Holy Saturday 2018

Holy Saturday is always a very busy day!

As I have for years, I organized the creation of Easter cards to accompany our parish's meals to the homeless and shut-ins. This year was humorous in that I thought the event started at 9:00, which made me an hour late since it began at 8:00! I guided 30-40 children and some stalwart moms over two hours to create our biggest number of cards ever--1500!

This was the first year I asked Chris to keep the 2- and 5-year-olds home and babysit them there so I could really relax and focus without worrying about whether my littles had gotten lost in the crowd or were getting hurt on the playground. It worked well!

It was also the first year I simply could not get an Easter basket ready for the Blessing of Easter baskets--a Polish tradition. This mama keeps having to cut back and simplify during this season of life.

In the afternoon, Chris finished printing the propers for the Mass tonight and having our girls assemble them.

Meanwhile, John has begun his lawn care business for the spring season and was off mowing a half-acre lawn for a couple of hours. I'm so proud of this kid: up early volunteering with me, then working a job, and then at the church for six hours till midnight serving the altar.

We dyed the hard boiled eggs and stuffed the plastic eggs.

Then I looked at my meal plan on the white board and realized I'd run out of my plans for the week and it was a BIG BLANK . . . for Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday! This Mama really can't do it all!

I dug around in my refrigerator and pantry, and was able to prepare a little quarter ham with homemade glaze, roasted sweet potatoes, and cornbread muffins (from a mix!). Voila!

Of course, after dinner, Chris dashed to a grocery store to buy items for a nice Easter breakfast and he planned to take us out to a restaurant for Easter dinner since his wife flubbed up on both counts.

At 8:30 p.m., Chris took the girls to church to join John already there for the Easter Vigil. Our diocese is blessed this year with the Pre-1955 version, a Mass lasting more than three hours described below:

"The Pre-1955 Missal includes the reading of all 12 Prophecies (ancient prophetic odes). Please do not underestimate the significance of this traditional Easter Vigil. The pre-1955 Easter Vigil still retains almost wholly intact the primitive form of the Roman Vigil followed by the Eucharistic Sacrifice, as it was done in the earliest centuries of the Church all they way up to our modernist era."

While I can go to sleep when Chris is out late working, apparently I can't fall asleep when three of my babies are out of the nest so unusually late, so I was grateful that they got home at 12:30 and I could drift off, knowing (accurately) that my baby would be waking me up for duty at 5:30 a.m. on Easter Morning.