Celebrating the Ascension

Well, I am getting around to putting these pictures up now... we celebrated the Ascension on Thursday of last week and continued on into Friday! Then we heard the readings for the Ascension on Sunday at Mass.

On Thursday, the girls made pictures much like Caroline did last year. They painted "clouds" with white poster paint on blue construction paper.

As with any art project, Cecilia really got into it for a two year old!

Caroline made her clouds a bit more cloud-like. She is also getting into making her own artistic creations lately, drawing and cutting and taping things together... most recently, she made a pinata out of paper and yarn for her little barn animals, and she taped chicken feathers to a pen so that she could be like "Fancy Nancy," a book character.

Then we glued an image of the Ascension in the middle of each painting. We hung them in the dining room.

On Friday, we planned to go to the park to meet friends and play before having an Ascension picnic for lunch. However, one family was sick, and the others had things come up, so we went on our own. On the menu for our easy Ascension picnic:

Cloud-shaped sandwiches. I just cut out the clouds freehand as shown above. A cookie cutter would be even easier (and might look better, too! ;).

Fluffy, white (er, light brown) clouds, since Jesus appeared to be rising up into the clouds

Then we had some cheese shaped like birds - it is traditional in some countries to eat some sort of bird on the Feast of the Ascension because Jesus "flew" to Heaven. I did use a cookie cutter for these (and you may see this shape reappear as a dove-shaped cookie at Pentecost this Sunday!).

We stopped at Kroger on the way to get some milk since we were out, so I thought we'd also see how much a couple helium balloons would cost. It turns out that they will give you helium balloons with the Kroger logo on them for free, so we got two of them! Then, the milk safely in one of those special "stays cold for three hours" bags, we headed to the park!

I think I may have mentioned before in another post that my Catholic elementary school used to celebrate Ascension Thursday each year by having a balloon release. All the kids would release balloons all together to symbolize Jesus rising up toward Heaven. We wrote prayers and notes on notecards and attached them to the balloon strings. I think we even wrote our addresses in the hopes that somebody would find our balloon and write to let us know! It was always lots of fun, I thought. A few weeks ago, I told Caroline the story of how we used to do this, and she wanted to do it as well. We hadn't planned to originally, because of having lots of little ones there (balloons are really unsafe around toddlers who might put a popped piece into their mouths... and I thought that some of them might get really upset at having to let their balloons go!).

This Ascension Thursday balloon release sponsored by Kroger

Watching the balloons drift higher and higher... you should have heard the giggles of excitement!

Cecilia looks worried in this picture, but she really wasn't. She is relatively laid back about this kind of thing... she actually had a balloon at a local event the weekend before this, and when it bumped against something and popped, Caroline was more distressed than she was! She kept saying that we could get an airplane and fly up to the balloons, though! I was surprised that caroline wanted to do this in the first place... she is usually very sensitive (once she cried and complained for a half hour after a balloon broke, insisting that I could just make another on magically reappear... and that was only a month ago!). I guess she was okay with it because she knew what the plan was for the balloons from the beginning.

And I thought I would share this photo of Cecilia's dirt-covered face while we ate lunch. The kids played hard!! We did end up running into two families there who we knew, and we all had lunch together.

We had a fun time celebrating the Ascension, and now I hope no environmentalists blast me for letting two balloons go on purpose! ;)