Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, from our crew to yours! I hope everyone had a wonderful, restful day.

Divine Mercy Crafts

We are attempting to do the entire Divine Mercy Novena leading up to Divine Mercy Sunday.  I say attempting to because we seem to rather stink at follow through on things of this nature lately.   But we are trying again.

As we are starting the novena, we have made a few crafts to help the younger children understand a little better.  Sean made this Divine Mercy Craft yesterday.  He even managed to find blue and red glitter to put on it.  Catholic Icing also has a wonderful Divine Mercy countdown craft you can make using the original craft as the counter.  But my glue gun is missing so we won't be doing that this year. 

Today several of the middle children made this Divine Mercy Lacing project.  This project is great for giving them their own one decade counter for saying the chaplet, complete with the prayers written on each bead.

Well also spend some time reading this book and listening to the Glory Stories audio on St. Faustina's life.  Hopefully this will help the children learn the story behind the Divine Mercy.  We've also found a few coloring sheets to use as well and I plan to see if EWTN will be running any Diving Mercy shows for the kids this week. 

Saturday at Home Depot

Today Dad was actually home to take the kids to the workshop at Home Depot. Everyone was very happy to have him along to help.  I know I loved knowing that I was not going to be the only person getting my fingers hit with a hammer today.

We took the 6 little ones with us today.  Ellie hung out on my back and the rest of the kids built bird feeders.  I think this was only the first or second time Robert has been able to go with us so he was beyond thrilled.

Liam took off and had his project finished perfectly well ahead of everyone else.  This is pretty much normal for him.  He is truly meant to do projects such as these.  His entire demeanor changes while he is working with the wood.  It's rather nice to see hm truly engaged in a project like this.

Everyone did a great job and we will be keeping many birds well fed this year. 

Resurrection Eggs

We pulled out our set of resurrection eggs today.  Yes, you can get creative and call them Paschal Mystery Eggs or Holy Week Eggs or make your own version but I bought ours a few years ago and am quite happy to have someone else do some of the work for me.  Especially when you can watch for sales and get them fairly inexpensively.

This year I also added some printables to go with the eggs.  I plan to laminate them later this weekend and hopefully add some velcro dots to keep the pieces together.  Assuming I can find my leftover velcro dots.  They walked off my desk the other day.

Even Ellie joined in the fun this year.  And the growling older children who seem to think at times that activities such as this are slightly beneath them.  Until the other children can't answer the questions, then all of a sudden it's "Oh, oh, I know, pick me" so I keep insisting that they stay involved. Because I am mean like that.

While I would not rely on these eggs as the only instruction your kids get on the meaning of Holy Week, I do think they are a wonderful hands-on way of helping them figure things out.

We Don't. . .

We certainly do not stand on the LEGO table in this house.  Nope, never.

We also would never even begin to imagine standing in a book box around here. 

Nope, those things do not ever happen in our house.

Last Supper Project

On Tuesday I printed out everything we needed to make this project for Holy Thursday.  Then we got busy (I realized I probably should not go shopping on Good Friday and really needed to get the groceries on Thursday instead), Alan came home early, and I fell asleep.  It was a much needed nap but it meant our Holy Thursday project was not finished until Good Friday.  Oops. 

a homemade last supper

Katie, Abby, Liam, and Kieran helped with this project.  It was a bit harder to get the egg cartons to stay together than I thought it would be and I imagine the entire thing would have gone together better with a glue gun rather than glue sticks.  But my glue gun is missing.  Guess I need to do something about that.

I love the finished project even if Katie did repeatedly cut off noses, beards, fingers, and in one case half of a face.  Now to find something for Good Friday.

Playing With Color

Today I had several of the kids paint a primary color wheel.  Something I just stumbled upon but thought would be perfect for a bit of art.  This involved digging out the water colors and realizing that they all got put away without pain tbrushes.  No paint brushes in the art bins in the living room or in the paint bin in the school room. So I go upstairs to pull out the paint brushes from the painting project I did with Little Flowers only to discover that most of them were never washed and are now covered in 2 week old acrylic paint.   So now comes the internal debate of do I attempt to save the brushes or just toss the lot of them since I bought 99 cent bags of assorted brushes and call it a day.

Anyway, I had a few kids who did the project properly and ended up with a very nice band of secondary colors in their color wheel. Then I have one who decided to paint to his own drummer and paint the middle spots himself.  The wrong colors.  Sigh. At least he used the secondary colors.