31 Days Of Me

I have about 15 minutes to write this or my exercise buddy (my husband) will lift weights without me. (Yay Body Beast!)  So this is a quick note to let you all know I have gone mad. I officially signed up to participate in another blogging challenge.  Thirty-one days, people! Thirty-one days of me chatting about a specific topic.  I picked Faith. It's a cop-out, yes. But that should mean I will not run out of things to write about.

Why am I doing this?  Because my brain needs the discipline and exercise.  The brain is a muscle after all.  If you don't use it, you lose it.  There is, however, a big chance that at the end of 31 days I will not have a brain left ;-)

So in your charity, will you come and visit this blog everyday? Only good comments will be posted lol.

Okay, my time is up.  See you here everyday beginning tomorrow! You know I will post about St. Therese :-)

Baking Girl (And Mom): Eggless Sour Cream Chocolate Cake

Because of egg allergies in our home we are always on the lookout for recipes that are still yummy despite the absence of eggs.  We have a standby chocolate oil cake recipe that we love but when I chanced upon this sour cream cake recipe I knew we had to try it.  At the mention of sour cream the kids made up their minds that it will be gross.  But the Baking Girl and I knew that you cannot judge a recipe by the word sour.  

The complete (and very easy) recipe is here - http://superyummyrecipes.blogspot.com/2012/11/eggless-sour-cream-chocolate-cake.html

A few tips -

• do not use the electric mixer to beat the wet ingredients! (that should be obvious but we learned the funny way)
• about the hot milk - pour it slowly so it doesn't cool down fast and clump up the butter, if that happens just stick the mixing bowl (assuming its not plastic) for a minute or two in the oven to melt the butter
• 180 Celsius = 350 Fahrenheit 
• make sure you have confectioners sugar LOL, our cake looked sad without it

This cake is moist, perfectly sweetened and will now officially replace the chocolate oil cake recipe as our favorite.  The children who claimed it sounds gross consumed every crumb of this cake before it could cool down. Even without icing it was so, so good.

Some pictures to share - 

dry ingredients

I love sour cream, my children not so much

we made the mistake of dumping in the hot milk, see tip above

true to the recipe it was done in 30 minutes

umm, what to do now, there's no icing sugar LOL

I don't think these boys need anymore sugar anyway

 We're baking this again today and guess what? We forgot to pick up icing sugar at the store. Again.

Pondering Prayer

 "Man has a noble task: That of prayer and love. To pray and love, that is the happiness of man on earth."- St. Jean Marie Vianney

Today we entered the fifth week of school. This means we took the day off!  It wasn't planned.  My husband took a couple of days off. We were supposed to go camping.  But real life took over so our tent is sitting in the back of the car while we sit at home.  We did have friends over and we spent some time at the park. Blissful. Beautiful day. Full of drinking in the blue skies and pondering the goodness of God.

School is going swimmingly.  We love the routine of each day punctuated by the (extra) devotions we have taken up this year.  Devotions not only for our own intentions but mostly for many of our friends who are going through incredible trials. We pray for a world that seem to be on the verge of madness (or is it there already?) There is so much to pray for.  So we do. We pray, we attend daily Mass, we say the rosary everyday, we are praying novenas, we are attending Holy Hour, we are preparing for Consecration renewal.  We remember those who may not, at this moment, have it in them to pray for themselves either due to the burden of a lessened faith or lessened will or physical ability.  And by this praying for another we too are changed. Our hearts begin to soften to our own conversion.  And boy do I need to be converted!

The funny thing with praying more than we have ever done before is realizing the bounty of time (and opportunities) to pray.  Funny when you do what matters, you don't ever seem to run out of time.

One of the meditations of Consecration renewal is that of Blessed Mother Teresa's consecration words- "lend me your heart".  A plea to Mary, she who alone perfectly loved (loves), to lend us her heart. I am awestruck by the beauty of that.  If I had even a smidgen of Mary's ability to perfectly love then I can truly love my neighbor as myself.  Then I would be on my way towards a conversion of life.

These past four weeks of immersed prayer life finds my (strong) will bending easier to the will of Love.  Don't be too impressed, I was kicking and screaming all the way. The Lord has been so patient with me.  There are days I find myself crying at the recognition of His unfathomable goodness and laughing at the absurdity of my pride.  And overall I am recognizing the joy of a lived faith.  In that joy I am able to pray more and pray more for another.  And I do hope that when that dark night of the soul comes someone else is praying for me.

I hope you have a good week of feasting with the saints.

The Liturgical Calendar And CCD At Home

Speaking at a homeschooling 101 event many years ago, I declared that in our home we majored in Religion. For the many years that follow, it was indeed and continued to be so. We live, eat, breathe, move and have our being in our Faith, in our God. One of the primary reasons we homeschool is the preservation of our children's faith and to instill in them a truly Catholic identity. The (early) days were a breeze with such joyful minds to pass on my proudly-Dominican acquired knowledge from the old country.  I didn't realize how much I owe those Sisters and that dear alma mater that fed me in the language of the Church (via the Baltimore Catechism) until I started teaching my own children. 

Fast forward to this year, four of our five are officially homeschooled. I am teaching four different levels of Religion class on top of CCD materials. I have five million different ideas and plans that need to be toned down a bit! We are very fortunate to belong to a parish whose CCD program is top notch.  For the Confirmation class alone (I have another one this year), they get to be educated by the most amazing minds - of Friars, Sisters and professors at the nearby Pontifical College. It is a priceless gift. 

My intellectual pride moment was given a dose of reality when I asked the first-grader to recite the Our Father and he said this " Our Father, full of grace..."!!!!  Here I was thinking all along, through the many years of praying everywhere and anywhere in both English and Latin, that everyone was getting the program! So this year we are back to square one.  And I cannot tell you how much that delights me.  There is such a sweetness to the early years of teaching Religion.  Kids are so honest and simple and so fun to teach in the elementary levels.  It is also refreshing to be humbled that my first-grader will not be finishing this year with a degree in Apologetics and Church History LOL.  He might know some Latin but he will not yet be parsing Summa Theologiae ;-)

we love our books!

Anyhow, the big question is: how to incorporate the CCD material on top of the home lesson plans that revolves around the liturgical year?  What I did is to set a day to go over the CCD material (Faith and Life and YouCat) for the following Sunday, as follows:

• Monday - First Grade
• Tuesday - Fourth Grade
• Wednesday - Sixth Grade (YouCat)
• Thursday - Seventh Grade

So throughout the week we go through different grade materials and everyone gets an insight (or a review) into what the others are learning. The older kids find the First Grade material to be sweet. I do not discuss the chapters at length as they would be hearing it at class anyway but I do entertain questions. And yes, the above-mentioned schedule is on top of the Religion class I teach at home (Baltimore Catechism, My Catholic Faith)  It sounds like a lot and repetitive but it's not. We cover different topics and celebrate different feast and fast days so it really is like a big party of Catholic knowledge.  There will be cookies and cakes to bake, crafts and lapbooks to create and lots of new fun things to celebrate the Faith.  After this year no one will be praying Our Father, full of grace!  I hope.

celebrating Mary's birthday, the middle child wrote a sweet birthday card and he took that promised birthday gift to Adoration

preparing for today's feast of Our Lady of Sorrows from Seton's Art 1 for Young Catholics

and we will be making this Gifts of The Holy Spirit lapbook again with some revisions

May God bless you, your children and/or students.

The Baking Girl: As I Was Saying... aka: A Literal Happy Birthday Cake

*It seems that I prematurely clicked "Publish" on my last post without realizing it. Thanks to my dear friend Barb for bringing this to my attention. Here's the complete post:

I shouldn't be posting about baking.  Our air-conditioner died on a very hot day.  Fortunately for my kids they can just bike over to a friend's house to swim away the heat.  As for me, well, no sweat- inducing chores were done until the sun came down. If the unit has to be replaced we will most likely wait until we've saved a bit to ease the big ding on the pocket.  Thankfully it is almost Fall.  We shouldn't have too many scorching days left.

Anyhow, a funny little boy turned seven recently. As usual, The Baking Girl was asked by the birthday boy to make a fun cake.  Awhile back, we found this gem of a cookie cutter that says "Happy Birthday" with extra cutters in the shape of balloons and candles.  It helped that this was in the clearance aisle. Winning. It then occurred to the girl that this is the perfect gadget to use on the cookie sheet cake ala Pioneer Woman that she's been wanting to try. It was a fun and simple recipe and the birthday boy was happy (even if Amazon botched the delivery of his birthday present, a rant for another time). Here are some pictures to share:

awesome cookie cutter

this is a basic chocolate cake recipe, nothing fancy

batter on cookie sheet

yay cake!

many hands make for light work

almost there

this is how I felt LOL

ready for icing

a very happy birthday boy

In a couple of days the oldest will be turning thirteen!!!  I'll be sure to post whatever cake creation will be made.  In the meantime, thank you Lord for a reprieve from the heat!  

Back to School And Word Of The Year

Our seventh year of homeschooling commenced today.  Seven years officially but ten technically. I feel like a pro at this, a tired pro to be exact.  It is always hard to transition from vacation to back to school.  Today was a long day especially for the oldest but over all it went very smoothly aside from the usual frustration over some Math problem by the younger kids.  After perusing the oldest child's Religion book I decided to make it everybody's textbook for the year. It is a seventh grade level text but there is nothing in it that my younger kids cannot understand or have not heard of before.  The text is a companion to St. Joseph's Baltimore Catechism no. 2 which, I think, is intended for middle-schoolers.  Other than that, the oldest is doing independent work.I was so impressed at how he really took responsibility over the lesson plans. It will be a good year for him.

For the fourth and sixth grader I am lecturing in Science, History and Latin, the rest is independent work. For the pre-schooler and first grader we are reading, singing, playing and just having a ton of fun while the others do they schoolwork.  The goal for the first-grader is Reading and Math proficiency.  

We are doing a five-day school week instead of the usual four, temporarily.  I figure since we have just come out of Summer vacation, there's no reason for us to take a weekday off yet.  I say temporarily because once the long Winter days have set in we will most likely need a weekday out to counter cabin fever.  As in all plans, they are changeable according to need. I'm not writing anything in stone.

My homeschool word of the year is - IMMERSE. I've been pondering this word for awhile in relation to my vocation. With so many distractions pulling me every which way I knew I had to re-focus my energies on my primary vocation of mothering, teaching and praying. I will write more about this journey of immersion I'm sure. In the meantime, here are some of our first day of school pictures:

schultute 2014

I love this student prayer especially where it says "pour fourth your brilliance upon my dense intellect", I don't think anyone can acuse St. Thomas Aquinas of having a dense intellect!

poring over his Math homework

The Baking Girl doing homework on the kiddie table in her pajamas

fourth-grader doing online Math drills

the almost-seven-year-old and his reader, he didn't want me to take his picture

a gratuitous photo of my morning fuel

I hope you are all having a good school year so far.