Eureka! Pictures!

I found my camera! Huzzah!

I made such a display of emotion when I found it that I embarrassed Maria...she was on the phone with a friend. Can't be helped though. I was really starting to worry that it was gone for good. Sure enough though, I found it when we were cleaning. I was crawling around, digging out all the goodies that had traveled under the couch during the week, and found my camera under there. I have no idea why it was there.

Oh my goodness, so much to catch up on, so much...it's so tedious to upload and such, and my little kids are already awake and flocking, so how about just a few at a time....

going back as far as September!! Here's a blueberry cheesecake for the nativity of the Blessed Virgin...see how the sauce is kinda brown looking? There was cinnamon in it. But it was good! We set 10 candles in it and lit one at a time as we said a decade of the rosary. Then the kids sang happy birthday and blew them all out.


Jack working on his letter formation during our "A" unit.


We have letter boxes with little doodads beginning with the letter "A", and he lays them all out and names them.

Does it look like we're working on a bed? Because we are! We have taken to working at least some of the time on the open futon in the school room. It has high ends and is up against a wall, so by laying a couple of pillows on the one open end we effectively have a giant play yard for Henry. I will often sit there with Henry and another child to do some work.

It works nicely...at least until he starts crawling!

Illustrating a Bible narration....notice that terrible pencil grip! It's so hard to get him to put pencil to paper at all though that I'm not frustrating him by correcting his grip at this point. His therapist will work on that and give me some tips soon I'm sure.


Baseball pics...


Tess and Henry waiting out the hot game day.



Baseball cookies after the first game.


and also cross cookies for the feast of the Holy Cross. We had a cookie hunt. Most of the cookies looked like this....


Except for the true cross, wrapped in plastic wrap, that looked like this....


The kids hunted for cookie crosses, a la St. Helena and the search for the true cross, and Jack found the "true cross". Then we decorated the rest too, because, you know, you have to be "fair".

A cake for the feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. Maria decorated it and put the swords in all straight up and down, which wasn't quite what I was going for, hehe...


We eat a lot of crap, huh? Such is the burden of being Catholic. We bear it bravely. To be fair, a cake divided between all of us is not so much per person, and we take at least two tea times to finish it. Sometimes I send leftovers to work with John. And the cookies were actually one batch of sugar cookie dough that I divided up to use for both the baseball cookies and the cross cookies. And some months are just heavy in feast days too...and some months I'm more motivated to celebrate every durned thing. And we make up for it during Lent. There, feel better? I know I do...

Ok, here's Henry at 5 months...asleep...


and awake!


And Tess with her very first pigtails. :)It is a source of heated debate what to do with her hair. The bangs are way long now and she looks like a sheep dog. I am not sure whether to cave and cut them again or suffer through growing them out.



Excuse all the junk at the top of the stairs. We have been in transition working on this living room for ages. But! Trumpets please! John finished cutting up carpet for me last week, and Maria and I moved stuff around and cleaned area rugs and everything is all put back together again, yay!
More tomorrow!