Back to School and the Feast of St. Anne

Apologies for not posting anything in so long!!  I have Zoo Atlanta photos to share from over a month ago... hope to get to those eventually!  But in the meantime, here's what we have been up to in the past two weeks.    Caroline began second grade - here she is on the first day of school, which was July 23rd.  We got a bit of an early start so we can take our time when needed throughout the year.  I'm about to find out how homeschooling with a toddler in the house goes!

We are really excited that this is a big sacramental prep year for Caroline... she will make her First Reconciliation at the end of January, and her First Communion in May!  We had a special treat to kick off the preparations and learning she'll be doing about these sacraments this year.

I found this idea on Catholic Icing... we cut the ends off large marshmallows and frosted a cross on each one and then stuck them on some sugar cookies we made.  The marshmallows represent the host, and of course I made sure that the girls - Cecilia, mostly, as Caroline would not confuse this - understood that this was NOT the actual host and they were not consecrated - they are just to be a symbol of the Eucharist to celebrate Caroline's beginning of her sacramental preparation.

They ate their snack with milk while I read to them from St. Patrick's Summer, which is one of the chapter books we're using in our in-depth, fun sacramental prep curriculum.  I have had so much fun putting together our religion materials this year!

Caroline will be putting together a First Communion notebook this year... here she is creating a cover for it using special stickers she picked out from the craft store.  I hope this will help make the preparation meaningful and enjoyable, and then she will have a keepsake book to share with guests on her First Communion day and to look back at over the years to come!

The following week, we celebrated St. Anne's feast day.  St. Anne was the mother of Mary, and traditionally she is pictured wearing red and green.  We made some red and green watermelon treats for the day: a watermelon sherbet pie and a watermelon drink garnished with mint.

I don't like to use artificial colors, so I was excited to find a simple watermelon drink recipe with just the natural coloring from the melon.  The sherbet, of course, is artificially colored, but after I made it, I was struck with a great idea for next year: use natural strawberry and pistachio ice creams for the green and red!!  

Mmmm...

Caroline shows her new St. Anne card - they always get a holy card on their name days.  Caroline's middle name has the name "Ann" in it.  July 26th is also St. Joachim's feast day (Mary's father), but we focus on Anne since it's Caroline's name day.

Cecilia enjoying her snack

One other thing we've done recently... we made a "Fishers of Men" craft for St. James's feast day, since he was one of the apostles who was a fisherman prior to being called by Jesus.  I gave the girls some construction paper and let them be pretty free with their design: I instructed them to sketch a boat shape and cut it out, to cut out dark blue paper to look like waves, and then to cut a mast and sail.  Actually, I think I cut the sails, now that I think about it...

Then they glued it all down to make a boat scene.  they drew apostles on the boat and fish in the water, and then we attached nets: pieces of a mesh bag that had onions in it.

Here's Caroline's... she opted for two small nets and copied her own Bible verse.

And here's Cecilia's... she chose to have one very large net!

The Feast of St. Anne

Caroline's "nameday" saint, St. Anne, mother of Mary, calls for a special celebration... we celebrated this way last year as well, so I think it is becoming a tradition! St. Anne is typically pictured wearing red and green, and her feast day falls in the summer, so we have watermelon-themed refreshments!

Caroline helped me roll the cookies in frosting to make the green rind. And, while I hate to admit it, fancy all-natural food coloring just kinda stinks. I actually had to add a little of the nasty fake red stuff to make the cookies turn slightly pinkish! Maybe because it was whole wheat flour, thus already brown... regardless, the raw dough looked like raw hamburger meat. Sorry if anyone was trying to eat while reading that just now...

Anyway, they tasted great! I can't find the link and am too lazy to get up and find the paper onto which I printed the recipe, but they had honey in them instead of sugar. We also had our watermelon "smoothies," as the girls call them, which is watermelon lemonade with mint... refreshing in this heat!

Caroline also got a new St. Anne holy card, as usual. Next year, I think she will get a St. Anne medal and a chain to wear it on... shh, don't tell her! ;)

On the Feast of St. Cecilia

Happy nameday to our little Cecilia!

She got a new St. Cecilia holy card that you see in the above photo... and the girls each colored this picture of St. Cecilia and her husband Valerian (I assume that is who it is supposed to be in the picture). Otherwise, we had leftover Christ the King crown cake to celebrate (pictures to come at some point, maybe...).

Celebrating the Feast of St. Anne

On Monday, the Church celebrated the feast day of the parents of the Virgin Mary, Saints Joachim and Anne. We have been trying to celebrate this day especially the past couple of years ever since I came across the idea for celebrating "namedays" for the children; that is, celebrating on the feast day of the patron saint of the child. We chose St. Anne as Caroline's patron because her middle name contains "Ann," and before I even really noticed that, Caroline already had chosen St. Anne as one of her favorite saints.

We started the day with a new St. Anne holy card at Caroline's spot at breakfast. Then, we prepared some snacks to share with friends who were coming over in the afternoon!

Making watermelon lemonade... which Caroline calls "watermelon smoothies." We got the idea for the watermelon theme from Catholic Cuisine, suggesting to use a watermelon theme for the feast of St. Anne since it falls during the summer and traditionally, she is portrayed as wearing red and green clothing.

I forgot to take photos of the girls rolling and cutting the dough and putting on chocolate chips, but here they are with a batch of cookies about to go into the oven. They look kind of ladybug-like before the green frosting! We used a box of organic sugar cookie dough mix and then ruined the nutritional quality of it by adding red food coloring... still wanting to get some all natural food dyes, because that would encourage me to do more fun baking projects like this one.

The girls were able to do the green frosting for the rind almost completely on their own... they just had to dip the rounded side of each cookie and rock it back and forth a bit, and then I scraped off excess frosting and set them on a platter. I would recommend putting them on a cooling rack or wax paper first, because they stuck to the platter since the frosting was wet...

Completed cookies! And as a random side note (because that is how I write, as you may have noticed!), see the bags on the counter in the background? Those are full of figs. Our fig tree is going nuts right now... we have one or two of those bags full of figs each day, and that doesn't include the ones that are on the top of the tree where we cannot reach to pick them...

I found the watermelon plates on clearance at Tuesday Morning a month or so ago and thought of them for this purpose... and I remembered them too, yay! Sometimes buying way in advance means I will just forget about it by the time the day rolls around... But I love Tuesday Morning - what a fun store. I love the song, too... I always think of it when I go to that store! Just another random tangent thought for ya... ;)

We were going to have 15 children in all, between the ages of 1 and 8! So, with that wide range in mind, I tried to come up with some activities that could appeal to at least most of the older ones... but it turns out that even the two year olds got interested in the crafts a bit! I got the coloring sheets of St. Anne from Waltzing Matilda - she has all kinds of hand-drawn saint coloring pages available for free! I also laid out supplies to be used for making St. Anne holy cards: cardstock, images of St. Anne found online, copies of short St. Anne prayers, glue sticks, markers, glitter, scissors, and colored pencils. My almost four years of elementary school teaching paid off with the scissors... I have a stash of about eight pairs of kid scissors from kids in my classes who lost theirs and never claimed them!

Here's a sample holy card I made so the kids could get an idea of what to do. I figured out how to put two images side-by-side in Blogger, and it wasn't even hard to do - yay!

Cecilia was the first at the craft table... is abnormally into arts and crafts for a two year old, but hey, I'll take it! I loved this kind of stuff as a kid, so maybe I passed that down to her. She just has such early pencil control, completely on her own with no "here, hold the pencil like this" from any adults... a correct pencil grip has always come naturally to her - so strange!

We had four families over besides our own. Here are several kids working at the big table... I love the looks of concentration! ;)

We had stuff on the small table too, so we could have more space. I was a bit concerned that with the age spread we might have some issues with a lack of age-appropriate toys, so I wanted to be sure to have the crafts on hand... but the kids played so well together, having fun with all ages mixed up, even with limited toys (I have a new toy policy with less toys out at a time, and maybe one day I'll get around to sharing that...). Less is more, right?

Working around the little table some more... you can see that we are severely unbalanced in terms of gender: mostly girls among our Catholic friends! And we also invited another family with three children, all girls, who weren't able to come. So out of 20 kids, only four are boys!!!

Seeing this photo reminds me of that sippy cup that was left here after the get-together... anyone want to claim it?

Caroline with a completed holy card

Cecilia, back at work again

The snacks - the other families brought pretzels and lots of fruit with a yogurt dip!

Yum!! We had lost of fun having so many friends over at once! The kids get to play while the adults got to chat - at least a little, in between monitoring the kids!

Here are the girls after everyone left - just before a HUGE thunderstorm! - showing their finished craft projects.

Thanks to all our friends for coming - we'll have to do it again in the future!

Celebrating St. Anne (and Caroline's Nameday!)

St. Anne is remembered in the Catholic Church on July 26. She and her husband, St. Joachim, are remembered as the parents of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. we also consider this day to be Caroline's "nameday," meaning the feats day of her patron saint.

But wait, you may say, if you happen to know... Caroline's name is not Anne, nor is her middle name Anne!

Yeah, we didn't use an actual saint name on our first child... although JPII's first name was Karol, but otherwise I have not been able to find any saints named Caroline... and certainly no St. Rhiannons, which is her middle name. So, after some creative thinking, along with noticing that Caroline seemed to have a special thing for St. Anne... I noticed that the name is actually within her middle name, RhiANNon. So... there's the background, in case anyone wondered or cared. ;)

Several days before the 26th, Caroline and I worked on a craft project to be used as a centerpiece to celebrate St. Anne. I based this off Charlotte's idea... I found some images online of Sts. Anne and Joachim, some with Mary as a child, and also some of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. If photo albums existed around the time these people lived, then these would be some of the people whose photos they would include in their family album.

I just cut the edges of some cardstock with a rugged-looking pair of craft scissors (I think the style is called "Deckle"), and then I printed off the pictures and let Caroline cut them out and glue them onto the pages. Then we tied them all together with yarn. The top photo shows one of the inside pages, and the second shows the "cover" of the album.

Traditionally in paintings, St. Anne is typically pictured wearing red and green... not Christmas-y red and green, which I suppose the decorations might look like if one chose an equal amount of red and green together. We made watermelon lemonade smoothies (another idea from Charlotte) because this red and green fruit is in season right now - perfect! Both girls really enjoyed cutting up the watermelon with me (and eating bites as they went!) to put into the food processor. Cecilia is getting very particular in doing some of the "big girl" things she sees here sister doing. She actually moves the chairs to the counter and climbs up herslef now - I have to be extra-super-mega-careful to keep all sharp knives and such pushed far back where she cannot reach!

As an aside, did you guys know that watermelon stains? As in, worse than blueberries, pomegranates, and avocado? I never got some watermelon stains out of Caroline's clothes from a previous year, but did that teach me to take off Cecilia's clothes first this time? We'll see if the immediate stain treatment has any better effect this time...

I keeping with the red and green theme, we had a green salad with tomatoes from our garden, and spaghetti with homemade tomato and basil sauce (also from our garden). And we happened to still have our sage green placemats out. I let Caroline eat off one for the special occasion, even (I was planning to toss them into the dirty placemat/napkin bag after dinner anyway...). Caroline wanted the St. Anne holy cards displayed right in front of her seat!

I plan to get a new holy card or two, or a small St. Anne statue, or a book, or a medal (lots of possibilities here!) each year for Caroline on her nameday. I will do the same for Cecilia, whose nameday will be in... hmm, I think November. I will have to look it up as we've not celebrated it before. I think the nameday celebrations are a fun idea - encouraging patronage to a saint and celebrating a special day with special food and traditions!

Here's Caroline, about to try her dessert, which was called St. Anne's Cream. It was like a custard/flan type dessert, and very yummy, I thought! Chris liked the flavor but had issues with the texture (I don't get the texture issues that many people have with foods!)... and Caroline's polite way of saying she didn't care for it? "I think this dessert is a little too interesting for a kid like me." LOL!!

St. Anne, pray for us!