valentines.  We went to mass this morning to celebrate the first Sunday of Lent.  Each week after mass our little ones love to go to the Adoration Chapel to say a quick prayer to Jesus.  After that we picked up some fun Valentine's Day donuts, went home and opened fun Valentine's Day presents from their grandparents!

 

 

 

Later in the day we read Saint Valentine by Robert Sabuda and did the activities in Catholic Mosaic.  We were learning about how Saints like Saint Valentine were imprisoned and sometimes even killed just because they believed in God.  Our six year old has certainly heard of this before, but he was just so shocked by this today.  He said "Mommy, that just does not make any sense!  Why doesn't EVERYONE love God?  Jesus is MY favorite Valentine!" 

 

My husband was working today, and after I had dinner with my little men I could tell our six year old was still deep in thought.  "Mommy, can we go to the prayer chapel at church?  I just really want Jesus to know how much I love Him.  I want Him to be my Valentine"  Be still my heart! 

So we all piled up in the van and drove to church.  This morning he had asked if we could light a candle for our little Saint Samuel, but I had not brought any money with me, so I told him we would light a candle later.  Well tonight on his own doing he brought $5 of his own birthday money to light a candle for our little baby!  We then about 10 minutes in the adoration chapel tell Jesus how much we love him.  After that we walked around church for a while.  There is something about being there at night that is so peaceful. 

 

The thing is, as I have been having my prayer and devotion time during Lent I have been praying for God to help me dedicate more of myself to Him.  I have praying to help me set aside the hustle and bustle of life and to focus on Him.  To love Him.  To give myself to Him.  And then, here is my six year old wanting for Jesus to be his Valentine.  Here is his little heart so freely and willingly giving his love to Jesus. 

 

We came home and prayed our daily Rosary with our Holy Hero CD.  We were all cuddled up in our kids bed together mediating with the Sorrowful Mysteries.  With two little ones under my arms I looked over and saw our 4 year old sound asleep.  He is usually our child who has energy right to the very last second of his day.  Yet here, with the gentle flow of prayers he drifted softly to sleep.  God's love truly carried us through this day and our children continue to teach me that putting God's love first is really the most important thing. I am truly humbled by my Little Valentines. 

Our First Week of Lent -2016

 

 

Lent is here!  I feel like it always comes up so quickly after Christmas and a short few weeks of celebrating Ordinary Time.  Here is what we were up to this week preparing ourselves and our home for Lent!

 

Also, to see what we are doing for Lent this year read about Our Lenten Plans and My Lenten Reading!

 

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Collop Monday

Celebrating the last opportunity to eat meat before Ash Wednesday with the tradition of thick cut bacon!  Yum!

 

 

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Shrove Tuesday 

Our kids LOVE "pancake day" and the treat of eating pancakes during a different meal other than breakfast.  We had pancakes for lunch and also celebrated with a Kings Cake!  They loved learning the history of the kings cake being from the Three Wisemen Caspar, Melichoir and Balthasar, being in an oval shape a crown and decorated with the colors of green for FAITH, yellow for POWER, and purple for JUSTICE.  Luke found the Baby Jesus hidden in his piece of Kings Cake today and was so thrilled to be the lucky one!

 

 

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Lent in Our Home

I am so thrilled to be adding the Cradle to Cross wreath as a part of our Lenten and Advent traditions in our home.  It is a beautiful hand made wooden wreath also includes wooden cutouts of Mary riding a donkey for Advent and Jesus carrying the cross for Lent.  There are extensions to create it different amounts of days to celebrate the different seasons! 

 

 

Also, right when you walk in our home we set up our front hall table with items to remind us of Lent.  We included the beautiful printable from Kendra at Catholic All Year, which says:

 

We can think of Lent as a time to eradicate evil or cultivate virtue; a time to pull up weeds or plant good seeds.  Which is better is clear for the Christian ideal is always positive rather than negative.  -Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

 

We also have our Sacrifice Beans with the printable from Lacy at Catholic Icing.  Along with those we also have a purple candle, a crown of thorns and an image of the Last Supper.  All beautiful items to remind us of Lent.

One of our favorite Lenten activities continues to be the Lent Calendar from Catholic Icing!  It is such a simple and basic activity but our kids love the visual of Easter approaching!  We have it laminated and on our magnetic board right by our kitchen table.  Our children love to move the magnet each day as we approach Easter Sunday.

Finally we set up our Stations of the Cross in our Little Oratory!  Find all about how we set this up HERE! 

 

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Burying the Alleluia

We do not say or sing the word Alleluia (Praise God) all throughout the season of Lent.  To remind of us of this change we "bury" Alleluia!  We got wooden letters spelling Alleluia and a wooden box that we keep them in throughout Lent.  Then on Easter morning and during the 50 days of Easter we will display them in our home!

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Ash Wednesday

Our little guys LOVE Ash Wednesday mass because they feel like they can really participate by receiving the sacramental of the ashes!  It was another solo mass for me with 4 little ones, but they did well.  I need to remind myself that little ones have the wiggles sometimes and that I need to give myself (and them) some grace.  After mass I had a handful of people come up to me and comment how well my boys did, tell stories of when they were taking their little ones to mass years ago (one lovely lady was telling me of her days of 6 boys all within 8 years!), and even one woman who said she teared up when our 4 year old said "I love you Jesus" during the Eucharistic prayer!  I need to remember how nice and comforting it is to hear those kind words and always pass on words of encouragement to other parents!

 

 

The ashes should not be a badge of holiness, but a way to admit our weaknesses and our need for God's grace in our lives. - Archbishop Joseph Kurtz
 

I also LOVED this video from Ascension Press, especially the quote that:

"The ashes mean that I am a sinner,

the cross means that I have a Savior!" 

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St. Scholastica

I feel like I can say it again and again, but Catholic Mosaic is truly a favorite resource in our house.  It has introduced us to such wonderful literature, fantastic Saints and lots of hours cuddling together reading and having fun!  February 10th is the feast of St. Scholastica so we read The Holy Twins by Kathleen Norris and Tomie dePaola.  We loved this great story and the fun discussion questions that followed!  Such a perfect way to spend 20 minutes after school/nap time together with the kids!

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Our Lady of Lourdes

On February 11th, we celebrated the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.  We used Seton's Art 1 book to make a fun Grotto with Mary and then watched the CCC movie Bernadette the Princess of Lourdes! 

 

My Lenten Reading - 2016

Reading continues to be a big part of my daily life and a true way for me to "escape" and relax!  I am so excited about what I have planned for my prayer, reflection and reading time during Lent this year.

1.  Blessed is She Lent Devotional Workbook and Stations of the Cross:

I have used the Blessed is She resources for a few years now to enhance my prayer time and reflection and they are simply wonderful!  This year's Lent Devotional includes goal setting each week of Lent, reflections to help pray through the week, information about Saints, the daily readings and journal space for reflection and tracking Lenten sacrifices and goals.

Plus, after loving the Blessed is She Jesse Tree Devotional Cards this Advent I am so excited for their Stations of the Cross Cards this Lent!

 

2.  Eucharistic Adoration and Relics from the Crucifixion

Since my Lenten Prayer Goal this year is to spend an hour a week in Eucharistic Adoration I am really excited to start reading Eucharistic Adoration:  Holy Hour Meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ by Charles Murphy.  This book profiles seven Catholics who are models of Eucharistic devotion and also guides you in creative prayer!  I cannot wait to dive in deeper!

Relics from the Crucifixion by J. Charles Wall is a new book that discussed where the Relics from the Crucifixion of Jesus went and how they got there!  I think it is the perfect book to read as I meditate on the Crucifixion of Christ and how it has changed our world and my life.

 

3.  Hail, Holy Queen

I am participating in the online study for The Bible and the Virgin Mary this Lent offered by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.  Along with this study they recommend reading Hail, Holy Queen the Mother of God in the Word of God by Scott Hahn.

 

 

If you want more ideas for Lenten Readings check out My Lenten Reading List 2015

Celebrating St. Apollonia

Image Source

Today, February 9th, we celebrate the feast day of St. Apollonia.  St. Apollonia died in the year 249 and was martyred for not renouncing her faith.  A famous story about St. Apollonia is that she had all of her teeth knocked out after being hit in the face by a Christian persecutor.  Because of this experience St. Apollonia is now the patron Saint of all things "teeth" and art often depicts St. Apollonia with pincers holding a tooth!

 

We are excited to celebrate St. Apollonia a big way in our home this year since our oldest son just lost his very first tooth this last week!  As parents we have decided that we do not celebrate Santa Clause (outside of St. Nicholas), or the Easter Bunny so we also thought it was a little silly to start celebrating the Tooth Fairy.  But, we still wanted to do something fun to celebrate the big step of losing baby teeth!  The hero of the day was St. Apollonia, and just as we celebrate St. Nicholas's feast day and give gifts we are introducing our family to St. Apollonia as they lose their teeth!  We got this great idea from Joel and Lisa Schmidt at The Practicing Catholic!

 

Once our little guy's tooth fell out he put it in his new St. Apollonia pillow and in the morning received a little coin in the morning! 

 

 

 

He also really wanted a way to keep his teeth and so he helped us find this fun Tooth Box as a keepsake.  We like that there is a place to record when he lost of all his different teeth as well!



St Apollonia, Pray for Us!

Our Lenten Plans

I love the flow of the liturgical year in the Catholic Church and might even say that I LOVE Lent.  I really enjoy having a time of the year where we are asked to reflect, reboot and restart.  Really, when you think about it we are calling to meet Jesus at the Cross and try to be a little bit more like Him.  He suffered for us, he loves us, he loves others.  This is the time for us to do a little bit of suffering to build a more perfect relationship with Him, create the best version of ourselves and love those around us!

This is where the acts of Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving comes into play during Lent.  We are asked to spend time in prayer to deepen our relationship with God and love Him more.  We are asked to fast, and meet Jesus at the Cross with our own little sufferings.  We are called to Give Alms and look outside of ourselves to give to others. 

After some prayer and discernment we have decided what our lesson plans are for this year!

1.  Prayer:

Individual: 

I love Eucharistic Adoration but I have never made an hour of Adoration a regular part of my life.  We very commonly go to the Adoration Chapel at our Church, but I am usually with all of the children and we spend 10-15 minutes there together in prayer.  While I adore that our children ASK to go to Adoration and I love having this experience with them I know that God is asking me for more. 

I plan on starting to have one hour of Eucharistic Adoration a week during Lent.  Because of my husband's variable schedule as a ER Physician (his shifts constantly change days and hours of the day) it is difficult to find a regular time each week where I can sneak away from our children.  Thankfully, we have worked together to find time for all of the weeks of Lent to start this goal of mine.

Couple:

I have gotten pretty good at praying FOR my husband, but I am not always very successful at praying WITH my husband.  Again, I use that variable work schedule of his as an excuse of why it is "too hard" to find the time each day, but how silly does that sound!  It is "too hard" to find 10 minutes to pray with my spouse?  No more, even if it is 2 minutes a day, our goal is to pray WITH each other.

Family:

Last year we started praying the Stations of the Cross as a family during Lent.  It was a beautiful experience and we all learned a lot and gained many graces!  We would pray in Our Little Oratory, at our Parish or other places around the community.  We plan on continuing this practice this year on Fridays.

In addition we are going to pray the Rosary together daily.  We get in good patterns where we pray the Rosary together and then life "gets in the way" and we stop.  Or, commonly we will pray a decade a day and call it good!  This Lent we are going to try to pray the full Rosary together daily.  We can use the Holy Hero CD's or just pray it on our own!

 

See what we did for Prayer Last Year HERE!

2.  Fasting:

Deciding on something to "give up" for Lent and to fast from beyond Meat on Fridays, etc is always the most difficult part of Lent for me.  I loved listening to the Carrots for Michaelmas Podcast with Meg Hunter-Kilmer about Getting Inspired for Lent.  She spoke about how Jesus fell three times, and it is ok for us to fall as well, as long as we get back up!  She also spoke of asking your community to help decide what to give up for Lent, so that is what I did!  I did the scary thing of asking my husband and children what to give up and got the response I needed.  It was hard to hear, but made it obvious what God and my family were asking me to do.

I am giving up my phone!  Now, obviously I am going to continue to use my phone to communicate with people when needed, but other than using it to answer or make a phone call or the occasional needed text message I am going to keep my phone in it's charger in our kitchen.  No more browsing Facebook, or Amazon, reading blog posts, listening to Podcasts, etc.  When I am with my husband, children, family and friends I want to be truly present with them.  I am going to let myself check my e-mail/Facebook once or twice a day on my computer, but simply going to be significantly more mindful of my time and get off my phone!

 

See what we did for Fasting Last Year HERE!

3. Almsgiving:

This year we are making an Almsgiving Box for our home where we will place an item of food, money or a household item (clothing ,toys, etc) each day.  Then at the end of Lent we will donate everything in our box to those in need!

We just took an old diaper box, decorated it in pretty wrapping paper and used quotes about giving alms from Catholic Icing!

See what we did for Almsgiving Last Year HERE!