Vacation Bible School 2013: The Vatican Express

This year's Vacation Bible School had The Vatican Express as its theme. The M.C. acted as a bus driver taking the children through a tour of what the Vatican is and what some of the key concepts of the church are. It took place during the week leading up to Jeff's wedding, so I didn't volunteer to help, saving my energy for that big day. It was a great week though and our kids thoroughly enjoyed it.

Just like every year, the youth of the parish run this program with the help of some adults. Sam and his friends were in the game room. All of the youth help sing and dance because so much of the evangelism that goes on is in the lyrics of very fun and catchy tunes that the children learn each day.
Aren't they great costumes for the Swiss Guard?!

Natalie was in charge of the Kindergarten class all week and she did a very professional job with them. Many of the adults in charge said that she ought to consider being a teacher!

John was invited to help out only on the last day of the week, since he wasn't old enough to be earning Confirmation hours for volunteering. The guys put on a "Rap" song that they created about the Lord.

Juby participated and performed a song with all of the dance motions with her group for the parents on Friday. Here are the words to one of the songs:

I'm standing on the Rock
The Universal Church of Jesus.
I'm standing on the Rock
And I'm not going to move....

When the storm clouds thunder in,
When the lightning crashes close,
When the rain comes pouring down.
I'm not going to move....

Peter is the Rock and On the Rock is built the Church
(Repeat louder and louder)

One, Holy, catholic, apostolic...

This is a really great program and about 85 kids from our parish participated. In addition, 25 young people from seventh grade through High School run the Faith, Art, Music,Games and Snack Stations that the children rotate through daily. There is a lot of positive energy focused on loving and serving the Lord transmitted between the generations present. I look forward to volunteering next year which may be my last as Juby will age out of the program! I suspect that our kids will continue to volunteer, because this was seriously a lot of fun!

Spring and Summer Book Case

 Larry recently finished The Complete History of World War II and Korea written by Francis Trevelyan Miller and published in 1951. He painstakingly read , a few pages each night, this 1000 page book which is 62 years old and looks it!  I am very proud of him for being such a reader!

 Some of the books that Juby read this summer are from the Hoofbeats series. They are about a girl and her horse, of course!

 She really enjoyed these books checked out of the library. The Stars and Stripes series are Historical Fiction. Each book is about a horse and set in a particular time period. Her favorite took place in the days of The Pony Express.

 Our last Read-Aloud of the year was Caddie Woodlawn written by Carol Ryrie Brink. This story is about a girl who considers herself to be a real Tom-boy. She has lots of adventures such as taking her younger brothers and sisters across a river on a make-shift raft. She is able to prevent the hot-heads in her town from attacking an Indian encampment by riding her pony for many miles, braving the elements, all by herself to warn them of the danger. This is set in olden days and fun to read.

 Our family's biggest reader is John who is really enjoying his life here with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritoes and a good book. He will often ask me to pick up this snack when he has a book he is reading.

He is allowed to eat Doritoes in the living room while he is reading if he puts a clean dish towel over the arm of the sofa. These pictures were taken on different days but I could probably take a version of it every week!

 I will run through some of the books he read this summer. I wasn't fast enough to take a picture of each. He has finished reading every book in the Warriors series, by Erin Hunter, about four clans of cats.

He has also finished the entire Redwall series written by Brian Jacques about a kingdom of woodland creatures and their battles.

I picked up the Newberry Award winner M.C. Higgins, The Great written by Virginia Hamilton while at the library hoping that he might read it and he did. The Newberry Award is given to the best novel for young people published each year. Our library has a special marking on the spine of the book so these novels can be easily seen. The older books especially can be counted on to be a good choice for a great book. He also read Book Three of a series that looked to me to be quite dark. I will discourage him from checking out the other books in this series

 In preparation for the movie coming out on November 1, he re-read Ender's Game, written by Orson Scott Card. This is a terrific book which I also enjoyed awhile back. I recommend it if you like Science Fiction or Suspense. I am hoping that Sam might be persuaded to read this, so that he too can attend the movie at one of its first showings when it hits the theater!

I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen which wasn't exactly as pure as the driven snow. It was about a the lives of circus performers and was O.K. I still haven't gotten around to seeing the movie.

It took me a long time to read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. This book was almost over my head. It showed me what I don't know when it referenced the history surrounding the Fall of Rome and the barbarians who took over, burning books and destroying libraries. Certain monks in Ireland (which was geographically unattached to the continent)  hand-copied books and tried to teach literacy. That's the gist of it. It was quite deep and not as good as I had expected it to be with such an engrossing title!

Agnes Grey written by Anne Bronte ( sister of Charlotte who wrote Jane Eyre and also sister of Emily who wrote Wuthering Heights) was a fantastic book which I checked out of the library from the Classics section. The book is about young Agnes who goes out to work as a governess to help support her poor family. The insight that the author had regarding human nature, parents and children was very astute and quite often I would stop reading to sit and think about what she had just said about the characters ( and cringe!!!)

I also read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn written by Betty Smith who had no idea that this book would become such a phenomenon, voted as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century. Aunt Catherine gave this beautiful edition to Juby to add to her little classics library that Aunt Catherine started. The front cover is inscribed with the birth and death dates of our family tree which also was planted in Brooklyn, NY. The setting is in about 1911 in a small neighborhood and is about the daily life and experiences of Francie who grows up there with her family. It was very good. As Catherine recommended, not all sections are really for children  but would be fine for teens and is certainly a wonderful and thoughtful gift which we really appreciate!

The book that I am almost finished reading is Eat Pray Love written by Elizabeth Gilbert. I picked this up at the church book sale and have enjoyed it much more than I expected to. Natalie saw the movie and said it was terrible and I can imagine that because the author is quite funny in an understated way- it is her thought patterns that are funny and I don't see how a movie could show that unless it is narrated. I really have nothing in common with this author except that she is a seeker of spirituality and she does like good food! It is very enjoyable to read and gives me occasional food for thought.

Hand Carved Bows

I don't remember my mother having to make us go outside in the summertime. Of course, it wasn't 95 degrees in the shade in Vermont, either! On this day, I sent John outside to play and he got creative whittling a bow from an actual branch.

Then he carved one for the little guy who strung it himself with yarn.  Do not look at the knives in this picture, very scary! I don't think I noticed these when I took the picture!

I loved seeing this activity and this bow is still working weeks later. Now that's what Moms are looking for from their kids in the summertime!

A "Grand" Fourth

On the morning of July Fourth, I got up early and decided to make a holiday of it by cooking good food. I didn't want to go spend a bunch of money buying groceries and so determined that we would cook what we already had.

Potatoe salad with lots of hard-boiled eggs, venison burgers made tastier with "All American Burger" packaged seasoning, shish kabobs from venison tenderloin and leftover corn on the cob, and very tasty homemade pound cake with strawberries and fresh whipped heavy cream were all on the menu. I texted the kids to let them know I was cooking.

To our delight, folks showed up including the grandchildren. Sometimes, impromptu gatherings are best. There is so much less pressure!

Cindi and I had on matching outfits.

Golf was the entertainment.

Handsome loves to play with his cut down to size club. He's pretty good!

It was great to see everyone who could make it to just hang out on a mid-week holiday.

Equally grand was spending casual time outdoors with the youngest members of the family.

Timber!

After years of discussion, we took the plunge and hired a team of men to take down first seven, and then another nine large trees from our yard. Most of the trees were diseased and indeed were hollow when dropped and cut up on the ground. Some healthy ones also had to go because they were extremely tall and located right up against the house.

I have resisted this for years and finally Larry realized that if this was going to get done, he would have to make the phone call. He most definitely called the right small business because these guys were FANTASTIC at what they did, hard working and affordably priced. They worked for a set price per hour which sounded steep until you factored in that four men with chain saws, a bucket truck, a massive stump grinder and a mulch maker ( tree branch chipper) came with.

This is the tree that I will miss the most. I have spent countless hours while sitting on the couch homeschooling the kids, watching the wide variety of birds that have called this tree their home. I have observed many birds in and around it through the kitchen window while washing dishes The birds are still confused because it is gone, and can be seen flying in the sky above this area looking for it.

From the front yard, the bucket can be seen way up in these very tall trees. This was no do-it-yourself job!

 Every time it stormed, we had to go into the basement to avoid being killed if one of these trees uprooted and smashed through the roof. There are only so many "Divine Mercies" one should pray before also doing what can be done to help the situation!

This is one of the big dead ones.

This Hickory was hollow through the middle and stood with a hard lean toward the house. This firewood we will keep because of the beautiful aroma of hickory wood when burning, especially if you smell the smoke from outside. It is heavenly!

The men, who worked from 8-2:30 on both days that they were here, left all the wood cut into fireplace length logs. I was very impressed with their work ethic. Being paid by the hour, you would think that they would want to take their time and leave at 5 pm. Not at all. They worked very quickly, cutting 16 massive trees safely into logs in 13 hours total (over two days).  In the past, we have paid  more for one tree to be dropped then we paid these guys for a whole day.

Most of the wood we will give away. We just don't burn that much anymore, now that we have heat in the basement. A guy on dialysis and his family took a boatload of it and a recent widow at church is getting a whole lot more of it, which the boy scouts have started to cut for her.

As an unintended result of this project, we now have lots more LIGHT in the kitchen, mud room and garage.

Although I don't miss the big ugly dead trees, I really do miss the two pretty healthy ones that were just beyond  the back deck. However, I am grateful that we made this decision and took the needed action to protect our family and our home from dangerous falling trees and  limbs on windy and stormy days and nights.

Still Driving Grandma Dolly

With two cars in the shop, Larry had to drive our new van to work for a week. Grandma Dolly's doctor's appointment arrived and Sam's little car was the only vehicle to take her in. You can imagine how much she enjoyed the ride through town in this two seater! I thought about taking the T-tops off to add to the fun, but technology baffles me so we skipped it.

In a couple of weeks, it will be nine years that we have been driving Grandma Dolly everywhere she needs to go. Greg took her the store weekly for a year, but the girls were never able to help regularly because of their duties at the horse farms. I am thinking that Sam may be just the man to step in and help me out with this pleasant task next year, God Willing.

Herbal Essence

I looked out the window to see the three girls sitting together with their hair blowing in the wind!

I grabbed my camera and took their picture, after they suggested that they turn around to get the wind to blow their hair backwards, not forward!

In Sickness...

Larry and I were both quite sick at the same time for a couple of weeks and experienced a paradigm shift as we saw each other as "sickly" It was very much like shades of what is to come as we age together ( Please God!). We were both on the same medicine, a "Z Pack", usually a terrific antibiotic but which did nothing for the respiratory viruses, manifested differently in both our cases. I remember us looking at each other like: "How are we going to get our stuff done, feeling this badly?"

The non-stop Violent coughing was the worst symptom for me, (which actually caused my rib to break!), a thousand times in each 24 hours and Sam had the very same thing. It was like a terrible Flu. In addition to his respiratory symptoms, Larry's knee(s),(arthritis and bone on bone) were severely painful making each step he took, agony. We were coming to the reality that we are ageing! What a shock. I used to be 19!!!!

We are both much better from the illnesses which took every bit of three-four weeks to shake. Larry will soon be having surgery to repair his knee and I hope and pray that it will be total success like his last one.

I found out why folks who are sick like to talk about it and realize that although it may be interesting to the ones experiencing it,... not so much to the folks who are listening to it!!!!!