Annunciation

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, the day of the Incarnation, when the Word of God took flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  For nine months He will dwell in her womb.  Although we are in the middle of Lent, the Church suddenly presents us with the expectation of Advent.

Since today Christ began His stay in His mother's womb, and Mary must have begun her preparations for His arrival, I began my preparations for Christmas.  Today, that consisted of making a list of all the people to whom I will give gifts and wrote down ideas for a few of them.  The list is mostly blank, but I have begun.  I also have an ulterior motive for beginning very early this year:  we are expecting a new baby in August, and based on my experience with my first, I don't expect to accomplish much beyond caring for children, doing damage control on the laundry, and feeding my family between August and December.

Happy Feast Day!

Meal Planning

Life around here is a little unpredictable.  What is appropriate for dinner sometimes depends on whether the baby is being quietly happy and cooperative, or fussy and difficult, or I am exhausted because she has been fussy and refusing to nap all day.  It doesn't really work right now for me to plan out specific meals on specific days.  I also don't have time I want to spend of writing a new meal plan every week.  On the other hand, having no plan means it gets to be dinner time and everyone is hungry and I have nothing quick and simple to fix.  That in turn results in grumpiness.

My current approach is to have about ten standard meals and keep the ingredients for them on hand all the time.  When I run out of something, or it gets low enough that I can't make that recipe again, I write it on my grocery list, which is stuck to my refrigerator with a magnet along with a pencil.  I periodically change some of the recipes in this list to keep things from getting boring. 

This solution works pretty well for me.  When dinnertime rolls around I just go to my list and pick something appropriate for today's situation.

On Images -- Part 2: According to Cardinal Ratzinger

I have always been unusually sensitive about idolatry.  When I was in elementary school I went to a (protestant -- I'm a convert) Christian summer camp.  At one point at that camp, we were talking about the episode in Exodus when Moses is up on the mountain getting the ten commandments from God, while Aaron is down at the base of the mountain with the people.  The people give Aaron all their gold jewelry and Aaron forms it into a golden calf, which they then fall down and worship.  At the summer camp, in order to try to explain to a bunch of elementary school children what idolatry is, they played a pretend game with the "pizza god" that if you danced around this thing then the pizza god would give you a bite of pizza in your mouth.  All the other children danced around the thing and pretended to chew a bite of pizza.  I sat stubbornly on the bench and refused to participate.

Protestants sometimes characterize the Catholic use of images as idolatrous.  It is not.  In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger explains why (brief summary):  The invisible God has become man and has made Himself visible to us.  Even in Old Testament worship, images were not totally unknown:  the ark of the covenant had two cherubim of beaten gold on the cover, as God commanded Moses.  Icons (and all good sacred art) come from prayer and lead to prayer.  They are intended to draw the mind and heart to God.  Because of all this the Second Council of Nicaea regards iconoclasm as a denial of the Incarnation.  The Catholic use of images is not idolatrous because there is no worship of images, but only of God (even images of the saints are also images of God, because in conforming themselves and their lives to the will of God, the saints become more and more transparent, so that we can see God working in them).  The images are a sort of window into heaven.

On that note, here are a couple more of the image in use in our home:

A San Damiano Cross over the bed

St. Philip Neri

On Images

Before I was a Catholic, I belonged to several varieties of protestant churches.  While we are not the iconoclasts that we once were, and religious artwork is not entirely absent from protestant homes and churches, this artwork in general has little purpose beyond decoration.  One of the things I love about the Catholic church is that images are used as objects of devotion and aids to prayer. 

When my husband and I set up our household together, we wanted to make sure that anyone who came in our door would immediately know they were in a Catholic home.  However, we have selected artwork that is to our taste (my husband intensely dislikes what he calls "chubby babies with wings"). 

Since we're talking about images, here are a few pictures.

This is what we have displayed on the mantel piece.

An image of the annunciation

thee icons showing Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

a statue of St. Michael the Archangel

a standing Crucifix, in the center

 

A statue of the Virgin and Child




A prayer by Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman

 This is in the first room one sees upon entering our home.  There are images in every room of the house (except the bathroom -- we thought the humidity might damage things).  I will post more examples later.

Gathering Dust

In my continuing effort to perform my daily duties more perfectly, the next item that needs my attention is dust.  My home has been gathering dust for some weeks (maybe months?).  This concerns me cheifly because some members of my family are allergic to dust, so I really ought to try to keep up with the dusting and vacuuming around here.  So my goal for the week:  seek out and destroy all the dust bunnies.

Mess Monday

Sh. Patty over at Sibling Revelries has a great idea.  Every Monday, take a picture of a mess. Then clean it up.  Then take another picture of the nice, neat, clean, organized space.  So without further ado, here's my mess:

It's worse in person, because there are piles on the floor that you can't really see in the picture.  I have a bad habit of putting things down on the nearest available space, and this is the result.

I started picking all this up, and much to my amazement, not only did this corner get clean, but so did several other areas of the house.  So here's the after photo:

Much better.  Now, if I can just keep it that way ...

Sh. Patty is taking a break this week, but hopefully you will be able to link to more messes in the comments.

How to Make Baby Hangers

What do you do when you have a huge pile of wire hangers that continues to grow every time anything needs to go to the cleaners?  You make them into something useful.  Like baby hangers.

I had a plastic baby hanger like this one, and it seemed to me that the perimeter of this hanger is about the same as a wire hanger.  That means I can fold a wire hanger into the same shape as this one.

So you start with a hanger that looks like this, and then you match the hook up with the one above to determine where to bend the hanger for the shoulders.  If you don't have a plastic baby hanger to work with you could use the clothes you intend to put on the hanger to determine the width of the shoulders.  Then you bend the shoulders, turn the corners of the triangle inside out, and flatten out the bottom ...

and you get something that looks like this.  Shirts and dresses hang on the top, and matching pants or diaper covers can hang from the waist of the hanger.

Now I can use all the hanging space in her closet!

Ordinary holiness

Christ says "Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48)

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman says "It is the saying of holy men that, if we wish to be perfect, we have nothing more to do than to perform the ordinary duties of the day well."

I am very imperfect, and since I am a slow learner in such matters, I am going to attempt to acquire one good habit at a time.  This week my goal is to clear away dirty dishes after every meal, instead of letting them accumulate on the kitchen counter.  By next Monday, I hope to have gained the habit of a clean kitchen.  What ordinary duties could you do more perfectly?