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Holy Week and Easter Resources

Holy Week is almost upon us and soon the great celebration of Easter!! This is one of my favorite times of the year.

Here are some old and new resources we’re using in the house to prepare for these great celebrations.

Chat Chat, An Extra Special Easter Vacation Our kids love this Catholic audio show with a bunch of Catholic chat. It has  great songs and lots of wonderful information.

Truth in the Heart Season III of the 2nd grade series is all about Holy Week. I love the Sisters. We have two other seasons, but this one has 6 episode all about Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil. It explains all the sights and sound and was a great resource when we had to teach our RE kids about the Triduum.

Glory Stories Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary We love the Glory Stories about the saints. I orders some things for Easter for our kids and we received a free CD of the Sorrowful Mysteries. I listened to it this morning and it was awesome! It’s a scriptural rosary for kids. They all have the Stations of the Cross. We don’t have it, but I may invest in that for next year.

Footprints of God, Jesus This is more geared toward adults, but our kids love Steve Ray and enjoy the video series.

For the Easter season, we are looking forward to enjoying the Garden of the Good Shepherd by Tomie de Paola and celebrating the Easter season with garden parties each week with the set of readings.

First Communion Preparations

Last week was a busy week for Therese. She was very blessed to participate in a 4 day retreat for the first communicants in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS). About ten kids who participate in CGS at several locations in town came together for this amazing retreat. We could never offer such an experience for the children in our RE class at our parish for several reasons, so we were delighted that she had this opportunity. She had a great time and she continues to be so very excited to receive Jesus. Next weekend we have the retreat for the children in our RE class. Her First Communion mass will be in May.

I also managed this weekend to get all her attire together for the occasion. Let me tell you that it was very overwhelming to look at all the hundreds of extravagant dresses with very large price tags. All i wanted was a nice simple, modest dress that maintains her dignity and that of the Sacrament. And our blessed Lord was so generous to help us find a lovely dress at Costco of all places for a very small price. It was the very last one on the rack. It even has white roses on it as she had requested. I used my Hobby Lobby coupon and I bought the toole and headpiece to make her veil. And
I found some simple white ballet flats at kohls on sale. For all of this and some white dress socks (since it would be a near occasion of sin to make her wear tights) the total was a little less than $50. Adam was especially thrilled about this! And Therese is so happy with everything and her opinion really matters.

Lenten Graces

We have had a crazy busy month…again. In the midst of the craziness, we’ve had a very prayerful Lent so far.

We started out with our pre-Lenten Mardi Gras party. We had some friends over for Cajun food, beer, music and good times. On Ash Wednesday, we brought out many of the ‘old’ traditions of baking pretzels on Friday and delving deep in scripture with our Lenten Cross. We picked up the other wooden Lenten cross that a local homeschool co-op was selling last year.  The kids are far exceeding their prayer promise. I decided we needed to get back into the daily family rosary. And in an effort to start off with baby steps, I told the family we are praying an after dinner decade every night. Much to my joy the kids want to say the WHOLE rosary. That is such a gift and one for which I am very thankful. Last night we had a friend over for dinner and we ended up only praying a decade because it was getting late. She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard kids whine that they couldn’t pray the WHOLE rosary instead of  only one decade.” On Fridays, instead of the rosary we pray the Stations of the Cross. The kids helped me make a Station of the Cross basket with 14 items to remind them of each of the stations. We light 14 candles and after each station one of the kids gets to blow it out. Last Friday was a little eventful when one of the children was playing around (instead of sitting down) and accidentally set an article of clothing on fire.

I have very much enjoyed my night time spiritual reading so far, too. I finished A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. Beautiful and very moving book about beauty, spousal love, conversion, mercy, and the love of God. It was very interesting to read many of the personal letters that were exchanged between Vanauken and C.S. Lewis. Then I moved onto something a little less emotional…Memorize the Faith by Kevin Vost. It is about memorizing key points of the Catholic faith using memory techniques of St. Thomas Aquinas and other ‘medival memory masters.’ It’s actually pretty cool. I can’t wait to use these techniques on the kids!

My morning spiritual reading has been just as great. Thanks to St. Jose Maria Escriva, I’m conquering my laziness and rolling out of bed early in the morning to pray and hopefully grow spiritually. I’m breaking open the word through the Catholic Letters (the books of James, Peter, etc) using the Navarre bible…love it! You just can’t go wrong with the Navarre. And I’m FINALLY making my way through Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ. I’m hoping I can get to the chapters on the passion by Holy Week. We shall see.

End of the Bible Adventure

Last night we had our last Bible Adventure study. We had a themed dinner party. Everyone was supposed to dress up in the color of their favorite time period and then they were to make a food for that time period.  Here were some of the dishes we had for each time period

• Early World–Apple Sauce–for fruit that Eve and Adam ate–Fulton chose this one
• Patriarchs–Roasted goat–for all those brunt offerings–I chose this one because of Abraham’s great faith
• Egypt and Exodus–Pomegranate Italian Soda–for the color of the Red Sea
• Dessert Wanderings
• Conquest and Judges–honey for the Land of Milk and Honey
• Royal Kingdom–hummus with Kalamata olives (to make it purple)–the Anderson’s chose this one.
• Divided Kingdom–
• Exile–blueberries–Gianna chose this one. Baby blue is the color of the time period
• Return–Lemon squares—Therese chose this one because the story of Ester falls in this time period and the color is yellow
• Maccabean Revolt–carrot souffle and also sweet potatoes–Adam and the Politos chose this time period and the color is orange.
• Messianic Fulfillment–bread, grapes and wine–Mr. Molchen chose this one.
• The Church–also the bread–Mr. Molchen said when you break open the bread you get the Church!

It was great reflecting on the things that stood out to us and the new things we all learned and even the things we want to learn in the future. Some of the themes that came up were:

1. Finally understanding the Divided Kingdom and the Exile;
2. Seeing that God has always been the same in His mercy and love–that is the idea of the Old Testament God being one of judgement and wrath was thrown out the window when we ‘learned the story;’
3. understanding now how the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New and more the symbolism of why Jesus chose certain places and times to do and say things in his ministry;
4. understanding how the Mass reading fit together!