November 2009 Archives

...of a new camera!! 

I so wanted to share some events from the past week! 

• Like the day Matthew wore a gift bag on his head for hours pretending he was a camera - taking pictures and then drawing them for our viewing enjoyment.  He even had a zoom feature, which took some pretty nice close-up shots of me and the other boys.  My favorite was the picture of me nursing Gregory!
• Or our wonderful Thanksgiving Day spent at my Aunt and Uncle's house with two of my cousins and my cousins' 7 children.
• Then, tonight, we celebrated our first day of Advent.  We lit our (portable) Advent wreath, processed into the living room singing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," listened to the reading of the creation story from the Bible, hung an ornament on the Jesse Tree, and then processed back singing "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord."  Nathan didn't do so well, (I'll have to try to get it started a little earlier tomorrow) but Matthew and Andrew liked it.

Anyway, Kevin is researching cameras and, hopefully, will select something soon!!  I really want to get some pictures of the St. Nicholas party that we're hosting here on Sunday!  Better get back to planning!

After nearly 2 months, we are finally able to vacuum again!  We were trying to keep going with our old vacuum. Without the brush roller working, though, it just couldn't pick up much.  My parents suggested a couple of models for me to check out, one of them being the Eureka Optima which they have and really like.  Would you believe that I stopped at Goodwill (for something totally unrelated to vacuums!) and there was a Eureka Optima for $9.99?  We cleaned it up, replaced the filter (another $9.99), and Voila!!


Here's Matthew giving her a test run:

We celebrated Gregory's baptism today on the Feast of Christ the King!

The kids were really excited and kept telling me how excited Gregory was.  I decided we had better still walk to church to use up some of this emotional energy.  So, Kevin ran the errands of picking up sandwiches and salads from 9th Street Deli and the boys and I mosied over to church.

The ceremony was really beautiful!  All the kids did really well and loved seeing Father pour water over Gregory's head.  I love the way our parish makes such a big deal out of baptisms! Blessings and songs abound and Father processes around the church to introduce the baby to the congregation.  Thanks to my Aunt Corinne, I can share a few pictures of our celebration. (We used a disposable, so they are not as crisp as digital!)

Kevin lowers Gregory into the baptismal font:

 


Father and Gregory process through the congregation:

While I read a brief biography of St. Martin, the boys decorated glass jars with tissue paper. We waited until dark and then lit a tea light candle inside each jar.  The boys had a little mini parade in the dark while listening to the St. Martin song.  I didn't know what they'd think of the song, but they loved it and probably would have paraded around for half an hour if we had let them!

We weren't able to capture how reverently and carefully the boys walked around with their lanterns.  Our camera has some sort of a problem and we only get one picture per battery set, so our strategy is to take the picture as fast as possible!!  Here's our two pictures: