Happy Birthday KLD!

If it's July 31, must be time for a pool party!!







We love you, sweet 9-year-old KLD!

Eat Our Bubbles!

Loving our swimmers!

Girls on the Run

MRD and KLD completed Girls on the Run this spring, and had a blast running with their friends. The culmination of the program was the girls all running in the Race for the Cure 5K, which was great.
I foresee lots more 5Ks in the future! :)

Gymnastics Girl

Loving my precious KLD! So proud of your hard work in gymnastics!

God Bless America!

End-of-School-Year Pageantry...

The Last Supper

On Thursday, KLD's 2nd/3rd grade class presented a sweet play about the Last Supper. It was adorable--and, of course, so was she!
How perfect that their play about the Last Supper was just a few hours before we celebrated the Holy Thursday liturgy, commemorating Jesus' institution of the Eucharist at his Passover dinner with his Apostles.

The Catholic Church claims that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, that the sacrifice of calvary is repeated at every Mass, and that he gives Himself to us in Holy Communion as food unto eternal life. ...

Let's turn to John 6 and see the context in which he says that. John 6, verse 4 tells us, "Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews was at hand." So everything that transpires within John 6 is within the context of the Passover. Jesus is talking to them now. At the time of the Passover, after multiplying these loaves, ending up filling twelve baskets with the fragments from the five barley loaves, He uses that as his point of departure for one of the most important sermons that He ever preaches and also one of the most disastrous from a human perspective.
...
He goes on talking about this bread and He goes on talking about Moses in context with that bread. For instance, in verse 32, "Jesus then said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven. My Father gives you the true bread from heaven, for the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.' They said to him, 'Lord, give us this bread always.'" Welfare state! "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger and he who believes in me shall not thirst.'" And He goes on talking about this some more. The Jews would then murmur at him in verse 41 because He said, "I am the bread which came down from heaven."
...
"He said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood,' which Leviticus condemns, the drinking of blood, 'unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.'"

~ From a talk by Scott Hahn / Full text here.

Thanks be to God for His most precious gift of the Holy Eucharist within the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass! How beautifully the Easter Triduum begins!

Quick Takes Friday

Joining Jen at Conversion Diary for Quick Takes Friday!

~ 1 ~
These Wisconsin politics...man, you cannot make this stuff up. I thought we'd seen the last of the drama when the 14 senators-on-the-run came back from their flight to Illinois. But this Supreme Court election is a whole new chapter. Who ever heard of a Supreme Court race being so exciting and too close to call at midnight on election day? Now, after we thought the democrat (oh, right, it's a nonpartisan position--yeah right) won by 204 votes last night, 10K more votes showed up, which flipped the election back to the incumbent. I couldn't ask for a better government lesson for the kids than living in Wisconsin in 2011!

And I must share with you Bill's master creation election flyer:







~ 2 ~
Remember my bad experience back in January with discovering that I weighed 15 pounds more than I thought? Well, guess what...I lost at least 10 of them. (A few more than 10, but I'm not admitting those were ever really there.) Really! Go me! And that was before...

~ 3 ~
I started doing Atkins on April 1. I love Atkins. It's so easy. You do have to be really committed, which is why I've been putting it off for way too long. But I've been having all these awesome omelettes for breakfast and filets for dinner. Yum!

~ 4 ~
As if anything could be overshadowing our wild Wisconsin politics in the news, now we have an impending federal government shutdown. I think it's imperative that we take care of our armed forces, but apart from that, I say bring on the shutdown. I agree with this post from Pat Archbold, that so much of this is really all coming down to the defunding of Planned Parenthood. What surprises me is that so many people have the misperception that Planned Parenthood is actually good for women. Ugh.

~ 5 ~
The girls started a new program called Girls on the Run, which involves a group of about 20 girls meeting with coaches to practice running and play games and hear about self-esteem for girls and nutrition and stuff. I like the running part, and so do the girls, and I think they're having fun with their friends. So far, they're running about 2 miles at a time, which is awesome!

~ 6 ~
And just when we thought basketball was over...we decided to sign WWD up for summer AAU ball. It turns out that his would-be team is going to have a really amazing coach, and I'm super excited about this opportunity for WWD. Can't wait to see him play with a whole new team!

~ 7 ~
MPD's potty training is pretty much a done deal. We can even go out of the house now, and he'll go potty almost anywhere. I'm so glad I waited until he was 3 and really ready. It has been so easy (can't believe I'm saying that) and he is so proud of being a big boy! Maybe by child #5, I've got it all figured out. (ha!) But seriously--the best advice I've read on this--and I've read a lot over the years--is to regard potty training as similar to learning to walk. Don't get stressed when they fall down, don't argue with them about it or insist on anything, try not to cry when dealing with poopy underpants(!), just cheer for them and make sure they know how excited you are that they are growing up. It's a big achievement--his, not mine, of course! :)

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Happy Spring--it's finally here!
Do head over to Jen's place for more fun Quick Takes!

My Brown-Eyed Girl

Hey where did we go

Days when the rains came?

Down in the hollow

Playing a new game

Laughing and a-running, hey hey

Skipping and a jumping

In the misty morning fog with

Our, our hearts a thumping

And you, my brown-eyed girl.

You my brown-eyed girl!

How we love you, sweet KLD!!

Whole song is here.

What to do on a Snow Day

Hot chocolate, of course!
We had officially 18.7 inches of snow in the great blizzard of 2011 last Wednesday. It was great and is now so beautiful!
Outdoor pictures coming soon...

Quick Takes Friday

Joining Jen at Conversion Diary for Quick Takes Friday!
It turns out that this week's Takes are not really all so Quick. Some are actually quite long. Sorry!

~ 1 ~
I have no idea what to get my husband for Christmas. I never have any ideas. He is the most frugal person in the universe, never buys anything for himself, and regularly returns the gifts I choose (even an IPod, a while back). I'm resorting to the strategy of giving him several gifts that are so small, they are not worth the trouble of returning. Sad, isn't it?

But seriously--not to be too overly cynical here--most adults don't really need Christmas gifts, do they? Bill and I are always fixated on getting each other things we need--is this the right strategy? After all, there is an entire genre of retail establishments--Sharper Image, Brookstone, Hammacher Schlemmer, practically everything in that SkyMall magazine in your seatback pocket--that sell absolutely nothing that anyone would ever need. These stores exist, I believe, because no one really has any good idea what to get their husband for Christmas.

~ 2 ~
I keep re-learning the ever-shocking concept that when I eat healthy food, I feel good, and when I eat junk, I feel like junk. Amazing corollary, that. In the former category, I can't wait to try this recipe.

~ 3 ~
I think this is WWD's best school year ever. He loves school; he's appropriately challenged which in turn makes him highly motivated; he's having a great time with his friends; he's got great grades; and he's doing a really good job of managing his schoolwork independently, even with a really busy extracurricular schedule). I am so thrilled--this is finally, really, truly where WWD belongs. (For now, anyway.)

~ 4 ~
I realized all that stuff about WWD a week or so ago when I was in a conference with both of KLD's teachers, about her math. We were talking about the school's math curriculum, discussing how it transferred into middle school, and I was a bit embarrassed to admit that I hadn't laid eyes on one single scrap of math work from WWD this whole school year. He made an A, so I guess that's okay, right?

KLD, on the other hand, is slogging through the harrowing nightmare that is this 4th grade math curriculum. What a mess! The information seems to be presented in quite a roundabout way--several different methods to solve each type of problem, a requirement to "write to explain" in words how you got your answers, and lots and lots of estimating answers before working the actual problem.

The faculty assures us that this is the latest thinking in how to teach math, but all I see is my daughter, who has always loved math best of all, starting to struggle with it for the first time, and taking all evening to complete her homework because the book is so hard to follow.

I haven't made up my mind what to do about this--I can always just supplement her math at home with Singapore, but my real concern is that this gobbledygook math is going to ruin her math confidence and burn her out on math. In my own experience, this can be a big deal. I wish I could opt her out of the school math, and teach her at home. If the public schoolers can opt out of sex ed, don't you think I should be able to opt my daughter out of math? We'll see, I suppose. But in the meantime...got any advice?

~ 5 ~
My beautiful budding musicians have been filling my house--and the town, a little bit--with the sounds of Christmas! Yesterday morning was the school concert, featuring MRD on clarinet and both MRD and KLD on piano, along with their friends. Last weekend WWD joined them for was their quite-festive piano recital. And MRD both sang a solo and played her clarinet in the school Christmas pageant this week. I am so proud of their hard work on their music--and so glad that they are enjoying it so much!

~ 6 ~
On a much more somber note, as I'm sitting down to write my Christmas cards this year, I've realized that my list is shorter than last year by 4 people who have died in 2010. (That doesn't even include Bill's friend Jim, who died tragically in his forties last January.) Unbelievable. What a year--I suppose I'm ready to put 2010 in the past! May God bless our dear ones and grant them eternal rest.

~ 7 ~
You know what? Bill's job being eliminated last August was--no kidding--the best thing that could have happened. He is like a whole different person without that nasty job from H-E-doublehockeysticks, and now I have my husband back. He is (mostly) happy, relaxed, enjoying the kids, and we are having fun hanging out while the kids are at school. Too much fun...as in, we can't keep this up forever. At least one of us has got to start bringing in some cash pretty soon, methinks!

One more delicious week until Christmas!! Enjoy!!
And go see Jen for everyone else's great Quick Takes posts!