...and i finally pull something off.

happy feast of st. therese of the little flower! well, i would be lying if i told you that i was one of those catholic homeschooling moms that is always on top of things and every liturgical celebration here goes off without a hitch...or goes off at all for that matter. i always have the best plans. i swear i do. but usually, i frankly, just forget about them until it's too late. and i don't want all of my kids memories to be "yeah, do you remember when we finally celebrated st. patrick's day in june?" or "man, that was a cool craft we made for the epiphany...in may." yeah, you get the picture. so i was rather proud of myself when this morning (let's not plan too far ahead here, right?) i remembered that today was st. therese's feast day. i scoured some books i had and browsed the internet and came up with a few ideas that i thought were reasonable to accomplish in one day with three pretty small children. well of course, on the day i plan to do something fun after lunch, who should decide to take twelve years to complete her school work? yes, my third grader. so, at two thirty in the afternoon we were (finally) finishing up her school work (we had been at it since eight thirty, with only a half hour break for lunch) and i sent them all out to play (run off some of their energy that was driving me crazy) in the back yard. at three i decided that if i tried the special activities right then they wouldn't be so "special" after all, unless you think of world war three as special. we all went upstairs for quiet time/nap time and i thought that maybe we would get to the activities later. well, i am happy to report that we did. first, we made sacrifice beads with a lovely printable booklet from here. i knew that if i stopped for just a moment, i could make them without the instructions. but really, with a two, five and eight year old...who has time to stop and figure anything out. this little booklet is wonderful.

next, the kids colored pictures of st. therese acquired from waltzing matilda (check out all of her great coloring pages for tons of feast days, they are free and beautiful) while i tried to make these paper flowers. i think the people over at shower of roses had much better luck with theirs than i did with mine. next time i think i should print off the directions in higher resolution in order to actually figure out what is going on. so much for saving ink.

then we finished up our celebration with some "mini eclairs" from catholic cuisine. ours were particularly easy because they came pre-stuffed from the dairy section. i didn't have any frosting whipped up so we just melted some chocolate and spread it on the top. and whenever you can choose between butter cream frosting and pure dark chocolate from wilbur...well, the choice is quite obvious.

they even gave some of us "french" mustaches.

what a tasty end to our feast! i'm hoping to pull off another minor miracle tomorrow...say a prayer for me. :)