Bip’s First Communion Banner

Now, before I tell you about Bip’s First Communion, I should show you his First Communion Banner.

We showed Bip many examples of banners from all over the internet.  He chose the elements he liked best, those things that he felt most expressed his faith.

Now here’s a little story of how God takes care of all the little details.  Bip’s banner is significantly smaller than Boo’s and Pumpkin Girl’s, due to the fact that at our current church the banners are hung from the side of the pews instead on the walls.  That means that the big bucket o’ foam letters that we have were too big to fit Bip’s real, very long first name onto the banner.  So when I went to the craft store for the felt, I was also keeping my eye out for something, anything, that I could use for his name that wouldn’t require me to cut out 8 teeny, tiny letters.  And whatever it was would preferably be green, Bip’s favorite color.  And I found one lone package of pre-cut (!), one inch (!!), felt letters in green(!!!).  Not one other package of those letters were left on the shelf.  I think I actually said, “Thank you, God!” aloud, right there in the store.  It was Hobby Lobby though, so if anyone had heard me I probably would have gotten an “amen”!

Ok, where were we?  Oh yes, making the banner.

So I drew the figures that Bip wanted onto the felt and cut them out.  He glued them down.

BipBanner

And here it is!BipBanner2

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Confirmation

Our Big Sacrament Weekend was a success.  Nobody else got sick, the weather was nice, nobody melted down.

Boo was Confirmed on Friday evening.  My feelings on this matter are a mixture of pride and nostalgia as that little boy who seemed to be in a constant time-out is growing into fine young man with a mature faith.  We even made him shave the four hairs on his chin for the event.

Earlier in the year he was one of four Confirmation candidates chosen to speak at our parish renewal weekend. His assigned topic was “What the Eucharist Means to Me” and he needed to fill 10 minutes.  Ten minutes is a long time when one is 14 years old and this is your first public speaking event.  He came up with a good solid 5 minutes worth of material and then turned to his constant companion, Pumpkin Girl.  Those two have such a funny relationship.  I can’t even scratch the surface here, but I think it would be fair to say that they are best friends.

So Pumpkin Girl did a little research on the history of the Eucharist which Boo used as a lead in to his main topic and the whole thing turned out rather nicely.  He gave his speech in March and even now, someone will come up to him and ask if he was the young man who had given the talk.

Boo chose King David as his Confirmation saint.  David was a man who struggled in many ways but always had a heart for the Lord.  Boo came up with him on his own and his choice surprised me since most kids chose more recent saints.  But King David is an excellent choice and suits Boo well.  Did make it hard to get him a statue or holy medal, though.

And so the time came and Boo got himself all spiffy for the event.  His sponsor, one of our fellow Catholic homeschoolers from when we were stationed in DC, was able to be here for the day. I got the moment on camera.

BooConfirmation

In typical Boo fashion, as he returned to the pew after being Confirmed, he flashed a big grin and gave us a thumbs up.  I wasn’t expecting that, so I don’t have a picture.  We couldn’t help but laugh.  It was just so very Boo.  I hope his enthusiasm for God stays with him for the rest of his life.

BooConfirmation2

(Great oogly moogly, I just noticed that he wore his survival bracelet.  Sigh.)

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Big Sacrament Weekend

So. I had the worst Mother’s Day ever. Well, the one worst one for me,at least.

To put it bluntly, I got a new toothbrush.

There’s a story here, of course. I got a new toothbrush because that’s what I do every time I get so sick that I find myself moaning over my aching stomach. And when my stomach hurts that much, there’s pretty much only one way out of it. Oh yes. On my knees in the wee hours of the morning, thanking the Good Lord above that the drop-in toilet thingy is doing its job because my face is about to up close and personal with the porcelain throne.

Stomach properly emptied, I returned to bed and slept pretty much most of the rest of the day.

Less than twenty-four hours later I felt much better, keeping food down and my fever was gone. Poor Phil went down about that time, though he didn’t get it nearly as bad.

But what, what, WHAT does this have to do with the title of this post?

I’ll tell you. Two of my boys are receiving sacraments this weekend. We’ve got houseguests coming. The boys can NOT get sick.

It’s been two days since Phil got sick and all the kids seem fine.

But if you could spare a prayer, could you say one that my kids stay healthy?

Thanks, I owe you one!

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Consider Yourself…

Guess who is playing the Artful Dodger?

ArtfulDodger

(Please excuse my blurry phone photo.  She had just finished with her fitting and I was standing mostly in the hallway, trying to be quick.)

Pumpkin Girl was asked to be the Artful Dodger in the beginning Broadway class (she is actually in the intermediate level) when they do “Consider Yourself” from the musical “Oliver”.  Very cool to be asked to come in just for that role, especially when it is the lead.

Can I say I’m just a little bit proud of her?  Ok, a whole lot proud of her?  And doesn’t she make the cutest darn Artful Dodger out there?

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Super Mario Pencil Holder

I have a new crafting buddy – Bip!  Last summer I found some crafting kits and I offered them to the kids.  Bip jumped on them and we had a ton of fun together with them.  They were these sand art kits that where you peel off the protective covering to reveal sticker paper, then you pour colored sand over it and when you’re done, you have a fun little picture.

As a side note, we did these on the day we evacuated from the fire.  We had to move quickly to pack the car and make hard to decisions about what to take with us and what to leave behind and potentially lose.  Those little art projects stayed on the kitchen table where they had been waiting so we could show Philip when we got home.  My heart ached, remembering the special time Bip and I’d had together, that last afternoon of peace and safety.

Anyway…that afternoon when I realized how much Bip likes crafting with me, I made myself a promise to find more things for him and I to do together.  Best laid plans and all, it has taken until now to get around to it.  He had a Cub Scout project to make a gift and with his dad’s help, he decided to make a Super Mario pencil holder for his buddy who is moving away.  Phil borrowed my idea for the decoupaged candle  and with some input from me, this is what they came up with. BTW, that last link goes to an article I wrote for The Homeschool Classroom blog.

MarioPencilHolder1

Bip’s original idea was to use Super Mario stickers he had in his stash, but he couldn’t find them.  But he remembered a magazine with some great Mario pictures, so he cut them out and used them.  My idea was to use tissue paper on the glass jar in order to ground the pictures and make them more visible.  Phil and Bip decided to use green for grass and blue for the sky.  They did that together with Mod Podge and sponge brushes, then let it dry overnight.  The next day, Bip and I decoupaged the pictures onto the tissue paper background and let it dry.

I really like how this turned out!  I especially like that most of it was Bip’s own idea and that we only needed to provide a little guidance.  He’s very happy with it, we all had fun putting it together and I think his Mario-loving friend is going to like it, too!

MarioPencilHolder2

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Talent

I have a knitting injury. A knitting.injury. Do you know how much talent that takes, injuring myself while just sitting there, all cozy in my jammies, hardly moving at all?

No, I did not poke myself in the eye.

I have trigger finger. Or at least that’s what the google tells me.

At first I thought it was a repetitive motion injury from knitting my watermelon socks non-stop and then moving on to a new pair of socks. I gave my poor hand a rest for a few days and then picked up the socks again. This pair is cabled which I have been working without the use of a cable needle. Non-knitters, stick with me here! Knitting cables without using a cable needle requires pinching the stitches at the critical moment when they want to unravel on you. I’ve used this technique before with success and without pain. But that was with thicker yarn which is easy to hold on to. Sock yarn is much thinner and I think I was pinching quite hard so it wouldn’t escape.

So there I was, all cozy in my jammies, knitting and pinching, when I realized that it was the pinching that was causing the pain. All the rest of the knitting was fine. So I got out a cable needle and the pain was significantly less.

I have broken my leg skiing. I have broken my wrist playing soccer. And now I have injured my thumb knitting.

Don’t envy me my glamorous life.

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The Other Shoe

Ah, just were things were going so well.

Or were they?

We’ve been living with the shadow of a furlough hanging over our heads. Philip may or may not be forced to take one unpaid day a week until October. We should know for sure by the end of the month. But then again, thats what they said last month. It’s sure going to put a crimp in the finances.

Meanwhile, there is some work we’d like done on the house. Quite a bit, actually, but it is all cosmetic. We were discussing our options for the kitchen, which has new granite counters but the original boring, stock cabinets. The previous owners did that. I don’t know why they didn’t upgrade the cabinets, too. I’d like to remove the soffit and extend the cabinets up. Just as I was discussing this and looking up, I noticed it. The Bulge of Doom. Directly under a bathroom.

I pointed to it and said, “We have water damage.”

You could almost see years of life draining away from poor Philip.

Ever the optimistic and helpful one (stop laughing!) I suggested that since we’ll be tearing up the ceiling, it would be a good time to put in pot lights or a sun tube. Somehow that didn’t cheer him up.

I guess I shouldn’t mention that if we’ll be tearing up the bathroom floor, we should really get new bathroom cabinets and counter tops. And for continuity, we should probably do the other bathrooms, too.

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Pinterest and Kids, A Cautionary Tale

Every so often I get obsessed with my blog stats. I track which posts are the most popular, what Google searches lead people to me, and what sites are linking to me. It’s fun for a couple of weeks and then I get distracted by something else.

One of the most popular Google searches that leads to my blog is “Boy Scout uniform”. The picture associated with that search is of Boo, grinning at the camera on the night he bridged over from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.

It’s always bugged me just a little bit. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was more of a portrait type picture, rather than an action shot. Honestly, I’ve always struggled over the kinds of pictures to post of my children. I’ll go for long periods of time without posting pictures at all, but that gets boring. Then I’ll just post pictures in profile, or somehow not showing their whole face. But that gets tricky and involves a lot of staging pictures. Eventually I just go back to posting whatever picture suits my posts the best.

A couple of days ago, I discovered that someone had pinned that picture of Boo, the one of him in his Cub Scout uniform, on to Pinterest. That just did not sit right with me. I can’t even put into words why. In my head, someone searching for a picture of a BSA uniform would realize that this picture isn’t really what they were looking for, so they would move on. But seeing it on Pinterest, that’s more of a deliberate action. More “I want to remember this picture and refer back to it as often as I want”. Plus there is the social aspect of Pinterest, the sharing with your followers and the repinning of things over and over. Somehow, pinning a mom’s snapshot of her child just wasn’t what I wanted.

I left a comment under the picture, asking the person to remove it. After a day and a half it was still there, so I invoked my copyright and used the official form to have Pinterest remove it. They did so within just a few hours! I also deleted the picture from my blog.

So now I have to give quite a bit more thought to the kinds of pictures I put on my blog. This was never intended to be a family update kind of blog. It was always a way for me to tell my stories, as if I was sitting over coffee or knitting with you. Most of my stories are about my childrend and pictures enhance the story telling. But now I’ve had a wake-up call that others may use my pictures any way they want.

If you have a blog, do you post pictures of your kids? Of their faces, or in profile or somehow concealing their faces? How would you feel if you discovered your child’s picture on Pinterest?

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Fiesta!

We have a dining room in our house, completely separate from the kitchen and the living room.  I love it!  We use it for dinner as often as possible, which is every day unless we are eating outside on the deck.  The only thing is that the dining room is pretty small (as they all seem to be in this area) and only has northern facing windows.  We have dark wood furniture in there.  It can be a pretty dark feeling room.

A few years ago I was a Longaberger consultant.  Sort of.  I signed up in Korea, where I didn’t have to make any quarterly sales minimums.  I got the consultant discount for myself without having any of the work!  At the time, my goal was to buy three sets of their dishware in red, white and blue.  I never got the white before we moved back to the States and my sweet little set up was over.

We used the red and blue Longaberger plates until the first time we had people over for an actual, grown-up, sit-down, dinner party.  I set the table with those dishes and the room looked so horribly dark and oppressive.  I knew I wanted something different, but I wasn’t sure what.

And I discovered Fiestaware!  I picked up some place settings from Kohl’s when they were on sale and I had a good coupon.  I got a few more place settings from my  mom for Christmas.  And then it was our turn to host the dinner party again and I grabbed the last place settings I needed.

Do you want to see my set table?

fiestaware table

The table linens are from Kohl’s, too.  They aren’t the best quality – the napkins aren’t completely square and two of the placemats are a few inches smaller than the others.  They came in a set, so I couldn’t choose. But I had a enough to set the smaller ones aside.  But doesn’t it look great?  Pumpkin Girl helped me fold the napkins and she set the table so that each place has a different color placemat, napkin, bowl and plate.

I love the way the table looks when it is set now, like it is time for a fiesta!

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