HA!

My picture-post-ability on new Blogger appears to be back!

Yay!

7 Sorta Quick Takes

1

Anna will receive her First Holy Communion on Mother's Day, but her first Confession is this Saturday, so we've been concentrating hard in our studies to be ready. And, though I'm a cradle Catholic, and have prepared seven children before Anna, there's nothing that reinvigorates my own fervor more purely than teaching little ones about the faith. Now, I love teaching history and literature and phonics and reading, but I have to say that Catechism is my favorite subject. I know, I know. Makes me sound like a terrible Pollyanna, but I love that Religion gets to the root of every other subject -- and it provides key yakking time with the children.( I love nothing better than a little subltle lecturing over coffee and schoolbooks in the morning...) But when the season of "Firsts" rolls around, Catechism is especially fun. For one thing, it's always a perk to hang out with my seven-year-olds. And if their enthusiasm doesn't spark my own fervor, nothing will. Their little minds and hearts are so fertile.

Figuratively and literally.

My favorite image to imprint on our First Communicants is the the notion that they must tend the beautiful garden of their souls for Christ to walk in when they receive Him in the Holy Eucharist. It's especially easy this time of year, when we're sowing our own vegetable garden to make these connections, to associate with the weeding as Confession, and then the raking and hoeing and tending as our firm ammendment and constant work not to sin again, and then the planting of new seeds as our good works. I love to paint this picture in the little one's minds, and it helps me with the weeding and pruning and planting in my own garden, too. Jesus, does truly make all things new.

2

Of less importance, but still very significant: Dan's making some headway in building his own business with a colleague, but to segway, he's landed a consulting job that will carry us for two months -- one that's mercifully close to home -- and hopefully, the ball will get rolling in either his own business or with more consulting gigs. God is good. Thank-you, God.

3

And now a little bit about bad companions -- and an analogy of how it's best to steer our children away from them.

This is a chicken story.

It goes like this: We had ten or so good laying hens when we started out, well behaved ladies, who stayed in the hen yard and minded their own business; they laid about an egg a day each, clucked and squawked and murmered like chickens do, and got just excited enough when the gatherers showed up to make things interesting. Then, a neighbor who wanted to thin out her flock a little, offered us a rooster and a couple of her hens. We knew going in that these birds were raised without a proper coop or hen yard, living like happy bohemians in a hollowed out VW bus in our friend's backyard. We knew they were mixed breeds and a little wild. But, I thought, "What the hey. They're free. More eggs would be good. And: a chicken's a chicken."

But, ahem... No, we have found out the hard way that this is not true. All chickens are not alike. It seems that there really are good-mannered chickens and bad-mannered chickens. Whether this is a nature or nurture thing, I do not know, but one thing I now know: all the best habits of good-mannered chickens can be completely ruined by a small handful of bad-mannered chickens in no time flat.

Here's the ruination: Not all, but a significant number of our good girls have taken to joining our newly-adopted, renegade, bad-mannered chickens in their daily escapes and raids throughout the property. And, while free-ranging is not necessarily a bad thing for the chickens if they gets their tail feathers back in the hen house by nightfall when the foxes and coyotes roam -- it is true, nevertheless, that chickens are a very bad thing for a newly-sown garden.

In spite of all the rainy days lately here in Colorado, we were making pretty good headway on our spring work... until the chickens found the garden. Every pea that I sowed two-and-a-half weeks ago has been pecked up and eaten. My spinach bed has been turned into a lumpy crater-filled disaster area, and my perennial beds have been vandalized, just short of having grafiti sprayed on my tulips. And, so far, no solutions have worked. We've clipped wings, plugged up holes, screamed and hollared... Nothing has deterred the hooligans yet. I'm going to try red pepper flakes and put up some more netting. But if that doesn't work, we may have to rid ourselves of some chickens. Baked or fried.

Can't do that with your kids if they mix with bad company, though. It's best to just avoid the problem to begin with.

(No, really. You can't. Sorry)

4

Oh, and on the subject of weather, dear folks in the northeast, I know you can join us here in Colorado identifying with this Mark Twain quote:

"In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours."

In the last couple of weeks here at our house, we've had several twenty-four hour periods where we've swung from extreme to extreme: lightning, thunder, rain, sleet, hail, snow, terrific wind, tornados -- and then the day will end with a beautiful jello setting in the west.

5

Just out of curiosity, I pulled up Time Magazine's Most Influential List, and I'm a little embarasssed to admit it, but I have to tell you, out of the list of influential leaders, I could only really identify four names, and of the four of them, I would only trust one of them to carry a cup of coffee across my kitchen. That would be Sarah. Glenn would raid the cookie jar. Bless his heart.

Of the list of Influential "Heroes" there was not one I would feel safe in a foxhole with and not one I would trust to to teach a child the alphabet. And, seriously, I can sorta see how Bill Clinton's name got on there, but Ben Stiller? Am I missing something?

I'm ashamed to say I recognize more of the names on the Artists List than the other lists, but am struggling to understand how the Time staff is defining the word "influential" here, as in the other lists. Conan O'Brien and Valery Gergiev are on the same list? James Cameron and Neil Patrick Harris?

And the Influential Thinkers List? Yikes. That's all I've got to say. As I read their biographies, I had to admit some were impressive individuals, but thinkers?

6

For the record:

In our house,

the most influential leader has been Daddy who single-handedly directed the outdoor trim and fence painting being accomplished by the Keystone Kop Kids, and actually made a success of the job. While writing code and business plans for three different start-up companies, doing the Church books, and maintaining a high-maintenance wife. Who loves him very much.

My personal most influential hero on earth is my Aunt Billie who, while fighting a rare form of cancer at 78 years of age, is the ultimate example of southern charm, beauty, and optimism, tied up in a package of resolute strength, determination, and faith. (While my heroes of all time comprise a list too lengthy to print here, but you'll find a good representation in my sidebar contents list under: Saints.)

The most influential artist? As spring unfolds here in Colorado, it's unquestionably the Author and Illustrator of all that is beautiful, our Creator. How could I list anyone else? All the rest are imitations, at best. He really wins top billing in all these lists, anyway.

But, oh, hey... I really should mention fledgling artist, Gabriel, who is teaching us around here the neat little trick of signing our names on pictures and paintings by hiding the letters throughout: a G in an ear, an A in a shirt collar, a B under a nose, an E in another ear... Everyone wants to do this now. That's real creative influence.

For most influential thinker in our house, it would have to be William whose constantly turning brain-cogs keep us all on our toes. Here's hoping the group of us can corral that mental energy into Aquinas-like machinations and away from the plotting of Rocky-and-Bullinkle type dramas.

7

As a last note, I'm having a dickens of a time with pictures on Blogger these days, and, though it pains me to post anything -- especially this lengthy -- without visual eye-candy (Alas!), I have no choice. I don't have time to figure out what the problem is. I think it just may be Blogger. Is anyone else having picture problems?

Jennifer at Conversion Diaries is the go-to girl for more Quick Takes (and other just plain good stuff!). Run over!

Faerie Houses

Faerie Tales

...Look for me where I am not,

And there you may find me…

On the leaf inside the rain drop,

Or… hidden in the tree.

I grow the wings for those who dare,

To step inside my world,

And let the colors of the mind,

Become the story told.

I’m not the riddle veiled by words,

I’m what the dreams unveil…

I’m all the colors of the sun,

I am… a fairy tale.

~ Alexandra Garland

And as the season come and go,

Here's something you might like to know:

There are fairies everywhere

Under bushes, in the air,

Playing games just like you play,

Singing through their busy day.

So listen, touch, and look around --

In the air and on the ground.

And if you watch all nature's things,

You might just see a fairy's wing.

~anon.

(Al fresco dining outside Faerie House #1)

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.

~ James M. Barrie, Peter Pan, Act I)

(The garden patch by Faerie House #1)

...because you see they live in nests on the tops of trees; and the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.

~ James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan, Chapter 17

(Faerie House # 2, made for the little boys who call it the "dinosaur cave.")

Come faeries, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame.

~ William Butler Yeats

The Faerie House construction crew

L-R: Anna, Cathy, Theresa

My littlest guy...

William Thomas, duded up for Mass.

A photo op for Mommy.

Isn't he looking dapper?

Such a little man.

But can he stand still long enough for me to take a picture?

What?

OH!

What Makes My Monday:

That my teenage daughter

crushes

on baseball players.

Do you suppose it's the result of having six brothers?

Or is it that Seth Smith is just a cutie?

Run over to Cheryle's for more Monday Morning Posts!

Anatomy of a Saturday Morning Breakfast

                These are the hens that laid the eggs

Early on a Saturday morning.

This is the girl that gathered the eggs

Early on a Saturday morning.

This is the guy that fried the eggs

Early on a Saturday morning.

 

These are the hands that made the biscuits

Early on a Saturday morning.

This is the boy that snitched the bacon

Early on a Saturday morning.

These are the children that ate the breakfast

Early on a Saturday morning.

Happy faces all around

All on a Saturday morning!

Outside my window...

This morning in Colorado...

Spring is when you feel like whistling

 even with a shoe full of slush.

 ~ Doug Larson

The Feast of St. George!

Last year's post on St. George, with history and links can be found here.

Charlotte's awesome dragon cake instructions can be found here.

For something simpler, Catholic Cuisine has a St. George's flag Krispie treat idea here.

The above engraving can be click-and-copied for coloring, or you can find  coloring pages here and here.

There's an egg carton dragon tutorial here, via Crafty Crow.

In Response to the Guys' Sports Fantasy Leagues

I think we women need to start up a Fantasy Shopping League.

The rules would be a little different from our husbands' sports fantasy leagues, but the idea would be the same.  The competition  would be to see what Fantasy Shopper could save the most money per key shopping season. Here's how it would work:  Instead of bidding for players to build a team, we'd bid for stores and specific items during certain time periods. The seasons would overlap, of course; Christmas shopping necessarily overlaps with ski vacation shopping, and end-of-summer sales bump into school start-up shopping.  But that can't be helped.  It's how the thing has evolved over time and we should be sensitive to the Department Stores bottom lines, of course. We wouldn't expect the retail chains to space their sales out for shopper recovery time or to appease our husband's wallet-sensitivity.

Once we got thing rolling, we could arrange to have sales bulletins texted to our phones and blackberries; and there would have to be an internet site devoted to tallying all the Fantasy Shoppers' savings.  We would have to spend weeks researching shopping trends and loss leaders before we bid for our seasons' shopping routes.  This would require copious amounts of footwork in the field, scanning of sales papers, and trolling on the internet.  Then, when we're off and running, we'll get up at five in the morning to check our stats!  And drop by the computer every time we pass it to see what we might be missing. What fun it would be just watching those savings add up in our ledgers!  We could call our girlfriends at all hours to announce our savings and commiserate on our losses. There would be snipers and cheerleaders, rivalries and clandestine alliances. What a great chance for female bonding! It would occupy our every waking moment: shopping and thoughts of shopping, real and fantasy.  =sigh=  Wouldn't it be lovely?

And I'm sure our husbands wouldn't mind the time and money we'd spend more than we mind the time and attention they spend on their sports fantasy leagues.  Certainly not! They'd be fine with it, wouldn't they?

What do ya think?

"A woman is a creature that's always shopping"

~ Ovid (43 B.C. - A.D. 18)

* I'm just kiddin' y'all...  I don't really want to start a Fantasy Shopping League.  I'm just trying to provide a little relativity to certain sports fantasy league players I know... Bless their baseball shaped little hearts.

Lipstick on a Pig?

Our house is on record as having been built in 1916.  It was one of the early homes built along the railway that sliced through the prairies joining the east with the west in the 1870s.*    It tickles me to think that early westward-ho families, well-heeled enough to afford the train, looked out the windows at the Colorado prairies -- and saw this little house.  It would have been a half mile from the nearest neighbor, a hop, skip, and a jump to the little town nearby.  There would have been no trees on the property yet in those days and the house would have been smaller, but solid and sturdy and built for function.  With no protection from hills or trees, it had to be strong to endure the pummeling of our prairie winds, the soaring heat of our high desert summers, and the frigid cold of our snowy winters.  Year in, year out, this sturdy little house has weathered it all in its spot here on a little rise in sight of the railroad tracks.  Bless its little heart.  And God bless the men who built it. 

But, dangit, I wish those guys had had a level or a plumbob with them when they broke sod and started building.  There's not a straight line on the place.  If you drop a marble anywhere in the living room, it rolls with unerring accuracy, every time, to the northeast corner, next to the computer where I'm sitting right now.  If you need to replace drywall, you need to be a mathmetician to figure out the proper geometry necessary to fit into all the weird angles of the rooms.  All the right angles in this house are wrong.  Makes for a challenge, let me tell you.  The men in this family have gotten very good at problem solving.

 But, to be perfectly fair, the topsy-turvy-ness may not have been all the builders' fault.  This little house has been through a lot in its ninety-odd years: it's supported the addition under its armpit of a cock-eyed living room; it's crouched under the weight of an entirely new second story; and it's lifted its skirts for the digging of a partial basement. It's been pinched and squeezed by the growth of the cottonwood and elm trees some kind soul planted many years ago; it's been buffeted by the wind and pitched by the inevitible, almost imperceptible but significant rising and settling of the earth beneath it.  So, the old girl is technically sound (we even had an engineer check to be sure), but gawky.  Cock-eyed and slightly dissheveled-looking, our old house is more of an Apple Annie than a Grand Dame.

But, she's a sweet old girl, and we're working hard to give her a bit of a makeover in the hopes of wooing a new family to love and care for her, so we can move back over to the Western Slope.  But, it's a tricky thing, this house-showing business.  First of all, we don't have a lot of money to spend on projects.  But, we want to do what we can to play up the good features of the house and distract from the not-so-good ones.  We want to make her look sound and welcoming and pretty, but we don't want to make her  look like an old woman trying to be a young woman.  We don't want to make an old Mae West of her.

We're hoping more for a dignified, aged-gracefully look, like Olivia de Haviland.

So, we've painted and painted and painted.  And painted. (I can't tell you how sick we are of painting around here...)  And we've repaired and spackled and decluttered, inside and out.

But it's still a work in progress.  We're not quite ready to put the sale in the hands of a realtor, but are hoping to get some cluttered corners cleaned, and officially put it on the market in the next couple of weeks.  And, who knows?  This time around it may actually sell. 

We've put the whole endeavor into God's hands and pray that His Will is done, regardless.  If we don't sell it, we'll at least have a new and improved house to live in!  And we'll be racking up points for all the cross-bearing a family has to do to keep a house always ready to show to prospective buyers.  =sigh=  (I blanche at the thought...)  But, it'll all be worthwhile if we can sell this place, pay off our debt, and live within a smaller footprint -- preferably in our old hometown, where we'll have daily Mass and teaching Sisters. 

Fiat voluntas Dei.

I'll post some pictures of our finished projects as they're photo-ready. 

* Interesting fact about the western railroad: The "golden spike" that joined the Central Pacific Railroad with the Union Pacific in Promontory, Utah in 1869 is reputed to have linked the east with the west -- but Coloradans know better.  On the "Golden Spike" line, trains had to be ferried across the Missouri River to complete the journey. The year after the celebrated linking in Promontory, Utah in August of 1870, the Kansas Pacific Railroad, crossed over the Missouri on the newly completed Hannibal Bridge in Kansas City, connecting to the Denver Pacific line at Strasburg, Colorado.  It was in Strasburg, on of our neighbor towns, that the first true Atlantic to Pacific railroad was completed.

We've been watching a little Ollie and Stanley around here...

... and just had to share this musical interlude.



We brought Anna's old bedframe down the other day to replace with a new one.  The besprings don't sound like Stan's when you pluck on 'em, though.

 Darn it.

It's not like I didn't know when I bought these...

....that this could very possibly happen.

Suction cups and magnets are irresistible to the under-ten crowd.

But this was apparently not random.

The toothpaste was next to the coffee pot this morning.

A stool was parked next to the sink.

Apparently some little someone is setting up a dental hygiene station in the kitchen.

My sweet little guy

Gabriel Joseph

Turned six years old

On April 12th.

Gabriel was born seven-and-a-half weeks premature, and had to stay in the NICU for two months.  He was such a cute little peanut; all the nurses loved him.  He was extraordinary because, from the earliest age, when he was still in the hospital, he would smile and laugh.  I'm not kidding.  It wasn't gas, and it wasn't baby gurgling.  Gabey smiled and laughed before he'd even reached his due date.  And he has been a happy, laid-back, delightful little boy every day that we've had the blessing to have him for our own.

I'm sorry to be delayed in reporting the momentous fingers-on-two-hands birthday, but with the busy-ness of the the weeks after Easter, all the streamers and balloons here just didn't make their way into the computer.  

But, it's important, so here's the scoop:

Gabey was very happy to have his birthday party a little early this year so he could celebrate with a big gang.  So, the Friday after Easter when all his brothers and sisters (except Paul -- and Nicole) were here,  Gabe blew out candles with the other Easter birthday boys: Kevvy, who turned 21 on March 25th and Jon, who turned 19 on March 28th.  (Tributes to these guys coming soon...)

Gabe got lots of really wonderful gifts from his grandparents and aunts and uncles and -- well, everybody!  But his favorite present was this baseball glove:

We like our Gabe. He's just a pleasure to be around. Here's the kind of boy he is: Today I was in my room folding clothes when  he came in and surveyed the stacks of folded laundry all around me on the bed.  He climbed up to help fold washcloths, like he usually does, and said, with such a sweet sympathetic look on his face,  (and I quote):

  "I'm sorry about all the clothes, Mommy.  It's just that there are so many of us and we get dirty so fast." 

He's got it figured out, huh?  And he's just so sweet.  I was so touched by his apology that I apologized back to him and told him I didn't mind his dirty clothes.  And he does get dirty, let me tell you! He's not perfect; he and his little brother get into a good share of squabbles and scrapes...   But, when I ask Gabey to do something for me, he always gives me a little salute and says, "It's my pleasure."  He's such a courteous little man and always so eager to help. You can't stay mad at him. 

I so enjoy each of my little girls and boys when they reach this age.  Six-year-olds rock. They just do.  There's something very special about the lingering innocence and the dawning awareness of the world around them that is touching and tender and funny. That's Gabe right now.  He's a very special six-year-old.  And growing up so fast.

I love ya, Gabe!

  

Makes My Monday

The first bonfire of spring...

Building the fire: first the brush, dry grass and sticks, then the logs when it gets going good.

Now posing for Mom (even Brigid, the foofoo-dog).

Such silliness.

Uncle Steve telling a crazy Uncle Steve story...

William believing every word of it.

(No worries.  I explained to him later that there really wasn't a wild albino that lives out in the tall grass and howls at the moon at night.)

Dan just getting the fire going (above).

Now it's really blazing (below), and the marshmallow roasting can begin.  Like so:

(Hot there by the fire.)

(But worth the suffering)

A lovely way to end a soft Spring day.

And a lovely memory to begin the week.

Make sure and run over to Cheryl's for more Makes My Monday Moments