Celebrating our Guardian Angels

What a beautiful day to celebrate our guardian angels! This morning we read two sweet stories of Wupsy, a guardian angel, from the Catholic Children's Treasure Box books we're borrowing from my generous sister-in-law. (We've not yet gotten to Angel in the Waters, Pascual and the Kitchen Angels, or the guardian angel story in Devotional Stories for Little Folks, but the day's not over yet!)

We also did a really neat art project with colored bubbles (for "B" week!) which, when dry, made beautiful backgrounds for some guardian angel drawings! Meghan didn't want to draw on hers, but here are Dylan's (on the left) and Caitlyn's. So pretty!

Early this morning I started a batch of Angel Kisses, so they had plenty of time to bake while we read and worked on our angel pictures! They made a lovely snack before lunch, and they are just so easy to make! Many thanks to Dawn, again, for sharing this lovely idea!

Tonight we're having angel hair pasta for dinner, and then I'm off to work, but only until one! Yay! The rest of the weekend promises to be filled with family fun, and I'm really looking forward to enjoying every minute of it! Happy feast day!

Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here,
ever this day, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.
Amen.

Fall gardens

I can't believe it's already October! I was just thinking a few days ago how sad it made me to look out my kitchen window and see our dead garden, but this afternoon I was outside with my two littlest girls and guess what? I realized that there's still quite a lot of life out there! We've been slow to plant a real autumn garden, but we've got a whole new batch of little green tomatoes that I'm hoping will have time to ripen, and maybe, just maybe, it's not too late enough yet to plant just a few more things? At any rate, here are just a few eyecatching beauties from our still blooming gardens. (Oh, except for that poor sunflower at the end! It looks the way I fear my poor Darren must feel some days...pecked to death!) ;)

Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels

I have to preface this post by saying that it pains me greatly to not have any photos from yesterday. I took a bunch, too, but lost them all last night! I kept getting a "file error" message while trying to transfer them to my computer, and finally the only thing I could do was just reformat my memory card, losing, in the process, all the photos I had taken during the day! Sniff! I'm sure I don't have to tell you how sad that made me. :(

However, despite my lack of pictures to prove it, we really did enjoy a lovely feast day yesterday! It's one of our favorites! This beautiful image of St. Michael is one I printed, trimmed, and laminated to use as a cake topper for the delicious devil's food cake we made for dessert last night. Get it? Because Michael battled the devil? Okay, that's probably pretty obvious. ;)

For breakfast we had St. Michael's Waffles, and, because "it is a tradition that blackberries are no good to eat after September 29th because 'the Devil spat on them when he was cast out of Heaven into Hell on Michaelmas'!" we topped ours with warm blackberry jelly! They were so yummy!

We read the stories of Sts. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael from our books of saints, and Dylan did a wonderful job of copying the St. Michael's prayer onto this gorgeous image of St. Michael battling Satan! He and the girls also did a splendid job of coloring the images shared by Charlotte for this special feast day!

Hope you all had a lovely feast day, as well!

Embarking upon the Alphabet Path!

We've really been enjoying our state-by-state scrapbook, adding a new state, in alphabetical order, twice a week since we started school this fall. Last week, we learned that the apple blossom is the state flower of Arkansas, so I thought it would be nice to study apples for our next day's science lesson. Of course, then I got to thinking that it would be fun to do a little apple craft, and figured I could probably even find a yummy apple recipe to extend the theme, and after a while, I remembered the lovely Alphabet Path down which so many of my fellow homeschool bloggers have been traveling this year!

While I thought they were quite lovely, I never intended to incorporate these lessons into our own school year, because, quite honestly, I was a little bit intimidated by so much creativity! But Blair, Charlotte, and Jessica have had such sweet recent posts that I decided to sample the first lesson, "A is for Apple Blossom", to see how well it would be received by my children. They loved it! And, I have to admit that although I have virtually none of the recommended resources, we still managed to make do very well with many of the books we already own!

I printed the cover page and first few chapters of the Alphabet Path Storybook, and found a collection of beautiful flower fairy coloring pages online to get us started along our own Alphabet Path. We read about St. Anne from A Catholic Child's Illustrated Lives of the Saints, but soon, I'd like to actually purchase the core "texts" of the Alphabet Path: An Alphabet of Catholic Saints, A Flower Fairy Alphabet, and, ideally, the Flower Fairies Alphabet Coloring Book and Museum ABC. (Sorry, Darren. My wishlist just keeps growing!) :)

So, here is a small sampling of what we managed to accomplish for our experimental "A" week! (Maybe I should also mention that this was really just "A" day, because I didn't decide to try this until Wednesday night and we don't do school on Fridays!)

We started by reading the first installment of the Alphabet Path story, followed by a short story about St. Anne, and we worked on some really beautiful coloring pages of the Apple Blossom Fairy (from the site mentioned above) and St. Anne (generously provided by dear, talented Charlotte!).

Meghan, meanwhile, was busy with some Letter A coloring pages that I printed just for her!

(Oh, and I should mention that breakfast was also a huge hit...apple waffles with syrup and powdered sugar! YUM!

We read many lovely books that day, including How do Apples Grow?, Apples, Johnny Appleseed, The Giving Tree, and Ten Apples up on Top. There might have been more, but these are the ones I can remember off the top of my head! We finished the day by stamping cut apples onto some apple quotes that I printed for each of the three older kids. They had so much fun with these! I would say it turned out to be a very successful day!

Up this week is the letter B, for which I've got a few more fun things planned, and I'm off now to go make some Breakfast Burritos to get us started! Hope you all have a great Monday and a wonderful week!

My Meggie

Oh, my Meggie. This girl has had more haircuts in the past week than she's ever had in her whole life! And most of them have been her own doing! I've had to hide all our scissors! She cut her own hair once before, but since it had been so long since that isolated incident, I never imagined she'd do it again. Wrong! Lately, though, she hasn't just taken little snips around the sides of her face....oh, no. Actually, it did begin that way, which I managed to even out well enough. But then it got a little shorter right in front, and I had to try and fix that, too. The only thing I could do was give her bangs, which she hasn't had in a long, long time (not since she was a baby) and, apparently, she didn't like them--she decided to cut them off! Yesterday I was too upset and overwhelmed to even attempt another repair, but this morning I figured I had better try again. I started by trying to even out what bangs she had left, and then she and Caitlyn decided that while we were at it, her hair should be shorter all the way around, so I figured, What the heck? Why not?! After a while, she was sitting in a heap of hair, and under the circumstances, I do think she looks pretty cute! I just hope her bangs grow out a little more before it's time for Christmas pictures! :)

Welcome, Fall!

From the learning room: Beautiful fall artwork, inspired by these layered fall leaves at Art Projects for Kids. (We didn't have oil pastels, but achieved an equally pleasing look with soft pastels.) Artists, from top to bottom: Caitlyn, Dylan, and Mommy!

From the kitchen: Warm Tasha Tudor Toffee Bars, served on a lovely platter from my Nana, with our charming tea time read aloud. (I saw these posted on Jennifer's blog a few days ago, and knew I'd have to make some! Super easy, I whipped up a batch during lunch prep today! Recipe can be found here.) Delicious!

Around the house: Brand new Apple Cinnamon Glade PlugIns, plugged into just about every available outlet! I love the smell of fall!