my little blonde Therese icon

The Bun is six, which is never easy, but she seems to be suffering from sixness more than average.  I can’t remember how it all came to a head, but the SuperHusband and I agreed we needed to take drastic action.  Child would be sent to either Piano or Karate.

Piano won for a whole host of reasons.  But wow: Expensive.   (More so because for part of that host of reasons, we opted to go with Not the Cheapest Teacher.  Even though said teacher tells me we are getting a parishioner discount.  I don’t want to know what full retail is.)  Apparently I have been massively spoiled by our super-bargain activities up to now.

So the deal is, and it all fits with the Addressing the Sixness action plan, that the Bun will clean up the trash in our yard once a week, thereby earning $1.  And she will put that money in an envelope and give it to her teacher, and we will pay the balance of her tuition.  Her teacher is thrilled.  (Yay teacher!  This is why we picked you.  Plus you are a good musician, that didn’t hurt either.)  The children have pointed out:

  • It is hardly any money at all.
  • We, the parents, are paying her that money.
  • Which she then gives back to us.
  • So how exactly does that help?

The mother silenced this questioning from the masses with pointed observations about her powers to tax, commandeer, and empress.

But the mother feels this way herself.  Not towards the Bun.  We are extremely happy with the piano plan all around.  Our yard is cleaner (yay!); our six year old has two different fronts on which she is developing confidence, skill, and self-discipline; and she has a sense of ownership over her lessons.  She helped pay for it with her own labor.  It is valuable.

No.  The mother feels this way towards God.

The Bun correctly observes that her contribution is very, very little.  My contribution to the work of Jesus?  Very, very, very little.  (Technically: Even littler than that.)  Plus the other similarities: Everything I do give came from Him anyway.  And He has to hound me even more relentlessly than I have to supervise the piano-player.  And He’s perfectly capable of taking care of the entire universe Himself, so what use am I anyway?

And this is a great consolation.  Our era is awash with talk of greatness.  Jesus isn’t asking me to be great.  He knows I can’t be great.  He knows the size of the problem — our whole fallen world.  He knows that He has to carry the load.  But He’ll let me help him, if I’m willing.  He’ll let me really help, and it will be good for me, and it will be the amount that is the size for me.

So that’s what I’m thinking about lately.   Being more like the Bun.   I like it.

Have a mission for you today:

Good morning, it is Thursday, and with any luck something sorta bad will happen to you.

Not really bad, I hope.  But just some generic rudeness, minor aches and pains, maybe some annoying bureaucratic snafu.  I hope this because I need to borrow it, on behalf of this baby:

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/joannamaureen

Go ahead, start offering up.  Thank you.

[PS: As an alternate route: Have a perfect perfect perfect day, and use a little bit of your resulting leisure to pray for baby Joanna.  That’d do just as well.  Or have an average, uneventful day, and direct some of your default prayers her way.  That’s good too.  I’ll take ’em anyway I can get ’em.]

–> Please note: the ‘donate’ button on the caringbridge site does NOT cause any financial assistance for the families who set up sites there.  Just pray.  No money.  Just pray.

I am totally ready to beg for funds on behalf of the Scheidels, perhaps to be sent through their parish, but at this time there is nothing set up for that.  Which is fine, because although Jackie and Jason would be perfectly happy to eat and have a house, the only thing they really want is for their baby girl to live.

So please pray for that today.

Thank you.

***

PS: In the event you happen to have said a prayer for the missionary family I quoted Tuesday, FYI Danny Pye is out of jail.  Yay.

other people’s words

Hey, look I’m being like Dorian and outsourcing.  Because I’m teaching tonight, plus I was being responsible today (reduced goofing off), plus Christian LeBlanc e-mailed this link to an article of his on the origins of the French language.

So go read that.  It’s interesting.  And then if you’re still bored, you can come back here and click on the link to the Verb Conjugator (many, many languages offered) and entertain yourself with that for a while.  That’s what he was doing when he had the presence of mind to entertain me.

–> Try not to blush when your boss asks you what you’re doing, and you insist you were just, er, conjugating.  Oh yes, one of THOSE sites.  Sure.

40 pictures = 40,000 words?

Hey and here’s more good new media, h/t to Fr. V.  I think this one fits into that whole ignatian-imagination-meditation topic we were on the other month.  I never really thought about what 40 days in the desert really looked like, until someone drew me a picture:

 

And I tell you I don’t watch TV.  Ha.  Yes I do.

Underrated Media

Julie D. at Happy Catholic reminds us to promote catholic media today.  I’m lousy at these coordinated things — such an excess of self-discipline and order required.  My thought one week ago, as I lay in bed calculating the hours until midnight:  It’s not necessarily that I am a slave to my passions.  Sometimes I’m just a very reliable servant.

But often, yes, slave.

Rather than be organized, then, I’m going to just give you a few of my top favorite underrated blogs.   My list of well-known favorite catholic sites is in the sidebar.

Brandon at Siris is not only much smarter than me, he is also the true boy scout of internet-philosophers.  Here is where he answers my question about Intentio.

John McNichol barely blogs, but that’s because he is actually writing books.  Which I guess makes him “old media”, but gee, who else out there is taking care of catholic boys in need of more action/adventure novels? Do you really want your son glued to some blog, when he could be reading chestertonian steampunk instead?

Christian LeBlanc explains the catholic faith to sixth graders, which I suppose makes him too smart for the internet, too. But since most of us internet Catholics really need a proper sixth-grade religious education still, he posts his lessons on his site, and also links them to Sunday Snippets.

And my last under-rated catholic blog to promote today is my friend John Hathaway’s.  If St. Therese of Lisieux were a married American catholic man with Asperger’s and Marfan syndrome, who really dreamed of being a missionary priest to Haiti but instead was homeschooling his four kids, teaching college English, and doing all things lay-carmelite, that would be John.  You begin to see why I like the guy.  (And his wife, but she is too sensible and too busy to blog.)

***

Speaking of underrated means and methods, here’s this bit of reflection is from a non-catholic blog, written by an evangelical missionary in Haiti, whose husband has been in prison for 5 months now.  Could just as easily be the wife of St. Thomas More writing here:

What? Huh?  Glory in suffering?  But you know what, it’s true.  One thing I’ve noticed is when you are suffering God doesn’t usually take the problem away immediately.  He’s not a magic wand to take away all your troubles.  You suffer and you suffer more when you are a Christian.  I have suffered so much in the past 5 months.  However I have noticed that thru my suffering I have changed, how I react has changed, and how I communicate has changed.

Read the whole thing here.

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Catholic Media Promotion Day facebook page is here.  You can make your list on your blog and then post the link on their wall, or just recommend some links directly on the wall.

About the Required Penances

In reading and talking with assorted friends elsewhere, the details of the various lenten penances keeps coming up.  What if you’re a vegetarian, do you have to do something extra?  What if your favorite meals are meatless anyway?  What if you are forced to go to a barbeque buffet on a friday (social obligation, large gathering, no one studying your plate)?  What if your life is such absolute misery right now that though you had planned extra penances on top of the obligations, you are too sick to pull them off?

And meanwhile, here are the Orthodox, who don’t play around with their fasts.

My thought is this:  Just do what the Church says.

The church doesn’t ask the impossible.  We’re told when we fast, to eat enough to maintain strength.  There are exemptions for people with medical needs that prohibit fasting or abstinence.

The Catholic Church takes sort of an opposite tack from the Orthodox, but either approach makes sense.  Catholics are given a bare-minimum assignment, and reminded that we who can do more, should do more.  Always.  How we fill in that blank is up to the individual to discern.  The Orthodox go hard and strong as  a blanket policy, and then your priest directs you on how to modify your observance of the fast per your state in life and spiritual maturity.  Two sides of the same coin: What you can do, you should do. What you cannot, you cannot.

As Catholics, I think our Lent Lite approach helps focus us on one thing: Obedience.

Not creativity, not “spirit of the law”, not Who Can Be the Saintliest.  If you are vegetarian, it is easy to obey.  If you are at the barbeque buffet forced to eat nothing but rice and mushy greenbeans and the little protein bar you stuffed in your pocket because you knew this was going to happen, well that’s a little harder.  (The Orthodox are laughing at you, of course, as you offer up your macroni-and-cheese-eating, but never mind.  They are laughing at all of us.)

But obedience.  Simple, unfettered, unworried obedience. That seems to be message #1 the Church wants us to learn today.

Seems timely.

 

[And yeah, it makes people super mad when you admit to it: That you’ll change your life in some small way for no other reason than The Church Says So.  Which is kind of a perverse pleasure for us curmodgeons, thinking of who we can really shock and alarm by eating our tuna with such docility. Ha.  Lent has its upsides.]

 

 

 

Lent-o-rama: Please Advise

Bearing asks for advice on how to assist children with their lenten devotions:

. . . I was not a child growing up in a practicing-Catholic family.   I literally do not know how to encourage a Lenten devotion without becoming Lent Cop Mom.

Seriously.  Help me out here.  . . .

Since I know I have a few readers here who could answer this one, and because I want to know the answer too, please go read the whole thing and then inform us.

Thank you.

Craft Idea: Painting Fans

I don’t do crafts.  But sometimes, yeah, I do crafts.  This was our activity for the 9 y.o.’s birthday party, but it would lend itself to a VBS project.  So I share.

Who were the artists? 18 Girls at the party, ages 3-13.  Two of the girls (ages 4 & 6) played on the back porch the whole time, the others painted.  All 16 painters, including a few very energetic ones, seemed to enjoy the project and stay focused on their work.

What we did: We painted folding fans.  We acquired a box each of these white fabric ones, and these wooden ones.  You find them in the wedding section of the craft store, and these were 18-count boxes.   We used bottles of washable tempera paint, and also offered markers and glitter-glue (already on hand).   For the paint we purchased six-packs of small bottles in metallic and glittery colors, and I think this worked well because no matter how hapless the artist, your paint selection was guaranteed to coordinate.

VBS Themes? This would be a great project if you are studying a saint who lived in a time and place where folding fans were widely used.  One of our guests ran back home and brought a list of Japanese words she had from school, and two painters used that for their design.  –> For any VBS lesson, you could provide a selection of possible design elements that suits your theme for the day.

Paint Control: Each artist received a cheap saucer-sized paper plate for a pallette.  I squirted nickel-sized samples of desired colors on each girls’ plate.  The girls got the message, and when they re-filled their paint, they took just a little at a time.  I issued new plates on request to a couple artists who needed larger or refreshed pallettes.

Brush Protection: Our array of brushes included old toothbrushes, cheapo kids’ water color brushes, good quality kids’ brushes, and really nice adult painting brushes.  I handed out the better kids’ brushes to the girls (one thin, one thick for each to start), but they were free to help themselves to anything on the table.  No brush damage!  I think that fan-painting lends itself to good brush technique because of the small surfaces.

Rinse Water Management: I used short, heavy mugs and glasses for the rinse water, and filled them no more than half-way.  Girls shared cups placed in the center of the table, and I renewed the water on request.  Low center of gravity pays off: no water spilled.

Budget: Ours fans were on sale for well less than $1 a piece, but suggested retail was something like $18.99 for an 18-count box.  So shop around if your budget is tight.  I spent about $10 on paint, and used perhaps a third of it.  You could no doubt do much better on paint prices.  –>  We will use our leftovers on other projects, but for VBS, half-used paint bottles can easily turn into waste.  If you need to strictly control the budget, pick just a few colors, and don’t open a new bottle of a color until you’ve finished the old one.

I can’t remember what the paper plates cost, but they were the super cheap ones, and for 16 painters we went through maybe 20 plates.  I passed out napkins or paper towels on request, used a handful of those.   I already owned the other supplies — brushes, rinse water cups, markers and glitter glue.  Most people just used paint. On the wooden fans, this project could be done exclusively with markers if desired.

The paint needs to dry! I used old shower curtains to cover the carpet initially, and then used them to cover the shelving where the girls put out their fans to dry while we had birthday cake.

Project Time:  I estimate we spent about 30 minutes on this project?  In a classroom setting, you would want to have a second activity on hand for students who finish quickly.   It would also be nice to have a come-back-later option for students who chose a very detailed design and ran out of time.

Caution: Everyone wants an extra fan.  Just say no.