You’re way deep in my bogus bag, and it’s zip-locked shut! Sebastian Bach as Gil on Gilmore Girls
Month: February 2015
Chickadee Thursday
This week has been so crazy, I postponed grocery shopping until today. As long as she gets her cookie from the Schnucks bakery, though, Chickadee doesn’t care what day we go!
Wordless Wednesday
Time to Say Goodbye
Tonight, before the children go to bed, we will say goodbye to our family Alleluia Banner, and put it away until the end of Lent.
We already said our farewells to the Alleluias in church on Sunday, as is the liturgical tradition. But since we are fortunate enough to have an Alleluia Banner at home, we make a big deal out of putting it away on Shrove Tuesday, and replacing it with the Jesus Tree Banner, which will become the focal point of our Bible readings for the next 40+ days. Being able to follow these liturgical traditions at home as well as in church is one of my favorite parts of being a Lutheran!
Alleluia cannot always
Be our song while here below;
Alleluia, our transgressions
Make us for a while forgo;
For the solemn time is coming
When our tears for sin must flow.
Tasty Tuesday–“Laissez les bon temps rouler!”
I decided to go all out for Mardi Gras this year! We had pączki for breakfast (store bought…one of these years I’ll make them from scratch), red beans and rice with andouille sausage for lunch, beignet for an afternoon snack (my first-ever attempt at making donuts, and a very successful one at that!), jambalaya for dinner, and a King Cake for dessert. It was a delicious day!
Let the good times roll!
Approaching Lent
It’s hard to believe, but Lent begins on Wednesday. If you’re looking for some family Lenten ideas, I have a few suggestions.
Our Lenten traditions actually begin the day before Lent officially begins. On Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday), we say goodbye to the Alleluias. This may require some reverse engineering if you don’t already have an Alleluia Banner. It can be simple…an alleluia drawn on construction paper, and then put away until Easter. Or, it can be more complicated–a banner with the word alleluia, or, like ours, with the word alleluia in every liturgical color. How fancy your alleluias are isn’t the point…making a point to say goodbye, and put them away until Lent is over is what you’re trying to share with your children. When you make a big deal out of putting them away, bringing them back after the Great Vigil of Easter is an even bigger celebration!
For the last few years, we’ve put up a “Jesus Tree” throughout the season of Lent. Similar to the Jesse Tree, its Advent counterpart, the Jesus Tree focuses on stories from Jesus’ life, culminating with the events of Holy Week. We all really enjoy adding this to our morning routine…the Bible readings (many days, we’ll read the story from both the Bible and a children’s Bible storybook), are very helpful in refreshing our memories, and the visual component of the tree itself helps us to remember all we’ve learned.
Last year, I added a Lent calendar to our schoolroom. Because Lent is such a long season, to young children especially, it seems like it may never end. While the Jesus Tree is good because there is a reading for every day in Lent, when you’re counting up like that, you can’t see the end. A calendar helps children see what day it currently is, and where you are in the season of Lent. I also added markers for special commemoration days like St. Patrick’s Day and the Annunciation. This year, I’m considering putting a black cross on every square in Lent, except for the current day, which will remain purple. This way, the children can take down one cross at the end of the day, to emphasize how many days there are in the season.
Possibly my favorite Lenten tradition is the making and blessing of the yearly Paschal candle. This is something we do on Holy Saturday every year, so it’s ready when we get home from the Great Vigil of Easter. It doesn’t take much time, and the kit we use makes it a simple activity. I think it’s a special way to end Lent, and it’s a nice way to tie church and home together.
These are just a few ideas for how you can celebrate Lent in your home. What else does your family do to observe this penitential season?
2014-15 School Year–Week Twenty
We managed to get all of our work done in four and a half days last week so we could join Moose on his 1/2 day on Friday…it meant hard work, but also a fun afternoon!
Math continued to be mostly review. Turkey and Bunny are working with the metric system again, but it’s been a while, so they needed a little prompting to remember what they had learned earlier. Ladybug has continued practicing naming fractions and working with money.
In our black history month lessons, we learned about the Civil War and Frederick Douglass. Medieval history took us to the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, where we learned about Ferdinand and Isabella. We haven’t gotten to Columbus yet, so we still have that to look forward to.
Our botany lessons focused on ferns, vascular plants that reproduce with spores instead of seeds. We all found the life cycle of the fern fascinating, and we were hoping to spot some ferns with spores present when we went to the Botanical Garden yesterday, but all of the ferns we saw were spore-free. We’ll have to remember to keep looking each time we visit…we should be able to see some eventually.
We have also continued our study of Anne of Green Gables, as well as the Grandma’s Attic series. I’m really enjoying Anne of Green Gables, and it’s really hard to stop reading after one chapter each day. I don’t want to give Turkey and Bunny more than one written lesson a day, though, so I’m trying to have some restraint. I’m glad the children still like it when I read aloud, because I still really enjoy doing it!
I think we’ll be taking the day off tomorrow, since Moose will be home again. We’re going to have some fun learning about Mardi Gras on Tuesday, and then adding Lenten studies to our religion lessons later in the week.
Stripey Flower
More Orchids
As promised, we returned to the Orchid Show at the Missouri Botanical Garden today, just two weeks after our first visit. I don’t know if they’ve added new plants in the last two weeks, or if we just noticed different things, but it was a totally different experience!
The plan is to go back again in March, just to see if anything else has changed. I’m sure even if nothing has, I’ll see something else that seems brand new!
The Climatron–February
We braved the wind and cold to make our February visit to the Botanical Garden so I could photograph the Climatron for this month, as well as visit the orchid show again. It certainly looked and felt like the bleak midwinter that the song mentions!
