Thursday's Week in Review

A Week in Review before the Holy Triduum begins . . .

1. Super Busy Weekend: Part I

The weekend of Palm Sunday was overly busy and Chris and I were so grateful to have each other to juggle and balance all our duties and events.

On Friday, we attended Mass as a family at 7:00 a.m., then John attended CCE, while I took the other kids to the grocery store, bakery, and cemetery. Chris took the kids (at their request) to pray at the abortion clinic (in the pouring rain) and, after their completing afternoon chores and music practice, Chris took the oldest three to 7:00 p.m. Tenebrae services, left John at the Fraternus lock-in, brought the girls home, and went back to retrieve John to sleep in his own bed.

Despite being up till nearly 11:00, the fellas wanted to be woken at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday to make breakfast sausage for 40 boys and get back to the lock-in bright and early.

John played sports with the guys for five hours before Chris took him to a birthday party. Meanwhile, I braved a deluge and flash flooding to take five kids to their last ice skating class and evaluations to see if they ranked up.

Flash flooding

It is so cute to watch the littler guys skate, especially three-year-old Thomas in his fireman helmet!

Without Chris' typical help to juggle the transition, I had the little boys take a car nap instead of going home, took everybody through drive-through for lunch, and delivered Mary to orchestra practice.

2. Super Busy Weekend: Part II

Come Sunday, Mary had choir practice before the Palm Sunday Mass which lasted three hours. It was beautiful but certainly took rigorous work for all the parents. I was so impressed that even more people than normal came to our Latin Mass, knowing how long it would be, when they could have attended the Novus Ordo: about 350 souls! I watched and all those many children--in the pews, in their parents' arms, in strollers--were not eating a bite of food in the church, or playing games, or reading books, and certainly nobody had electronics out. Good job, parents!

David sleeping through a Very Long Mass

The photos of the Mass are all courtesy of Marcus Kuncuro:

After Mass, John and Joseph joined in the first occurrence of a sports-team that is going to meet once monthly after Mass. The boys always play games, but this is going to have teams, jerseys, rules, and points. The fun was multiplied when one of the priests showed up to do his own exercise and decided to join the boys for basketball. All the parents and siblings were cheering and a lot of us brought brown bag lunches. It was super!

3. Notre Dame

On Monday of Holy Week, the 850-year-old Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burned. This is grievously sad for practicing Catholics and those of us who have been there in person are touched on a personal level. We thank God that the Eucharist (body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ), holy relics (such as Jesus' crown of thorns) and saints' relics, as well as much artwork, was saved by a human chain of heroic firefighters.

We told our children the next morning and there were tearful eyes among us.

4. Introducing Peter

Apparently I have no bird afficianados reading my blog, or you would have been laughing and emailing me to tell me that Heidi is a male zebra finch. Zebra finches are sexually dimorphic, with strongly different color patterns.

Male on the left, female on the right (source)

Heidi's bright red cheeks were a "tell" to anyone who knew anything, which was obviously neither me nor any of the PetSmart staff. Further, Heidi sings and sings, while Clara never found her voice: it has been too long since I took a zoology class to remember that most birds who sing are males--decidedly true of zebra finches.

So, our mystery is solved: Heidi is a male, Clara is a female, and these are real baby bird eggs. Mary has renamed the male bird "Peter," who is the goatherd in the novel Heidi.

And now we wait to see if the birds will successfully hatch!

Clara and Peter nesting

5. School Break

I took off teaching school for Holy Week (to prepare for Easter) and Easter Triduum (to actually celebrate Easter).

This is now the calendar entry I actually enter into Google Calendar a year ahead of time for every Holy Week: "GOAL: Take off Holy Week: It is way too stressful to keep schooling and achieve anything holy or domestic."

Only the middle schooler had a full load of independent work for his hybrid program (because he won't be able to do it next week) and all kids had music practice (the oldest two in the final two weeks of preparing 10 and 15 songs, respectively, for the big Guild event). He also got a new lawnmowing client!

6. Annual Standardized Testing

We scheduled our Annual Standardized Testing for Spy Wednesday. I was able to leave the 1- and 3-year-olds with Chris at home, so I sat for almost four hours in a quiet room while my children were being tested and I got to read nearly 100 pages of my book! Compared to the pitiful three to five pages per day I now get to read, this was a 'feast'!

I always say that the standardized testing is to make sure Mommy is teaching them right, so it's really me being tested, not them.

Results: Mommy is doing fine. Carry on!

7. Maundy Thursday

Thursday was busy-busy-busy with preparations, including dying the Easter eggs. It was fascinating to watch that I really was not needed there, the older children are growing in leadership so well. 

John served the Thursday night liturgy while Chris and the girls attended. I kept the wee ones home, read the Bible story about the Last Supper to them, and tucked them in. The three-year-old was so interested that he sat up in bed, looking at the Bible for twenty minutes.

Palm Sunday 2017

Passiontide begins!

On Saturday, Chris took the oldest three children for our Parish Service Day. Some people sign up to make repairs around the parish, others to make landscaping installations, while a group of children go perform (songs, poems, and so forth) at the nursing home across the street from the church.

I stayed home with the littlest boys, and Joseph (4) helped me stuff 200 plastic Easter eggs with candy for a volunteering event, and organize all my supplies to make 1,300 Easter cards for next week's Easter meals event.

Then some little neighborhood friends came over to play, and I documented the blooming spring flowers before heading to Confession and making an attempt to buy Easter dresses for the girls (report: they're all sleeveless, so I am, as yet, thwarted).

During Passiontide, I try my best to veil our holy images with purple cloths in the home, as churches, do, and it's always been a chore: This year, my chore consisted of asking my 10-year-old to go into the attic by himself to get the bin of supplies, and then telling four kids to open the bin and "go cover everything with cloth." They ran around like happy mice for half an hour . . . while I didn't!

Running around covering holy images

Palm Sunday Mass is one of the longest of the year with both a procession and a 30-minute chanting of Jesus' Passion: It is so beautiful and so challenging for parents with children to last two and a half hours.

The professional photographer at Mass that day captured a beautiful photo of Chris carrying cherubic Thomas (20 months) about. Thomas does very well with Daddy, which is why Daddy has taken Thomas duty during Mass for months now. Mary chooses to sit in the front row and John is serving the alter, so I sit with the 4- and 6-year-olds.

Daddy and Thomas during Mass

I'm glad the photographer did not capture me during Mass: I had barely slept the night before and had no energy left to battle with my two children who couldn't handle the length of the Mass. After exiting twice, and trying a session in the cry room, I finally sat us outside in the courtyard, my only parental goal being that the two kids would remain sitting in chairs (instead of running gleefully in the sunshine) while drawing on a scrap of paper from my purse and chatting quietly.

Below are a small sampling of the gorgeous photos taken by the photographer during Mass.

John (10) in the center

Palm Sunday 2012

I made a Palm Sunday craft with the children.

It was too advanced for them.

Lesson learned.

Palm Sunday 2010

Holy Week has arrived, catching me a little unawares because I'm still unaccustomed to following the liturgical calendar in our domestic church, as the Catholic Church teaches every family is. Late Saturday and at the crack of dawn Sunday, I was online looking at gorgeous blogs of other homeschooling families with their myriad crafty ideas and prayer suggestions for how to teach children about the Passion.

Before John came downstairs this morning, I had three books of children's Bible stories out, each bookmarked with the story of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. John ate his breakfast, then saw me casually sitting down with these books and he fell for my lure: "What are those books, Mama? Will you read to me?"

So, we read about Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, although I confess frustration that John didn't seem to be paying attention and he asked me to read him other Bible stories, which I did.

However, when we got to Mass, what little reading and chatting we did paid off. I also reflected on how Mother Church knows that her children (of all ages) need "props"--tactile and visual elements--to remember and understand special solemnities. Lex orendi, lex credendi. John's eyes bugged out to see hundreds of people gathering outside our church, holding palm fronds, ready to process. "Can we hold palm branches? Maybe we can ask somebody for permission!" With what joy John held his palm frond high in the air and we whispered back and forth about how the people in Jerusalem, children included, did the same thing as this when Jesus arrived on the baby donkey. Then we began processing and the choir began singing and I pointed out to John, "Look! There's that unusual word again: Hosanna!" Learning about Hosanna ("God, save us") earlier that morning had led to yet another of John's tough questions for Mama: "God, save us from what?" (And following was our first discussion of heaven and hell . . .)

During Mass, I was absolutely delighted to have John asking questions, indicating for the first time that he was listening to those zillions of words over the course of an hour I assumed he was tuning out (making me think of the teacher in "Charlie Brown"). When the first epistle of the Prophet Isaiah was read, John perked up: "Mama! A prophet! She said 'prophet'! Like the prophet Jonah! What is she talking about?" I told him he was right, had good ears, and he should listen more to hear what the Prophet Isaiah had said.

Then when the priest was giving the homily, he mentioned something about yelling. John tugged at me, "Now do we get to yell?" He'd been so hoping that we too could yell at today's Mass, the way that the people yelled Hosanna! when Jesus entered Jerusalem. Little Boy was disappointed to learn that he still could not yell.

Then during the Canon, John heard the name of John the Baptist and said, "John the Baptist! He's in my heart!" Yes, he is one of your patron saints, honey!


In the afternoon, we shrouded many of our holy images at home in black cloth (as I had no purple cloth handy). When I see the statues in our parish shrouded at this time of year, I miss seeing them, but I was quite startled to feel a real sadness in my heart to now look around our home at all these black shrouds. It feels like some good friends are gone! Or maybe even dead! I really had no idea how much comfort I take in the holy images with which we've decorated each room in our home.