Every Family Shall Carry Home a Blessed Candle

"On Candlemas Day every family should carry home a blessed candle, which will have a special place on the home altar and will be lit in all moments of danger, during thunderstorms, during sickness, in time of tribulation." ~ Around the Year with the Von Trapp Family

My pastor announced that he will bless candles on Candlemas Day, February 2nd. Now, my only challenge is finding a box big enough to carry our candles to church to be blessed! This feast, so rich and sensory, is a true treasure, nearly lost to modern times.

I am just beginning to understand how the candles of Candlemas are inextricably tied to the Feast of the Presentation.  My dear friend Donna is such a good listener.  I think that she is especially blessed with this virtue because she has suffered so in her lifetime.  She was widowed very young and has since cared for her aging mother. Whenever I go to her to sort my own trials, she prays with me on the phone.  And then, she promises to "light a candle." She almost always has a prayer candle lit, I think.

When Our Lady took Jesus to the temple and Simeon greeted them, he recognized the light first. He said that Jesus was "the light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel."  Then, he told the Blessed Mother that she would suffer: "Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted and you yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." 

She did not understand but she did know that she knew the Light, the Lord, was hers in her suffering.  When we suffer, we turn to the Lord, who came as light and life to the world. And we can light a candle to remind us of those words of Simeon who coupled forever the suffering with the Light. What beautiful sacramentals candles can be in the domestic church!

I've always loved candles; I am drawn to light and beauty.  In candlelight, the hard edges of the world are softened. Now, I feel drawn to them as I'm drawn to prayer.  Christ settles over the candlelit room and softens the edges of the harsh world while illuminating my soul with His holy will.  We appeal to our senses when we prepare our homes with candles to use throughout the year.

For many years, my family has enjoyed advent candles.  My children like to light them, like to snuff them, like to sing about lighting them.  Those pink and purple tapers bring the liturgical year to light every night at our dinner table and I'm always sad to put them away. They are replaced right after advent with gold candles for the Christmas feast, but when that season ends, there are no candles on our table.

This year, I decided to buy some blue pillar candles for the table for the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God.  I was so pleased with this new tradition (just once and it's a tradition), that I started thinking about how we could bring the liturgical year to our table all year 'round. Combined with traditional prayers keyed to the calendar, the candles would be a visual reminder of the life of Christ in the Church.

I researched traditional symbols for different seasons of the liturgical year and I bought pillar candles in appropriate colors. To the traditional green, purple, and gold or white, I added blue candles to use for Marian feasts. Next year, I will make the candles from beeswax, but in the interest of time, this year I purchased paraffin candles.

Using very thin beeswax, the children cut liturgical symbols and melted them onto the pillar candles. There are flowers and hearts on the Marian blue candles, fish and loaves of bread on the green candles, an empty tomb and an egg on the white candles for Easter. The result is a series of liturgical candles to use throughout the year at the dinner table.

Then, we made some blue novena candles using beeswax and soy wax with some blue dye in large Mason jars. We'll use these throughout the year on our Marian prayer table. I love the idea of a perpetual candle to remind us to continually come to the Blessed Mother for a good chat. What the children don't know is that my husband will be reminded on all the Marian feasts to bring home flowers for Mary.  With fresh flowers and candlelight, this table will always look lovely.

We also have some tapers to bless.  These belong with our miniature Mass kit. Katie is particularly fond of lighting candles when she sets the altar. And she is also fond of snuffing when she has finished there.

Finally, I stocked up on beeswax votive candles. These are sweet smelling candles that I will light when I offer my prayers for friends and family.  And I ordered an extra box for Donna--I figure I've used at least that many in her house over the years.

Achieving Peace of Education

Helen sent me a little red book in early December that has captivated me.  It's called  Achieving Peace of Heart by Narciso Irala, S.J. The book is a compelling guide to mental and emotional health and happiness. I hope to write about it later with regard to the sage spiritual advice found there.  In the first few chapters, however, what struck me is how much Fr. Irala sounded like Charlotte Mason. His antidote to the exhaustion and confusion of our fast-paced world is to slow down and concentrate fully on one thing at a time. He wants us to cultivate what Miss Mason calls the "habit of attention."

I've been thinking hard for over a month now about this call to simplicity and concentration.  And I can see how the last year has really been an advent of sorts.  It's been a preparation for a serious commitment to simplicity and attention in all aspects of life--from the spiritual to the academic.

While I will certainly share more about peace of heart, right now, my thoughts have been most definitely on peace of education.  The process--during advent,no less--of reflecting upon Michael's education and preparing college portfolios has given me ample opportunity to assess what works for our family.

Charlotte Mason education works.  It's academically sound and produces a well-educated child. It is a peaceful, integrated education.

The Domestic Church works.  A fully-integrated life of prayer at home with our spouse and our children, celebrating the liturgical year and the life of the church gives children spiritual peace of heart.

That's it.  Living books, narration, nature study, Latin (yes, I said Latin--stop laughing, MacBeth). And God, real and present and tangible.

Sounds like a plan.

Lovely Learning Rooms

The latest loveliness fair is up at Castle of the Immaculate. Drop by and be inspired as we begin a new school year. Beautiful job, Helen!

The thrill of a new year!

A few weeks ago, I noticed that it smells like fall.  I wasn't outside, catching the first whiff of falling leaves.  I was actually at the mall, shopping for a few late pregnancy items.  The smell?  The distinctive scent of back-to-school shopping.  Though the fashions have changed, I am happy to report that new shoes, crisp khaki pants, and stiff backpacks still smell like they always did. 

I loved back-to-school as a child.  I loved it even more as a teacher.  And, I admit, I had considerable pangs of wistfulness the first few falls that I did not go back to school in either capacity.

We try to school year 'round here, at least to keep to some maintenance level in the summer.  So, back-to-school can sort of disappear into the ordinary days. This year, when the neighborhood children board the bus, I will be about three weeks from delivering a baby.  Since this is my fifth baby born between the last week of September and the third week of October, I know that back-to-school for us will be followed in short order by "Fall Break,"  even if fall has just begun.

Charlotte Mason wrote that "education is an atmsophere, a discipline and a life."  It's oft-quoted, simple, and direct.  That's been the guiding principle for my summer--a summer I've spent at home, preparing for the baby and hyper-focusing on meeting the individual needs of each child in this house.

With the encouragement and support of much good conversation, I've looked at atmosphere.  The good and generous Lord gave us this home and yard.  Have we used it in a way that is pleasing to Him? Does the atmsophere welcome Him to the home that is His?  We're trying.  We've gardened and cleaned and organized and spruced things up.  I've kept my eyes and my heart on the goal of Marian loveliness.

Then there is discipline.  That's more than a paragraph in a post about learning rooms, but discipline is key to making home education work.  We have our household routines down.  Really down. Order is the backbone of executing all the lovely plans we've made.  If we can't find the pencil, if we don't get up in time, if there are no clean socks for the big game, we will be frustrated and cranky and--before long--despondent over our failures.  There must be order and there must be time planned into every day to maintain that order.  It's not optional.

So it is with preparing the learning room. I take comfort in an ordered environment, probably too much comfort, as if I really have the control that a clean room promises. Just invite a toddler in, all delusions of perfect control will dissipate rapidly.  I've shared much of our "atmosphere of learning" in the preschool posts.  There are lots of pictures there.

• Our arts and crafts supplies are  actually two floors down in a cabinet in a room that has lots of lights and a vinyl floor.
• Language arts materials for little ones are described in this post.
• Math manipulatives for one and all are detailed here.
• Hands-on materials and picture books for to encourage growing closer to Jesus, the Bleesed Mother and the Saints are pictured here.

Here is the big picture of the room where we spend so much of our time.There is only one working computer for the eight of us (Dad has a laptop).  It's a mixed blessing--no one spends too much time on the computer and I definitely can see what people are doing there all the time and we get lots of practice sharing cheerfully but, well, there are eight of us competing for the machine;-).  The computer on the desk with the pink lamp isn't functioning, but we are hoping to refurbish it so that it can run a word processing program, at least. In the clear plastic shoe pockets behind the door are all those little office supplies that tend to walk away--pencils, staplers, postit notes, sharpies...

The basket to the right of the main computer desk holds teacher's guides and books for mom.  The basket on top has nature notebooks in it. Scrapbook/notebook supplies are in the clear plastic drawers beneath it.

There is a big, unfinished (the plan was to paint it to match the table, but I had a baby instead) armoire cabinet filled with all sorts of paper and other lapbook supplies.  On top of it are finished lapbooks and books to ship.

The big baskets are labelled with the children's names and hold their current workbooks, living books, and notebooks. (Michael and Christian have theirs in their room.) The peach crate on the floor holds all the Five in a Row volumes and picture books.

 

Finally, there is the "room" that was my husband's vision and ranks right up there among the most romantic things he's ever done.  When this house was being built, it was supposed to have a two-story family room.  He asked that there be a room above the family room instead. That's the learning room you see pictured here. In that room, he drew plans for a large walk-in closet--the biggest closet in the house.  And the day after we moved in, he installed shelves in there.  And now, we have a real live library!  Some people buy their wives jewelry, mine buys me books!

The shelves are all labelled according to subject matter.  The children all have bookshelves in their room for books that are extra-special to them, but most other books find their way here. I love this closet.  I love the many, many things in those books that are mine to discover and to share with the people dear to me. I love this lifestyle of learning alongside the dearest people in the world.

Education is a life.  It's my life.  I'm learning all the time--learning about my Lord, about my children, about my husband, about myself.  I'm learning how to teach and how to learn.  Real Learning is a lifestyle; it's embracing with humility the idea that no matter how much we've learned, there's still much, much more to know.

What I did with my computer vacation...

On Monday evening, as we were eating dinner, we saw a huge bolt of lightning out our sunroom window.  With it, a simulataneous clap of thunder and...the ringing of a toy microwave and telephone??

Yep.  Apparently, there was so much static in the air that it jolted the battery-operated toys in Katie's kitchen into action.  We thought it was pretty cool until it occurred to me that a jolt that could hit the play kitchen just might have hit the computer in the room above it.  Michael went up to check and he didn't come back down promptly.  I took that as a good sign--must have gotten distracted by his e-mail.  No...he was up there trying to get the computer to even turn on. Long story short, the computer was fried and so was the cable modem.  We fought with the cable company (who graciously said they'd be out August 30th) and Michael spent hours fetching, installing and troubleshooting a whole new system.  And here I am!

So what did I do with my computer vacation?  I remembered that Meredith had invited us to celebrate our kitchens and I turned my attention to making it something worth celebrating.I started by clearing the clutter off the refrigerator door.  I don't really like a lot of busyness there. I've got some magnets of liturgical art that I love (they were a gift from a friend) and some others that are tiny little miniatures of the art from my aunt's collection, hanging in the gallery that bears my uncle's name. These are paintings I want my children to recognize immediately as familiar friends.  That's about the extent of my "Fridgeschooling." I've also got a MomAgenda family calendar and a posting of the family rules and a current chore chart for this week.

I had some art work up but, truthfully, there is not room for everybody's art at one time and it was always getting caught up in the doors. So, I looked around for an alternative.  My eyes lit upon a woebegone fabric sample hanging from the blinds in the sunroom (which is our eating space).  Hmmm...make drapes before the Carnival?  Nah, it's been 4 years since I hung that swatch; I don't want to rush things.  Instead, I taped artwork up to create a valance. Well, I didn't, but Michael and Christian did. Now, the children's art is beautifully displayed, safe from rips and tears and it adds a happy note to the kitchen! (All the photos are thumbnails--click to see it bigger.)

The table in the sunroom happened a year or so ago.  The eating space in the kitchen proper is precisely in the middle of the house.  Our table is large and there are lots of chairs around it.  I felt like I was always bumping into it.  I also didn't really like looking at the prep mess while eating dinner.  So, we moved it into the sunroom.  While disscussing Simple Elegance, Molly mentioned angling a table.  I tried it and it's so much nicer that way! Before moving the table into the sunroom, that room was mostly a play space.  My children like to play close to me and I'm usually in the kitchen.  We've left the play kitchen and some baby doll accoutrements and in the corner are a wooden castle, some trolls, a basket of wooden train tracks and trains, and some Lincoln Logs.

There is not an abundance of cabinet space in my kitchen, so we hung a pot rack above the center island.  I also use the high counter between the kitchen and sunroom to display and store stoneware serving pieces. My sink has a beautiful, wide view of the backyard and I frequently stand there watching family soccer games while cooking and cleaning up.

My kitchen sits squarely in the middle of my house, a fact that rather irritates me sometimes because it's rarely as neat as it appears here.  But there is no denying that it's the heart of my home!