Mama-luia

I'm more than ready for Advent... well, not in the sense of being 'ready' like the physical preparations have been made, but boy, I am relieved to move onto a new liturgical season! And a new liturgical year ! November has been a dreary month, as is her unwelcome but predictable pattern, so the lights of our Advent wreath and the soul-stirring hymns that I have loved since I was a child are a welcome change to the bleak nothingness of the November we are just about to wave farewell to. Isaiah and I put up our December saint calendar yesterday after dinner. No, it's not December until Friday, but I just squeezed the last few days of November on the top row, and moved everything up. Seeing a visual of all the beautiful feast days approaching already filled me with excitement and awe. The kids can hardly believe how soon St. Nicholas day is, which they dearly love. I can hardly believe how soon Christmas is... so much yet to do. But Advent... I love it as a season ...

One more guest post, from my darling daughter. I love Daddy and he loves me. I love when it is the morning. I love Mama. I like cake and I love the song "Five Little Ducks Went out One Day." I love Elijah and my cousins. Anna

I am pleased to offer another guest post from my dear second-born son, Isaiah. Apparently writing is in the family! Take it away, Isaiah. My robot is going to be a smart robot and his name is Helper and he is going to have a jetpack. He's going to blast off this planet as soon as I get him built, and I'll bring him to school and get him blasted off. And I shall get blasted off in no time at all and he is going to be super cool. Isaiah

Today I have the pleasure of sharing a guest post from none other than my own son!  He watched me type up a post recently and asked if he could try it as well. I just worked away at a pot of soup in the same room while he typed, and he needed minimal instructions. Thanks for contributing, Noah! My name is Noah. I'm 8 years old. My favourite sport is kayaking. I'm in Gr.3.My favourite subject is science. I've already written 1 story; it's main character's name is Anna. It is a fiction book. The reason I want to write a blog post is because I like writing. I am also writing a story. I  LOVE  writing!                                                                                          This is me. I like listening to audio b...

Lovely little Anna turned four three weeks ago. Four is such a wonderful age! Suddenly your toddler-ish child seems so grown up and capable of new things, but with the precious imaginative innocence of a little child, too. We celebrated her birthday with family in the city, and my dear sister made her a beautiful cake iced in pink and turquoise, her favourite colours.  I just love her sweet expression here, just so dear and lovable.  Our little lady is getting so wise and mature! We then had a party with a number of her friends at our house. It was another slapped-together 'theme party' (in very loose quotation marks) in honour of butterflies. To give you a sense of the lack of preparation on my part, I actually hid the prizes for the scavenger hunt while the kids were already there. And I have no photo at all to prove it happened. She didn't seem to mind my disorganized state, though. Just to have a bunch of sweet little children over for pi...

So where was I? Goodness. Time just flies and flies on by. I am the self-appointed 'keeper of memories' at our home, in part because Patrick self-admittedly has a poor memory for details, so my lack of blogging feels like these memories will get otherwise lost. Must get back at it! *** So much of the time, I'm running through my days. I said wistfully the other day how I missed when Anna was a baby and the boys were too little for school. We made our own schedule and spent our days as we pleased. I read them the entire corpus of Laura Ingalls Wilder that year while nursing Anna... we made a lot of cookies... it was good and relaxed and peaceful. Now life feels like Hurtling them Into the Next Stage phase. Not that I am trying to make them grow up , but I mean my days are just so dictated by the getting ready for school, the decompressing from school, getting dinner on the table, getting bedtime going... there are so many routines to keep up that it feels like...