Hearts for Home - 1st November

 In today’s busy and aggressive society mothers at home are not given much encouragement to be committed to their role in being home.

In my weekly 'Hearts for Home' post I am encouraging myself and others to commit to thinking about what 4-6 things we can do each week to bring our thoughts, prayers and actions to keeping our 'Hearts for Home'.

I am praying that a spirit of gentleness, generosity in thoughts and time along with loveliness and grace would lead us to be all that God wants us to be.

I pray also that each person involved in 'Hearts for Home' would also pray for any others involved as well.

May you be blessed by this initiative. I pray it brings you and your family many blessings.

So each week list 4-6 things you will commit to that will keep your "Hearts for Home'.
Please leave a you name and a link to your blog (if you don't have one just leave your list in the comment box) and perhaps a comment so we can all see and encourage each other.

If you would like, add the 'Hearts for Home' logo to your side bar as a reminder of your goals.
May God Bless you this week.

♥ Please leave a link to your Hearts for Home Edition on the Mister Linky at the end of the post, so we can all come and visit.
I would also appreciate you linking back here too.☺ ♥ ♥

Enjoying our lives on the 1st November by doing ♥ ♥

Hello Dear Friends,

I am sorry to miss you all last week as you may know we have had trouble with our Trahaearn putting on weight.

Today we had success after a very disappointing couple of days where he lost weight again but today we have a significant increase of 190grams.

This is just to emphasise that fact that our baby is going to be my focus this week with feeding and expressing along with any Feast Day activities. and the extra medical and other unusual appointments for the week.

I will try to get that routine happening  that I talked about in one of my past Hearts for Home, boy it seems like that was so long ago.

We will be having Braedon's birthday on Saturday and a First Holy Communion celebration for a new little friend of the children on Sunday.

I am hoping to catch up on some blog posts...those dreaded drafts that call to me in the night.

And I just want to live and enjoy our family as it is now, even in  this imperfect life we are living.Life changes so fast and the family circle though changing and growing, which is a beautiful thing needs to be appreciated for the hear and now. I am so thankful for my Lord, my Faith and my family that I need to express this each and every day to all of them.

Blessings to you and your families,

Celebrating Halloween 2011

Today was a fairly interesting day for us with Trahearn and his trying to put on weight and getting ready to celebrate these three consecutive feast days in the Liturgical Year.

But I tried to keep it simple, I really did, I tried not to go over board and make it stressful for us and I think we succeeded in this. The stress with Trahaearn feeding does not count, right?
Autumn took this photo while I was ready our very few books regarding Halloween:
Father Phillip Tells a Ghost Story and Pumpkin Moonshine

We made a list of simple crafts and food for the day, this Orange cake with Orange frosting and decorated with chocolate to be a Pumpkin Moonshine cake was made exclusively by Rogan

Pumpkin Soup in our Pumpkin soup Tourine for dinner along with bread rolls for dinner

Decorating the table is lots of fun and we used some decorations from last year too

We decided (clever Autumn) that Spiders- as often used in Halloween decorations could be used to represent the Poor Souls in Purgatory who people have forgotten about and who suddenly reappear and ask us for prayers
Bats - can represent those temptations in life which appear extraordinary and many people chase after only to discover later that they have lost something more important

Another craft was to simple draw the face on a pumpkin moonshine and colour in to hang up for deocrations

If you have no pumpkins to carve how about decorating some oranges.....they look similar don't they. Well we think they were pretty cute.

Love, love, love candle light

We are ready to eat

Sweet little boys together, couldn't resist Corbyn loving his baby brother

I mad a quick felt craft here: simple cut out a pumpkin shape (well as close as possible ) and some face pieces for children to make the faces over and over again.

A matching game weh have had for over 12 years from Preschool Printables

 Spiders on the table made from egg cartons painted black and pipe cleaners

 Blackboard Picture

 Myffy just about to go to bed with her felt Pumpkin Moonshine

 And of course Moran did too.

All in all it was fun and relaxing and we are looking forward to All Saints Day tomorrow.
Oh yes I was going to post a heap of information about All Hallow Eve but need to go to bed before Trahaearn needs feeding again. However I just can't resist this quick information from Fisheaters, because I love sharing why things are celebrated like they are.

So Blessed All Hallows Eve to you all

Blessings to you and your homes,

The Feasts of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls

Last week while in hospital with Trahaearn my friend Erin asked me if she could use one of my old posts about All Saints day for the  Australian Catholic Families Blog, I said sure no problem and assumed all was well.

It wasn't until I came home and started to look at my own blog to plan our own celebrations that I couldn't find a post on any of these three feast days that I began to wonder what was wrong. I knew we had celebrated these days over the last few years as well as pre blogging days and 'why can't I find the posts on this?"

The reason why was that, um, well,  I never actually posted them and I found them partially done in drafts. Oh dear how I hate my drafts, so many posts I part;y do and then leave some never to be published at at all.

So although we have celebrated All Hallows Eve today - commonly know as Halloween I wish to share these past photos of how we have celebrated in our home.
We have no parish parties here or home school groups to join in with for these and so essentially ours are 'home made feasts' in our Domestic Church

We have a wonderful opportunity  on this special three days to celebrate the Liturgical season of All Hallow Eve, All Saints and All Souls day this year and we will gradually do so with out trying to do too much.

So with out further ado  what I would like to share is some of our older photos of our feasts of these days and the celebration we have at home.
The reason we celebrate this at home is we have never lived where it was celebrated within the Church as a parish or had other homeschooling celebrate with us.
So over the years we have clelbrated many of these traditions with in the context of our family circle.

When instituting these traditions into our family, before blogging was a big thing on the Internet. I gleamed most of our ideas from the 4real message board and Catholic Culture.
I have a folders full of ideas I have printed out of Liturgical and seasonal ideas to do with our family, along with lots of handwritten notes over time.

As our ideas had to be home based one of the most influential  articles in how we spend these days was on Catholic Culture but written by Jennifer Miller and I will go into more depth as we cover the feast days per post.

AS you will see the children look a whole lot younger and our little Arwen does not even feature as she was  a babe in arms or a 'thought in the mind of God' still.

These photos are of our dressing up for All Saints Day and the 'party' we had at home. They continue for a while down the page

This is our procession for All Souls Day and our subsequent bonfire for it

Home made graves for the remembering the souls of the departed.

An earlier year again with a combination of All Saints and All Souls Day

Another year-we celebrated in typical  Halloween fashion.

We carved our first ever Pumpkin Moonshine (finding a pumpkin the right shape is harder down under as it is Spring not Autumn season)

We also had a new party complete with Paper Bag Pinata

Rather than Apple Bobbing we had Cheese Nibbling

Braedon has always been a comic and wonderful actor for these type of events.

Decorating our home for appropriate events is a huge must do for our family

Well with this blast from the past published finally I hope to write up today's events in another post and share our fairly easy day of celebrating  All Hallows Eve together.

Blessings to you and your homes,