Fat Tuesday ~ or ~ What Are You Giving Up For Lent This Year?

Well, it's Shrove Tuesday, otherwise known as Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras or Pancake Day. Today is the day on which we traditionally go to Confession (or are "shriven") in preparation for the upcoming penitential season, the day on which we say "vale" to our "carne" (goodby to our meat), the last day on which we can behave like fat pigs before Lent. And so tonight, for dinner,well make pancakes, and serve them with bacon. Tomorrow, actually, before Ash Wednesday Mass, we'll hit the confessionals.

We're taking the day off of school in honor of the day today to finish watching the movies we borrowed from the library and clean house in preparation for the Lenten season. We always clean house before embarking on anything important. We'll do a basic scrub down and tidy up today, then throughout Lent, we'll tackle our worst projects, organizing closets and pantries, cleaning out garages and cars. It's part of the whole idea of preparation for us. By Easter, we'll be disgustingly cleaned up around here (at least that's the general idea...)

Also today we're all supposed to be fine-tuning plans for Lenten sacrifices and offerings. As a family, we give up TV (That's why we're watching movies today) and desserts (We're also making brownies and finishing up the ice cream in the freezer). We do still get to enjoy these things on Sundays, though, the traditional day to give it a rest and prevent burn out. Those of us who are of age observe the traditional Lenten fast and abstinence rules, of course. And everyone gives up one or two other little things.

I'm giving up coffee... Pray for me.

The little ones' offerings will tend more toward things like: getting up before 7:30 in the morning on school days, taking all the dirty diapers out to the dumpster, giving up a favorite cereal, giving up the computer, etc.

All good for helping to get a small feeling of what Christ's sacrifice on Calvary meant, for learning that "loving means doing," and for working on our self discipline. We plan to make a Lenten Crown of Thorns for a visual reminder of how our acts of selflessness are pleasing to Our Lord, but we'll do that tomorrow using the instructions from Homeschool Living, except we'll probably use frozen bread dough instead of starting from scratch.

But, today we're going to finish up all the goodies, to, um, remove them from tempting us...

And in between all our cleaning and preparation, we're going to do these pancake mazes for fun.

And, if it isn't snowing too hard outside, we might do a little Shrove Hunting.

I'll list some of my Lenten reading later on in the week, as I get to it. Another of my resolves is to spend less time on the computer and more time with my nose in a book. We'll see how that goes...