Happy Pentecost!

We celebrated Pentecost this year by going to Mass with one of my brothers and his wife, with whom we had stayed over Saturday night. Then we came home and celebrated in our own domestic church...

Caroline and I had begun to prepare on Friday. One thing we did was to hang these doves above our dining room table. Caroline was so excited when I told her we were going to get out all the dove Christmas ornaments! "So, we can look at all the other Christmas ornaments, too?" I had read in several places about the idea of decorating with doves - the symbol of the Holy Spirit - and perhaps hanging them up from the ceiling. One thing I read suggested a wooden dove figure, to which I thought, "Where would one find a wooden dove? And how much would that cost??" Then I remembered - we had a few dove ornaments that would do very nicely. I think it would be really neat to collect more (my husband groans as he reads this, I am sure!) and have them hanging at different heights above the table... I think my light fixture could accommodate up to 12 total!

Three of the four doves we hung up were gifts from my godparents - they used to get me a Christmas ornament each year. This is one they gave me in 1996 (no, I didn't just remember this piece of trivia - I wrote the years on the boxes when I received them!).

They gave me this one as well, in 1993. It is one of my favorite Christmas ornaments of all... so simple and pretty.

They gave me this one at Christmas 1994. Cecilia particularly enjoyed this one last Christmas - the sparkly-ness was probably very attractive to her!

Here's the fourth dove ornament. It came with Chris when we got married, so I don't know the history behind it!

The hanging of the dove ornaments was the only idea here that I came up with partially on my own. The rest of the Pentecost ideas I cannot take any credit for at all!

Caroline is holding her completed Garden of the Good Shepherd. I saw this activity referenced on many other blogs, and then when I saw that it was on sale for just a couple dollars, I decided, why not? We'll do it this year! I see so many activities and think, "Oh, that will be fun to do in a few years..." So we did this one this year! It is an Easter countdown, with fifty stickers, one for each day of Easter. We put the final sticker on today - a dove surrounded by flames for Pentecost. Caroline was very excited to hold up the completed display! She was also sad that we were done with it... but it is able to be reused (at least, it is marketed as such!), so we will pull it out again for next Easter.

Caroline and I put together our decorations and other Pentecost preparations on Friday, because we were going to a birthday party an hour away on Saturday and from there to my brother and his wife's house to stay overnight. We made this fun Pentecost Mobile... I printed off some dove shapes and cut them out while Caroline cut out the spiral that I had drawn on some cardstock. Then she glued the doves to the spiral.

Cecilia really wants to feel like a part of things - she flips out if Caroline gets play-dough, makers, scissors, etc. and she does not. But she has to be contained... she will take crayons all over the house, so I put her in a booster with a tray. She doesn't do well with paper on this tray because it doesn't fit well, and she also doesn't understand about holding the paper steady with her other hand. So, since they are washable crayons, I just let her draw on the tray. It rubs right off with a damp paper towel. Unfortunately for Cecilia, she will not be drawing again any time soon... she ate the brown crayon. Well, she ate a bite, chewed it and spit it out, then took another bite... yuck.

Here's the finished product in action. Hanging under the fan, it really twirls well! The doves are supposed to be glued on facing down (oops), because then as the spiral twirls, the doves descend - like the Holy Spirit did, get it?

And here is our table on Pentecost Sunday, all set up under the doves. Caroline and I decorated while Chris and Cecilia went grocery shopping after our trip home from my brother's house. We put out the red tablecloth, since Pentecost's color is red... the priest wears red, and the church we visited this morning had a red altar cloth as well.

I couldn't get a great picture of it, but we also salvaged petals from our last remaining roses on our rose bush outside our house. We sprinkled them along the tablecloth - they are to symbolize the flames that rested above the apostles' heads. Can't remember where I read this idea... apologies to whoever came up with it for not linking to you! If anyone knows where I read this, fell free to put it in the comments box!

We made cupcakes (er, oatmeal muffins with cream cheese/honey frosting!) while Chris and Cecilia were shopping, too. Then I arranged them on this cupcake stand. Here's where I found this idea. The top cupcake is tinted blue for Mary, and then there are twelve white cupcakes for each of the apostles. Caroline pointed the one mismatched cupcake (a leftover cranberry muffin from a couple days ago... how do you bake 13 cupcakes at once with only one muffin tin? Yay for my rare instance of foresight in saving the cranberry muffin for this use!) and declared, "This one is John." She didn't name any others... apparently it was only important to her to know which one was Mary and which was John, ha ha! The lit candles represent the flames that appeared above their heads, and then Caroline blowing them out represented the wind that filled the room when the Holy Spirit came down. I thought that was a fun idea, and so did Caroline!

Ariel view...

Here she is blowing them out (her hair is wet because she just got out of the bath... Chris did bathtime while I frosted the "cupcakes" and stuck the candles on).

We had lots of fun celebrating Easter this year! Wrapping it up with several ideas for Pentecost worked out really well... celebrating the end to a very blessed Easter season! And there were so many other great suggestions for Pentecost at Shower of Roses... a great resource for the coming years (and where I found most of my ideas linked from ;). A few other things we did to celebrate Easter throughout all fifty days... we learned all the words to "Jesus Christ is Risen Today" and sang it almost every day. We kept the Easter books and the Resurrection Eggs out for use throughout the season. Along with the daily sticker and Bible reading for the Garden of the Good Shepherd, I think we had a good first year of actively celebrating the fifty days of Easter in our home!

Come Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of Your Divine Love. Send forth Your Spirit and they shall be created, and You shall renew the face of the earth. Oh God, Who by the light of the Holy Spirit instructed the hearts of the faithful, Grant, that by the same Spirit we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolation. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Sisters

Both "nursing" their baby dolls... well, Cecilia is trying to figure it out...

Reading books together in Caroline's room

Can somebody help here?

Somebody with some fashion sense, that is? ;)

Cute skirt, huh? It is a hand-me-down for Caroline... if I can figure out how to put it on her, that is! I assume the above photo is the front of the skirt... right?

Here's what makes me unsure... this photo shows the back if I flipped the skirt over from the position in the top photo. The elastic is now centered, but the tag is in a really weird position, is it not?

And here is how it looks if I center the tag, the way you'd think it should be... doesn't look right at all now, does it? The elastic waist part is all skewed now.

Hmmm...

Because it is easier than writing posts myself...

...and so I can find it again to refer to myself! That is the real reason I am linking to it here, and in case anyone else wants to read some good stuff:

http://theparentingpassageway.com/2009/05/22/the-battlefield-of-the-mind-anger-and-parenting/

Good parenting information there!

Ascension Thursday

Thursday marked the day that we celebrate Jesus's return to heaven, which means we are nearing the end of the Easter season. We will officially celebrate it on Sunday, although it is known in the Church as "Ascension Thursday" and the feast is typically moved to the following Sunday. In my parochial school when I was growing up, we used to release helium balloons with notes tied to the strings on this day, to symbolize Jesus going up to heaven. We stopped doing it after several years (darn those environmentalists ;)... Tim, did you even get to experience the fun of a 500-balloon release Ascensions Thursday?? It was great fun, except for the few kids whose balloons would inevitably end up caught in a tree or power line only seconds after being released...

So, we refrained from a balloon release, although maybe that is an idea to keep in mind for future years. Instead, Caroline did some cloud painting with white paint, a cotton ball, and her fingers. Then she stuck an image of a painting of the ascension (which she cut out herself) to the clouds.

I also found this cute little craft online... if I can remember where, I will post the link. Caroline colored Jesus, the apostles, a cloud, and the background and then we cut them out and I attached them together... the result is that Jesus slides up and down so Caroline can make him rise up into the skiy, and the apostles slide back and forth (for some reason - maybe so they can pace back and forth?). We have used both these things as visuals in our dining room.

We also did this rhyme and finger play (which I was randomly inspired with late Wednesday evening):

Jesus ascended into the sky. (point finger upward)
All his apostles waved goodbye. (waving motion with hand)
Jesus said, "Across the world you must go," (spread out arms wide)
"Spreading the Good News so all may know." (cup hands around mouth, then point to head)

And we made this dessert Thursday morning - I called in Ascension Cloud Cake. It is completely no-bake - it is frozen. Nice for warmer weather, and very easy.

Here it is cut open... yummy!

So, we had a fun day celebrating the ascension! Everything sort of fell together for us in celebrating this feast... we don't always manage to do this much. Each thing was little and didn't take much time, so it ended up being very do-able. I have heard it mentioned that some people read blogs and get discouraged because of seeing what other people do in their homes to celebrate feast days... because it looks like they have perfect families with these great plans that go so smoothly all the time. And I have also seen it discussed that this is because people typically put the best things that happen on their blogs rather than blogging the messes and whining and other things that may happen day-to-day with small children. This is quite true. What you do not see behind these photos and words are the frequent temper tantrums Cecilia had all day, and that she did not take a nap. It was almost cute for awhile when she threw her little fits... until this day, when they came one after another, ha ha! She decides she wants to play with the toy lawnmower that Caroline is playing with and expresses this by shrieking and running towards it... so Caroline very politely steps aside and takes the other toy lawnmower for herself... and of course, Cecilia immediately decides she wants that lawnmower instead! This went back and forth a couple times until ! scooped Cecilia up, told her how hard it is to be one, and we went inside! So, we'll probably have some difficult days as she goes through this developmental phase and beginning to learn that life has limitations and disappointments. A tough lesson for anyone to learn at any age, poor baby ;) She'll make it, though, especially if that huge molar will finish breaking through her gum!

Definitions by Caroline

Whole Milk Kefir: "suck yogurt"
Pretty accurate description of it, I'd say...

Pretty as a Picture

Looking up at Mommy with those blue eyes

There are BLUEBERRIES growing up there!

Happy in the bath

Had to stick in a pretty picture of Caroline, too - it is harder to catch these lately, because she either won't look at the camera, or she makes a goofy smile.

Our Mary Garden

The month of May is dedicated to Mary, Mother of Jesus, so I decided it would make a good time to start a Mary Garden. In our garden, I wanted to have a statue of Mary as the focal point, but do you know how much those things cost??? The cheapest garden statue I could find was $60!

This garden area is at the end of our sunroom. It was already like this when we moved into the house years ago.

So, I painted this sign. Chris attached some posts and hammered it into the ground in our garden.

Caroline suggested we paint a picture of Mary since we didn't have a statue. So I found a piece of wood for her to paint. First, I painted the whole thing a beige color with some leftover wall paint so that it would seal the wood and hopefully allow it to withstand the weather better. It was still damp when Caroline began painting, which created a neat "wet-on-wet" effect. She also wanted to paint Joseph - painted him first, in fact. Then she painted Mary in brown and went over her again in blue. The red and green at the bottom is a flower. After it was dry, she wanted to put their names on it, so I spelled them for her and she wrote them. Other than the letters in her own name, I haven't "taught" her to form any letters... she has just started doing it on her own.

We plan to add a little at a time to our Mary Garden. We planted marigold seeds, so we'll see if they come up. I also plan to plant some rosemary, maybe just in a pot, and put it in the garden. We are also going to make a garden stone with some sort of Marian theme - I picked up a stone making kit and various blue gemstone things at the craft store. In future years, maybe we will get a statue, and we'll put in other plants traditionally associated with Mary. I have a few ideas for garden decorations that reflect some of Mary's many titles... it will be a fun project to revisit each May.

Great Article

I love this.  It is short - go read it!

Prayers Please

For those of you outside of my family who read this blog, I wanted to let you know that my new niece, Elizabeth, passed away at the beginning of this week, at almost two weeks old.  I ask for any prayers you can offer for the family, especially tomorrow, when there will be a memorial service held for Elizabeth, and in the coming weeks.

It is impossible to find words to describe this tragic loss.