Our Lady Around the World: Images

If you would like a preview, I have posted images for each title of Our Lady at First Heralds, together with some very short and simple snippets of information about each one. There are a series of separate posts, to which you can find links here.

A note on copyright
Religious images on the web rarely carry any indication of copyright restrictions, or attribution to any source. Often the same image, or very similar versions, will occur in multiple locations. I am assuming that such images are in the public domain, and have tried to use these where possible. A few images appear more individual, and for these I will add a link underneath to show the internet source. All the images I will be posting are readily available elsewhere on the internet, none are taken from commercial sites, and they are being collected here only for convenience and for personal use.

Our Lady Around the World: Calendar

I promised a series of posts on Our Lady around the world for May and have been busy this week doing my homework (it became addictive!). To whet your appetite, here is a list of the thirty countries I will be visiting and the titles of Our Lady I will be exploring. May 31st is the Feast of the Visitation, so I will not do a post for that day.

• 1st - Algeria: Our Lady of Africa
• 2nd - Argentina: Our Lady of Lujan
• 3rd - Austria: Our Lady of Mariazell
• 4th - Belgium: Our Lady of Banneux
• 5th - China: Our Lady of China
• 6th - Columbia: Our Lady of Chiquinquira
  
• 7th - Costa Rica: Our Lady of the Angels
• 8th - Dominican Republic: Our Lady of Altagracia
• 9th - Egypt: Our Lady of Zeitun
• 10th - England: Our Lady of Walsingham
• 11th - France: Our Lady of Lourdes
• 12th - Germany: Our Lady of Altotting
• 13th - India: Our Lady of Vailankanni
• 14th - Ireland: Our Lady of Knock
• 15th - Italy: Our Lady of Loreto
• 16th - Japan: Our Lady of Akita
• 17th - Kuwait: Our Lady of Arabia
• 18th - Lebanon: Our Lady of Lebanon
• 19th - Lithuania: Our Lady of Siluva
• 20th - Mexico: Our Lady of Guadalupe
• 21st - New Zealand: Our Lady of Pukekaraka
• 22nd - Philippines: Our Lady of La Naval
• 23rd - Poland: Our Lady of Czestochowa
• 24th - Portugal: Our Lady of Fatima
• 25th - Russia: Our Lady of Vladimir
• 26th - Spain: Our Lady of the Pillar
• 27th - Sri Lanka: Our Lady of Madhu
• 28th - United States: Our Lady of La Leche
• 29th - Vietnam: Our Lady of La Vang
• 30th - Wales: Our Lady of Cardigan

My selection was almost entirely random, although I am pleased to say I managed to include at least one from each continent. Most of the titles and images were new to me, and I was amazed to find just how varied the different stories were ... they range from a shrine that claims to date back to just a decade or so after the resurrection to one that grew up after Our Lady appeared only thirty five years ago; there are shrines that were destroyed and rebuilt hundreds of years later, and one that was destroyed by shellfire less than three weeks ago; there are miraculous cures, miraculous protection, visions and apparitions. I hope others will enjoy learning about these as much as I have.

Pope Benedict's Message to the Jewish Community

Somewhat behind the times I finally got round to reading Pope Benedict's address to the Jewish community on his recent visit to America. His respect for and understanding of the Jewish Passover shone through ... but there was also honest recognition of the differences in the Christian and Jewish perspectives, which makes his acknowledgment of what we have in common more powerful. I know I have a few readers with an interest in things Jewish, so I thought I would share part of his message:

To the Jewish community on the Feast of Pesah

My visit to the United States offers me the occasion to extend a warm and heartfelt greeting to my Jewish brothers and sisters in this country and throughout the world. A greeting that is all the more spiritually intense because the great feast of Pesah is approaching. “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever” (Exodus 12: 14). While the Christian celebration of Easter differs in many ways from your celebration of Pesah, we understand and experience it in continuation with the biblical narrative of the mighty works which the Lord accomplished for his people.

At this time of your most solemn celebration, I feel particularly close, precisely because of what Nostra Aetate calls Christians to remember always: that the Church “received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles” (Nostra Aetate, 4). In addressing myself to you I wish to re-affirm the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on Catholic-Jewish relations and reiterate the Church’s commitment to the dialogue that in the past forty years has fundamentally changed our relationship for the better.

Because of that growth in trust and friendship, Christians and Jews can rejoice together in the deep spiritual ethos of the Passover, a memorial (zikkarôn) of freedom and redemption. Each year, when we listen to the Passover story we return to that blessed night of liberation. This holy time of the year should be a call to both our communities to pursue justice, mercy, solidarity with the stranger in the land, with the widow and orphan, as Moses commanded: “But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this” (Deuteronomy 24: 18).

You can read the rest here.

What a blessing Pope Benedict is for the Church, with his combination of personal gentleness and an incisive and rigorous mind, honed in the pursuit of Truth. He is very different from Pope John Paul II, yet his pontificate is so complementary to his predecessors.

Thursday Thirteen: Past Times

Down memory lane ... thirteen things from my childhood that my children have never known.

1. Coal - I grew up with coal fires. I remember regular deliveries by the coal man and houses with "coal holes". I doubt my daughters have ever so much as seen a lump of coal.
2. Records - the black round things with a hole in the middle that came before CDs.
   
3. Juke boxes - do you remember putting a coin in the slot, choosing your music and hearing the machine make clunk-clicking noises as it loaded the record.
4. Mutton - we often had mutton chops and roast mutton on Sundays. Now all mutton is apparently dressed as lamb.
5. Dripping - spread on bread, or bread fried in dripping (bacon fat). Nobody had heard of cholesterol in those days!
6. Operator-connected phone calls - yes, I am old enough to remember a time before all telephones were on the direct-dial network.
7. The test card - no round the clock TV in my childhood. During the times when nothing was transmitted, the BBC used to show the "test card" - a picture intended to demonstrate that yes, you were receiving a signal, but no, there were no programmes to watch. The testcard was, of course, in black and white. (I remember seeing my first ever colour TV in the home of an affluent friend when I was ten.)
   
8. Wind-up watches and clocks - no battery operated timepieces in those days. Although my girls have seen a wind-up clock (my mother has an antique grandfather clock), they have certainly never had to remember to wind a watch.
9. Old money - pounds, shillings and pence. Twelve pence to the shilling, and twenty shillings to the pound. Money problems in arithmetic were not fun, even to the mathematically inclined. ("If John bought a table for £5.13s.4d and six chairs for £1.2s.11d each, how much change did he get from £20?" Ugh!) We used a completely different set of coins, not to mention pound notes instead of coins.
   
10. Inkwells and dip pens - for most of my schooldays, school desks had inkwells that were always kept filled as we were only allowed to write in "real" ink. I am even old enough to remember a year or two where we had to use old-fashioned dip pens, provided by the school. Fade ... smudge ... splatter ... blot ...
11. Log tables - the alternative to the yet-to-be-invented pocket calculator. After a certain age maths meant an ever present book of "log tables" - logarithms, sines, cosines and more - to make impossibly long-winded arithmetical calculations possible without electronic assistance.
12. Sweet (candy) cigarettes - so we could pretend to smoke like the grown ups. How un-PC is that!
13. School milk - little bottles of milk we had to drink at morning break every day. Room temperature, and sometimes no longer quite at their best. Drinking your milk was not optional. Consigned to history by Thatcher the Milk Snatcher.

Help! I Married an Alien!

I tried this with various blog and non-blog family names. Here is the winner of my private competition:

Your Slogan Should Be

Tevye: What You'd Eat if You Lived on Mars

The Slogan Generator

HT: Theresa

Seder Snippets

We had a busy weekend with two seder meals. Why two seders? Due to the difficulty of knowing exactly when the new moon would occur in Israel, Jews in the diaspora (outside Israel) traditionally added an extra day to Passover and celebrated two seders to ensure they had the right day covered. Nowadays the correct date for the beginning of Passover can be calculated more accurately, but the double seder tradition stuck.

Saturday's Seder
Small scale, with just the five of us. We downloaded this Family Haggadah (seder order of service) a couple of years ago and it works well for our mix of ages. It has all the essential elements of a traditional seder, clear text, abbreviated versions of favourite songs transliterated into the western alphabet, and is short enough for the girls to stay focused (mostly!).

Cherub was intrigued by the whole thing. Particularly by her very small "wine" glass, which she stuffed with a mixture of parsley (our "karpas" vegetable), charoset (apple, nuts, wine and sugar mixture to represent the mortar used by the Israelites in Egypt), matzoh and hard boiled egg. Nice.

Nobody spilled any wine. Unheard of.

Mercifully no unpleasant surprises during the preparation, unlike some people. Commiserations to Faith over the dead chipmunk.

Sunday's Seder

A larger scale at my SIL's, with fifteen people altogether (three families, plus an elderly gentleman from their synagogue, and a young Spanish Jew living in the UK to learn more about Judaism). Our girls were the only children ... the other "kids" are now all young adults. This was a full scale seder, following the Orthodox Haggadah and using a mix of Hebrew and English. Everyone there apart from myself and the girls are actually Reform Jews, but the Reform Synagogue organisation here doesn't have its own Haggadah so they stick to the traditional one. A traditional seder is long. We started at seven and finished at eleven, but only because the later section was fast-tracked as people needed to leave. Otherwise it would have been nearer midnight. It is also hard to follow, as the translation is grim. Old-fashioned language at its worst - pompous, wordy and obscure.

Cherub spent the entire time before the seder meal (an hour or more) sitting at the table happily arranging Playmobil people and furniture. After the meal she played a bit with Angel and Star, and with a box of sticklebricks. She is clearly a party animal. No way was she going to let herself fall asleep while there was a party going on. At one point she sat on Angel's lap and nodded off ... but managed to force herself back awake, hopped down and tried to walk. She was so close to asleep on her feet she looked like a little robot.

Lengthy negotiations over the afikomen (a piece of matzoh hidden by the children, which later becomes necessary for the continuation of the seder ... the children then hold it to ransom). My BIL is a lawyer. It shows. It took a while to establish that (a) yes, he was a person prepared to use cash to buy himself out of a difficulty, and (b) no, the girls would not consider Euros a better deal than sterling. All were eventually satisfied with the end result of the negotiations.

Two entirely random overheard comments:
"Pescatarianism sounds worse than cannibalism to me." (Huh?)
"I was at a Sephardi seder last night and at this point everyone hits each other over the head with a spring onion (scallion)."

Cousin L spilled her wine.

Preparing for Passover

Passover starts tonight, which means a long "to do" list in this Catholic-Jewish household ...

• Remove bread and bread products
• Clean toaster and dump in garage
• Fry fish (cold fried fish is a common British Jewish seder food)
• Boil eggs (ditto hard-boiled eggs in salt water)
• Make charoseth (gooey apple-cinnamon-wine-walnut mix to represent the mortar used by the Israelites as slaves in Egypt)
• Make coconut pyramids and cinnamon balls
• Prepare seder plate with lamb bone (we don't have one!), horseradish (nowhere locally had any fresh horseradish root, so we will have to make do with a jar of creamed horseradish), parsley, bowl of salt water, charoseth
• Find Haggadahs (order of service for seder meal)
  
• Set out jug of water, bowl and towel for hand washing
• Set table
• Find afikomen presents for girls (too complicated to explain here)

Now what did I forget?

Ouch!

I am mortified.

As I watched Little Cherub play yesterday, I realised that whenever she bent down to pick up a toy, or got up from the floor, she groaned like a stiff old middle aged lady with aching joints.

I wonder where she could possibly have got that from?

I knew mid-life motherhood would have its hazards. I was geared up to being mistaken for her grandmother (hasn't happened yet!). But a creaking, groaning toddler?

Ouch!

April's Shower of Photos: Day 15 and 16

Our Lady Around the World

I had an idea ... and it grew!

It started with the idea of making a May Basket for Little Cherub. I wanted to print out some pictures of Mary to laminate and put in the basket and started googling for images. As I did so I found a few from different parts of the world and decided to make a set of little cards with a "round the world" theme. Then I thought, why not make one for each day of May? And why not turn it into a blog project?

So, for Mary's month of May, I will be posting a series of "Our Lady Around the World" posts, taking one image and title of Our Lady daily, each from a different country. I have spent Little Cherub's nap time over the last couple of days researching, and I am finding it fascinating. I am learning tons! I will also be posting a series of images of Mary at First Heralds over the next week or so. These will give you a sneak preview of what to expect.

Play Time

The town council has just invested a substantial amount in refitting several local playgrounds, so Little Cherub and I have been having fun testing them out. We are impressed! She is particularly impressed with the new slides. If anybody mentions the word "slide" in her hearing, a little voice pipes up with "wheeee!!!!!"

You would think that as I am in photographic mode I would have thought to take pictures, but no. Fortunately, K-next-door did.

April's Shower of Photos: Day 14

I liked the shape of this ash tree, still looking rather wintry against the grey .

April's Shower of Photos: Day 13

Another head shot taken yesterday.

April's Shower of Photos: Day 12

On Saturday mornings we often take Little Cherub to the canal to feed the ducks. I managed to get a good close up of this mallard.

On, Doo, Pee, Pour

Little Cherub has discovered counting. She can now "count" up to ten, though she skips seven because it is a tricky word - if you can't say it, just miss it out, is her theory. We have a long way to go before she gets the idea of one to one correspondence, though.

"Cherub, how many feet do you have?"
[Points randomly in the direction of her feet]
"On ... doo ... pee ... [triumphantly] POUR!!!!"

It may lack mathematical accuracy, but it's very cute.

April's Shower of Photos: Day 10 and 11

I didn't manage to get out with the camera yesterday or today, so here are a couple of pictures taken when we were on holiday in Dorset - a group of teasels silhouetted against the sky and the Fleet, and a close up of a single teasel. (Old camera again, so not so much clarity.)

Thursday Thirteen: Knitting

One of my new year's resolutions was to take up knitting again, and it is one I have kept with enthusiasm. Here are thirteen good reasons for knitting.

Knitting is:

1. Soothing and relaxing - that gentle click, click of the needles and rhythmic movement
2. Simple - you only need to learn two basic stitches, knit and purl
   
3. Easy to pick up if you have a few spare minutes - no setting up and organising required
4. Economical - it is possible to buy yarn very cheaply, the internet has a huge number of free patterns, and you save money by knitting things you would otherwise buy
5. Portable - you can tuck your knitting in a bag and take it anywhere
6. Satisfying - you get to wear, use, or watch your family and friends wear your finished articles
7. Environmentally friendly - wooden or bamboo needles, natural fibres like wool, cotton, silk and bamboo ... an ecologically sound hobby. You can even recycle old clothes by unravelling them and reknitting the same yarn.
8. Sociable - knit with friends, chat to other knitters.
9. The perfect hobby for bookworms - with a little practice you can learn to read and knit simultaneously.
   
10. Toddler friendly - how many other crafts can you do with a toddler around?
11. Flexible - there are so many different things it is possible to knit, and an endless variety of patterns and yarns.
12. Addictive - once you start, you can't stop!
    
13. Fun!

April's Shower of Photos: Day 9

I tried to take a close-up of a couple of daisies and failed miserably, so here to fill the gap is a photo taken a while ago at a homeschool group field trip to Ashridge. The education team there provide various nature based activities for groups. On this trip the children first had to make "colour palettes" by sticking small samples of different coloured leaves, grass, flowers, bark and so on onto cards with a strip of double-side tape. Then they had to collect materials to make a large-scale picture before viewing (and photographing) the end result from the top of this monument. The girls' group made this flower.


It was taken with my old 3 megapixel camera so the details aren't clear, but the yellow petals were heaps of leaves, the stem was quite large branches, and the flower and leaves were outlined with twigs.

Enter by the Small Rivers

Because you have asked me, my brother John, most dear to me in Christ, how to set about acquiring the treasure of knowledge, this is the advice I pass on to you: That you should choose to enter by the small rivers, and not go right away into the sea, because you should move from easy things to difficult things. (from Letter of St.Thomas Aquinas on how to study)

HT: Northampton Seminarian

April's Shower of Photos: Day 8

These horse chestnut buds are just about to burst into leaf. The camera's "simple" (idiot-proof!) setting has an option for backlit shots, which works beautifully to get a clear picture of the subject. It may be a little light - unless I just have my monitor set too bright.

Taking this series of photos has reminded me just how pleased I am with this camera. I checked, and it is a Panasonic DMC LS60. For a cheap, entry-level digital camera, being operated by an unskilled photographer, I think it does an excellent job. This is the review that convinced me to buy it (I was originally looking at a Kodak which got less than stellar comments).

The Girl Who Lived

Yesterday I took a gaggle of girls - my three and J-next-door - on a shopping expedition to a nearby town. Walking back to the train station afterwards I lagged behind the three older girls, pushing Little Cherub and a heap of bags. Watching them trotting along, animated and chatty, I thought about the miracle that is J, The Girl Who Lived.

Like The Boy Who Lived (apologies for the allusion if you are not a fan of Harry), J bears an scar. On her chest, put there by surgeons. Like Harry, protected by his mother's love, The Girl Who Lived did so because of the courage and love of her parents.

J was diagnosed in utero with a catastrophic heart malformation, which the doctors predicted would make life outside the womb impossible. If she survived long enough to be born, her first breaths would lead only to suffocation as the blood flooding through her severely enlarged arteries compressed her lungs. Terminate the pregnancy, said the doctors. It would be the best thing. The kindest thing. She can't survive.

I can hardly begin to imagine the courage it takes to struggle through the long, heavy months of pregnancy carrying a baby you know will die at birth. But, thank God, J's parents had the faith and courage to carry that burden. When the time came for the birth to be induced, they simply asked that it should not be on the same day as her brother's birthday - to celebrate the birth of one child and mourn the death of another on the same day would be too painful. And so two days later than originally planned, The Girl Who Would Die was born. And lived.

The doctors were right. J had exactly the heart defects they predicted. But against all the odds her little body fought back. The baby who should have been blue, silent and gasping for breath, was pink, crying and breathing. The doctors were able to wait until she was five months old before carrying out corrective surgery.

And now? J is a happy, active and sporty teenager; she performs lead roles with the local children's theatre group; she has a busy social life and many friends. She cooks. She shops (clothes!!!). Now and then she yells at her Mum. She would lose her head if it wasn't screwed on. She is Angel's very best friend. She lives!

Life? Life is precious. Even the tiniest, most hopeless of lives is precious. Love? Love means having the courage to nurture even the smallest flicker of life, to risk the pain of loss. And sometimes love of that magnitude can be rewarded with a miracle.

I know that.

I know The Girl Who Lived.

Prayers Needed

... for Maria of Pixilated School Notes, who is undergoing tests following the discovery of a nodule on one of her lungs. Please pray that all will be well.

April's Shower of Photos: Day 7

These brown lumps are some sort of fungus growing on the hedge surrounding our back garden. I rather like the way this photo captured the mossy green tinge of the branches. I tried taking it using both the "ordinary" and "flower" settings (you can tell I'm a technical whizz with a camera. Not.) The general setting came out clearer.

The Experiment Continues

The properties-of-elements experiment with spectacle frames continues. The results now stand at:

Non-titanium frames - two successes for Little Cherub
Titanium frames - one failure for Little Cherub

Fortunately Star was due for a new pair anyway. Her old ones are well and truly snapped.

I Love This Stuff!

Titanium.

Why, you ask?

Put it this way ... have you ever had a pair of glasses with cheap metal frames fall into the clutches of a toddler who thinks it is fun to see how much she can bend them? And have you ever had the same happen to a pair with titanium frames?

I'm pleased to report that despite having to force one arm back from a 210 degree angle, jammed over the front of the lens, the titanium frames are as good as new. That would be the titanium frames I bought (on sale! yay!) after she destroyed the last pair by doing the exact same thing.

And while I am on the subject of elements, how cool is this ... and this. Out of my price range, unfortunately.

April's Shower of Photos: Day 6

Another daffodils photo. Yesterday's rain turned to snow, though it is thawing like Narnia after Aslan's arrival.

A Little Magic

Tevye and I had a kind of random conversation last night about what we could choose if we could pick a small thing that could be done magically - instantly and without any effort on our part. No great life or world-changing wishes, just a little touch of magic. These were our choices.

Me: To be whisked from the sofa to my bed. When I'm tired I want to go to bed now. I don't want to have to go through the whole nightly routine of undressing, throwing clothes in the laundry, putting on pyjamas, washing, tooth cleaning, using inhalers, and general faffing around before I can get into bed. A little wave of a magic wand and ... pouff! sofa to bed! Bliss!

Tevye: Instant unpacking and sorting out when we return from a holiday. Unloading of car, unpacking of bags, washing, ironing and putting away of clothes, checking and answering email backlog, dealing with post, catching up on anything else that has gone undone ... all sorted!

Now I think his is a poor idea as we only go away once or twice a year, whereas I would benefit from mine every night. He thinks getting from sofa to bed is such a small and insignificant process it is a waste of a good magical wish.

What would you choose?

April's Shower of Photos: Day 5

I'm getting inspired by Jennifer and other April Shower participants to think more about what I want to achieve with a photo. Today I decided I wanted to try and capture the rain that had stopped a few minutes earlier. Some of my efforts might charitably have been described as "interesting"; a few were just plain pathetic. I liked this one, with the raindrop on the flower in the centre and the cloudy sky behind. Thank goodness for ImageWell, which allows me to cut out the messy bits round the edge (I could do it in iPhoto, but find ImageWell easier). Is that cheating?

April's Shower of Photos: Days 3 and 4

Some of the rare flowers in our garden ... rare not in the sense of unusual, but because it takes true tenacity to survive my black thumbs and Tevye's conviction that anything that grows must be a weed.

My camera has a "flower" setting. At least, there is a picture of a flower on the dial and it appears to take close ups of flowers when the arrow points at that picture!

Really VERY Old

Overheard in the back of the car, Star to friend:

"My Mum was really old when she had Little Cherub. Now she is very old!"

April's Shower of Photos: Days 1 and 2

Jennifer of S/V Mari-Hal-o-Jen put out a challenge for this month:

If you would like to join me in a month of photos, please drop a comment into the comment box and I'll collect all our info into my seriously outdated sidebar. Set your own goals for the month or focus on a theme that interests you (Spring Flowers, macro photos, portraits, or perhaps the color green?) or simply have uploading one photo a day as your goal! Goodness knows that's all I'll get done some April days!

I hope to make April's Shower of Photos a little Loveliness to look forward to each day, won't you join me?

Photography is not my strong point but I'm going to give it a go, even though it is pushing me right out of my comfort zone. I think I will need a focus to avoid sinking into a paralysed, photo-less confusion, so I'm going to go with a "nature" theme. I only have an pocket-sized entry-level Panasonic digital camera. It takes better photos than the old Kodak I was using until it died last year, but a professional piece of kit it most definitely is not.

I got off to a good start as we took Star and Little Cherub to the zoo today. Plenty of photo opportunities there - though not as many as there would have been if I had remembered to buy spare batteries for the camera, which ran out of juice part way through the day. First, a close up of a lemur nibbling what looked like a piece of twig. The lemurs are in a walk-through enclosure, so it is possible to get up close and personal.


This rhino wasn't as near as he looks and we were firmly on the other side of the fence! He was pretty close, though. I would love to have got a shot of two magpies sitting on the back of an oblivious rhino, but they flew off.


The penguins have always been a zoo favourite of ours. Here are three Humboldt's penguins marching. Judging by his feathers the bird at the back must be a large chick. Behind them was a longer and better procession, but that was the point at which my camera died.


This is a poor quality photo as I had to go heavy on the zoom. My camera has a 3x optical zoom: after that it relies on digital zoom with a corresponding decrease in resolution. This 11 week old baby was such a cutie I had to include him, digital zoom or no.


Tomorrow I hit my first bump in the road. Buy camera batteries!

Eat like Granny

My organic fruit and veg box includes a weekly newsletter from the farm owner. Mostly his news is information about current crops and growing conditions. This week it was a more general piece about food and healthy eating, triggered by a newly imposed requirement to use computer generated nutrition analysis to establish whether school meals cooked by his company are "healthy".

First he quoted four guidelines from Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food, which sound eminently sensible to me:

1. don’t eat anything your great grandmother would not recognise as food
2. don’t buy anything with more than five ingredients
3. only eat at a table; eat slowly and communally
4. distrust any food claiming health benefits

He feels - rightly - that we have lost confidence in our ability to know what is "good" food, and spend too much time listening to scientific "experts" and not enough listening to granny. And he cites one of my personal bugbears:

Even today there is just too much that we do not know. Nothing illustrates this better than the thirty year vilification of butter only to find that the miserable, meal ruining transfats (margarine etc) that have displaced it are in all probability more damaging.

This was his conclusion:

Traditionally cooked whole foods have been elbowed aside in favour of highly processed functional foods designed, manufactured and marketed to solve the problems associated with a Western diet. They don’t seem to be working. Science will not solve a cultural problem; namely a collapse in the willingness, confidence and skills needed to cook and enjoy real food. There is no one healthy diet or silver bullet that can better the knowledge accumulated over generations of how to use predominantly locally sourced ingredients to sustain us through happy and healthy lives. Pollan’s advice is that unless you suffer from a specific dietary illness like diabetes, the best thing to do with a nutritionist’s advice is to ignore it.

You can read the whole newsletter here.

The book sounds good, and I was glad to find my library has a copy. Only one copy, and three reservations ahead of me, but I have added myself to the queue and can wait patiently!

If in doubt ... do less!

My planning mania struck again before Easter. My train of thought landed on Little Cherub's future schooling, and I found myself starting a list of topics I wanted to cover with her in the early years. I began scribbling down all sorts of great ideas for setting up Montessori-style trays, subject baskets, main lesson books ... then I wondered if I really needed to reinvent the wheel. I took a look at the Preparatory Level of Mater Amabilis and the introductory notes I wrote jumped out and hit me. Time to listen to my own advice!

IF IN DOUBT - DO LESS. Trying to do too much with a young child is worse than doing too little. It is better to start from scratch with a six year old than to find yourself dealing with one who doesn't want to do schoolwork any more. Be sensitive to your child's needs and readiness. If he or she isn't ready, then holding off for a year or so is fine.

Then this from a Parents' Union School Preparatory Class Programme:

Children of five still need plenty of quiet growing-time and as much out-of-door life as possible. Daily lessons should be regular but informal and the time-table regarded only as a flexible guide to a well-assorted arrangement of free play occupations, activities and quiet story times.

From there I took another look at the notes I made on gentle learning for the early years (still a work in progress), and went right back to the drawing board.

I made a list of the things I want to prioritise - outdoor time, nature study, stories, picture books, art and craft. Then, inspired by Donna Simmons' suggestions for three to six year olds, I worked out a routine that would allow me to include them all on a more or less daily basis.

• 8.00 Housework
• 8.30 Prayers, Bible or saint story, songs, poems (a sort of Circle Time, if it is possible to have Circle Time with just two of us)
  
• 9.00 Out and about - this could include any combination of Mass, trips to the park, outdoor play, walks, visits to the woods or lake, library trips, errands, visits to friends or Grandma, and other outside activities. Plenty of outdoor time should allow nature study to happen naturally.
  
• 12.00 Lunch
• 12.30 Story time
• 1.00 Rest (quiet play or look at books)
  
• 2.00 Craft activity - interpreted widely, to include crafts, handwork, painting, cookery and gardening
  
• 3.00 Picture books
• 3.30 Play time
• 6.00 Dinner

This is meant as a loose structure for our day, not a rigid timetable - something I simply don't have the self-discipline for. Writing it out means I can see what it is realistic to fit into a leisurely day. I know my own weaknesses, and know that I find it easy to miss out outdoor activities and crafts. They take effort, and if I don't have a plan of sorts, they won't happen. I also want Cherub to have a sense of order in her day. Boiled down to its simplest, the essence of the plan is "mornings for out and about stuff, afternoons for reading, quiet play and hands-on activities".

The timings are dictated in part by the older girls' school day - they leave at eight and get home soon after four. Going out in the morning works better for us as it gives as a clear block of time without any time pressure. It also means I won't get "behind" on my day and end up not getting out at all. I don't imagine that we will spend three hours out of the house every day, but if I think of the morning as "outdoor time" it will makes planning easy. Any morning time we spend indoors will be "free" time.

I am not going to plan any formal learning, but if Little Cherub is anything like her sisters, she will probably learn the basics of letters and numbers without needing formal instruction. Poor Angel got it whether she needed it or not, with Star I was more laid back, and this time round I'm just going to relax and let it happen when it happens. I will have letter and number activities available to do for fun if she wants, but I will follow her lead.

ImageWell

I know I have a few readers who are Mac users, so I thought I'd pass on a recommendation for some image editing software I have been using: ImageWell. The basic software is free, with the option to pay for an upgraded version with extra features.

I haven't tried any other image editing software, so I can't make any comparisons, and all I use it for is prettying up pictures for my blog, but it does that very nicely. My header pictures here and at First Heralds, and the Tolkien quote in my sidebar were all done using ImageWell. I got a bit carried away with electronic doodling, and have already made a rather nifty header picture for May. The software will easily adjust the size of pictures and makes it possible to superimpose text. Other options include cropping, making pictures opaque and adding coloured borders. There may be more but that is as far as I have got with my experiments.

ImageWell has also solved a minor technical issue that bugged me. For some reason photos taken with my camera held vertical come out sideways on this blog, even though they appear the right way up in iPhoto. Dropping them into ImageWell and saving them there solves the problem.

First Heralds

I have been thinking for a while about starting a new blog to post specifically about teaching the Catholic faith to toddlers and preschoolers. I finally did it, and a number of very kind people with little ones of their own have agreed to contribute. I think it is going to be good! Take a look at the list of contributors in the sidebar and I'm sure you will agree.

You can find the blog here, at First Heralds. If you wonder about the title, it was inspired by this section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children. Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith of which they are the "first heralds" for their children. They should associate them from their tenderest years with the life of the Church. (CCC 2225)

The Turin Shroud

I have been using iPlayer to catch up with various TV programmes I missed over Easter. One was a new BBC documentary about the Shroud of Turin, the cloth impregnated with markings indicating it was the burial cloth of a crucified man, and long believed to be the burial cloth of Christ. It was pretty interesting, so I thought I'd share the programme's findings.

You may know that back in the 1980s radio carbon dating seemed to identify the Shroud as a medieval fake, dating the fabric to the early fourteenth century. This programme pursued mainly historical rather than scientific evidence, which convincingly dates the Shroud much earlier. Here is the gist of the evidence ...

• Documentary evidence shows that there was a Shroud believed to be the Shroud of Jesus in Constantinople in the twelfth century. It disappeared during the sack of Constinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The Shroud of Turin is known to have appeared in the mid fourteenth century in a French village. The knight who owned the Shroud was the descendent of a crusader who took part in the Fourth Crusade.
• The Shroud of Turin can be shown to have fold marks consistent with being kept in a display mechanism that would tally with the way in which the Constantinople Shroud was displayed.
  
• Scientific evidence shows that the Shroud bears real blood stains, of blood shed in both life and death. These blood stains are Group AB, the rarest of the main blood types.
  
• There is another relic believed to have covered the face of Christ after the Crucifixion: the Sudarium of Oviedo. The blood stains on this cloth are also Group AB, and when placed alongside the Shroud, the stains in the head area can be matched up. The evidence strongly indicates that the two cloths were used to wrap the same body. (There is an article on this here.) The Sudarium is definitely known to have been brought to Spain from the Holy Land in the 600s.
• The markings on the Shroud indicate that the nails used during the crucifixion where placed in the man's wrists and heels. Archaeological evidence shows this was the method used by the Romans. However, medieval art always shows the nails in palms and feet. A forger would presumably have followed the convention of his time, and would have had no means of knowing that this was inaccurate.

Why does the historical evidence and the radio carbon dating clash? Nobody knows, but the suspicion is now that there must be some error in the scientific dating. The scientists who carried out the test are now reviewing their methods to see if they are flawed.

Interesting stuff!

Yellow Music

I promised you trivia, and it doesn't get much more trivial than this. Yellow music to go with yesterday's yellow list ...

• Big Yellow Taxi
  
• Mellow Yellow
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
• Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree
• Yellow Submarine
  
• Yellow River

And to raise the tone a little (and date me less), some classics for spring ...

• Four Seasons: Spring (Vivaldi)
• The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky)
• Appalachian Spring (Copland)
• Spring Symphony (Britten)
• Songs Without Words: Spring Song (Mendelssohn)

Reader's Block

Am I the only person who suffers from reader's block?

There I am, reading away happily for a while, when wham! Along comes the wrong book at the wrong time (or is it the right book at the wrong time?) and suddenly I'm stuck. Reader's block. I can't get to the end of the book, but neither can I bring myself to let go of it.

My latest reader's block has been caused by Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: a History of the Popes. I got maybe a quarter of the way through and ground to a halt. I don't want to give up. Duffy is a top notch historian and the book is a subject that interests me ... but it is a fairly dense read. A big, big subject, and small print, which doesn't help. I have to be in the right mood to pick it up, and mostly I'm not. And there are an awful lot of pages to go. But neither can I quite bring myself to put it aside. It means that for the last month I have read little other than knitting books.

Right, Bookworm. Move on! You have permission to stop reading that book. Or, rather, to stop not reading it.

In a similar vein, I have been short on ideas for blog posts lately (is it a Lenten thing?), but since Easter I'm bubbling over with ideas. Whatever writer's block I had seems to have vanished. Lots to write about ... Little Cherub snippets, interesting conversations going on elsewhere, plans, thoughts and just plain trivia. Now I just need to make time to do the writing!

Thursday Thirteen: Seeing Yellow

I haven't done one of these for a while, so here, for spring, are thirteen yellow things I like ...

1. Daffodils - my favourite flowers
2. Buttercups - another favourite. Maybe because I also like ...
3. Butter - yes, the real, comes-in-a-block, saturated fat stuff. I justify only ever buying the real thing on the grounds that a little butter is better than a lot of low-fat spread. In fact, according to Tevye's biochemist cousin, a little butter is better than even a little margarine, which he wouldn't have in his house. (I'll gloss over the fact that he has since moved on to only using olive oil.)
4. Sunshine - at least I think I do. Can someone remind me what it looks like?
5. Sunflowers - big, yellow and beautiful
6. Smiley faces - because they brighten up dull text much more than :) and ;)
7. Bananas - yellow superfood
8. Lemons - lemon sorbet, lemon mousse, lemon cake, lemon chicken, lemonade, lemon squeezed on pancakes ...
   
9. Little Cherub's cute duvet cover - now I just need to paint her room yellow to match
10. Yellow cars - supposedly the safest colour, because they are most visible. I was once the proud owner of a yellow car, until it died of old age.
11. Golden lion tamarins - aren't these the cutest monkeys? One of my favourites at the zoo.
12. The yellow brick road - can't you just see me dancing down it, off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz .. dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum ...
    
13. Winnie the Pooh - the original, not the Disney version

Easter Display

For the last few months I have been using this space on top of a storage unit in the sitting room for a liturgical / seasonal display. I'm rather pleased with the way my Easter one came out. I bought the little egg tree on impulse from Tesco - though I think it could be quite a fun craft to make something similar. Maybe another year? The picture is one I found online, printed and laminated. The wooden candlestick I found forgotten in a drawer. The cloth is just a square of white felt - I also have green and purple squares to use for Advent, Lent and Ordinary Time. Very cheap and simple, but t make it easy to incorporate the liturgical colours. In front is Little Cherub's liturgical year book, and the three knitted eggs (one is hidden behind the candlestick) are there because I had an urge to knit them and then had no idea what to do with them!

Leaving Home

Getting ready (note carefully applied back-to-front hat)


Time to go! What do you mean, I can't go for a walk if I'm not dressed? What's wrong with my sleepsuit?


Mind you. I'm not sure that I want to go if there is any of that odd white stuff about!

An Easter Reflection

Not from me - I'm not feeling particularly reflective this year - but from Jennifer at Et Tu?, who reflects on her experience of the Eucharist since becoming a Catholic at the Easter Vigil last year.

Her initial response before her conversion was bemused disbelief ...

There was a part of me that kept hoping I'd find that it was all a misunderstanding, that Catholics were only required to believe that the consecration of the Eucharist was a really, really, really important symbolic event, that all that crazy talk about drinking blood and eating flesh was just some old fashioned superstition that us enlightened modern folks weren't required to believe. I was a lifelong atheist, after all. It was enough of a feat that I even came to believe in God in the first place. It was enough of a leap of faith for me to believe that some miracles might have happened a few times throughout history. But to ask a former militant atheist to believe that a miracle happens at every single Catholic Mass, that bread and wine are actually changed into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ despite the fact that they look exactly the same...it seemed too much to ask.

Then she moved on to intellectual acceptance ...

When I received my first Communion at Easter Vigil last year I had come to accept that the teaching on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is true. Or, perhaps more accurately, I was willing to accept on faith that it was not false. I was undoubtedly being led to the Catholic Church, and found its defense of this teaching to be solid and compelling, so I trusted that it was true in some mysterious way, even though I didn't really get it.

And now, after a year of experiencing the Eucharist ...

This belief in and love of the Eucharist is the most surprising thing that's ever happened to me. Never in my dreams would I have thought that I could believe such an incredible, outlandish claim. On some occasions I have even taken a step back to look at it all as objectively as possible, to set everything aside and honestly ask myself if this is all in my head, if perhaps I am eating bread and drinking wine at the Mass, but that its great symbolic value has led me to put myself in a different state of mind. And all I can come up with is this:

If this is a symbol, then I am insane.

It's not Tolkien, but that's about the best I can do. The way this Sacrament has slowly transformed my soul and given me a connection to God that I never knew before, the way I could easily move myself to tears at the thought of not being able to receive it, the strength I have drawn from having this direct communion with God...if these things are not real, then nothing is.

Go and read the whole post here.

And I'm very glad she linked to the Tolkien quote, which I had forgotten about (and in any case, had never found a source for). I added part of it to my sidebar.

What Narnian Are You?

And you can add consistent to those qualities. I did the same quiz two years ago and got the same result.

HT: Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning

Glimpses from Holy Week

Palm Sunday
Woefully unprepared for Holy Week. Also woefully unprepared for Star and best-friend-F. I find myself in the sad position of finding it less stressful taking a 21 month old to Mass than taking a 9 year old. F's mother read them the riot act beforehand, with dire warnings of what would happen if there was a repeat of last year's sword fighting with palm crosses during Mass. Neither of us thought to warn them not to be palm trees. Waving, rustling, noisy palm trees.

Monday
Took Little Cherub to Mass, where she behaved beautifully. Joined two homeschooling friends for a Stations of the Cross afternoon. The children made plaques out of clay, with a scene of their choice, then we placed them round the garden and prayed the Stations. Cherub enjoyed herself with salt dough and a doll's house. I enjoyed a sociable afternoon and reconnecting with homeschooling life.

Tuesday
Nothing memorable.

Wednesday
Went to Mass again. I was tired and found the walk hard going (30 minutes there, a bit more back as it is uphill). Castigated myself for bemoaning a 30 minutes walk ... after all, who wouldn't walk for 30 minutes if they knew God was waiting at the end of it? Cherub untypically cross and agitated during Mass, for some reason I couldn't fathom. Realised afterwards that it was because the step-counter she had attached herself to had got left in her pushchair and she was not best pleased!

Thursday
Woke up with a headache and general malaise, which doubtless explained why Wednesday's walk was such hard work. Mass of the Last Supper, which never fails to move me, this year included despite feeling limp. Struck particularly by the stark change of mood during the Eucharistic Prayer, when the bells rung during the Gloria were replaced by wooden clappers. No Cherub. No Star. Only Angel and she was serving, meaning I was child-free and able to focus (not that Angel on her own would be a distraction). Worked on putting together Cherub's Way of Light box.

Friday
Headache persisted. Good Friday liturgy, with Star and Cherub. Both well behaved, apart from a little service sheet chewing by Cherub once she got bored of "reading" it. I dithered over whether to take Cherub, but decided I would risk it as she responds quite strongly to things at Church being different - Ash Wednesday was good for two or three weeks of interest in black splodges on foreheads, and this week there has been much signing of "all gone!" over the purple covered statues. Despite a little restlessness during the reading of the Passion, she was very engaged by the veneration of the Cross. She wanted to "kiss Jesus", but was overcome by nerves at the last minute and decided against. I was thankful all over again for her Stations of the Cross box, which has kept her interest through the whole of Lent and meant that in her own small way she had some idea of what was going on.

Saturday
Confessions in the morning. (Quote: "Star, if you don't stop that you will have to add being noisy in the Confession queue to your list!") Finished off Cherub's Way of Light box, more or less, and did some baking for Easter Sunday. Attended Easter Vigil with Angel and Star, who had been given the choice of coming with us the Vigil or going to Mass on Sunday morning. Twenty minute wait beforehand almost too much for her - much whinging about being tired and having a headache. Fortunately she was distracted by the interest of fire and candles and forgot her woes until the Vigil was nearly over. By this time I was struggling with aching head, aching chest (usually I love incense, but it just isn't good for coughs) and tiredness of my own. Some years the Triduum is an intensely spiritual experience; others, like this one, it is a case of being present and participating as best I can amongst the distractions.

Easter Sunday
Celebrated! Chilled (literally, as the snow fell). Coughed. Ate chocolate. Ate breakfast. Organised a chocolate egg hunt for the girls. Coughed. Ate more chocolate. Grandma and my brother arrived. With chocolate. Ate very large lunch. Ate more chocolate. Chilled (now not so literally, as the snow had melted). Coughed. Ate tea. Relaxed with a nice, medicinal glass of wine. And chocolate. Enjoyed a couple of treats from the BBC: the last episode of Lark Rise to Candleford, and a dramatisation of The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency.

Happy Easter

This is a first for me .... a WHITE Easter. At least the Daffodils match my spring theme!

May you have a happy and blessed Easter season.

Holy Week

Palm Sunday tomorrow and the beginning of Holy Week. I am not planning to blog any more until Easter. I am planning to pray rather more than I have during Lent. (Why am I always so full of good intentions, and so incapable of putting them into practice?)

Introvert / Extrovert

This post by Amy Welborn on introverted parents of extroverted children got Melanie thinking about parenting her extroverted toddler, which in turn set my mental wheels in motion.

I have always registered as an extrovert (in the sense that being with others charges my batteries) on Myers-Briggs type tests. However over time the degree of extroversion has narrowed, and now only just tips the scales into extrovert rather than introvert - 53% according to the MyPersonality.info badge in my sidebar. Oddly, I've never before considered how this relates to my children.

Angel is an extreme extrovert. Sending her to school was like plugging her in to a high performance battery charger. Stamina? After a day at school, she is up for anything! Her need for company is intense, which at least means she is not likely to be prone to the teenage phase of lurking in her bedroom alone. Homeschooling an extreme extrovert can be a challenge. We were lucky in that a combination of neighbour children and after school activities provided enough social time to keep her going. In our earlier homeschooling years, I had the energy and enthusiasm to take her out and about regularly to a mix of organised activities and informal socialising. Now, with my own need for that social charge lessening, I'm not sure I could meet those needs so well.

Star is an introvert, though I have only now realised this. She comes home from school tired, which initially I assumed was just a matter of not having developed the stamina to cope with a long and busy day, but now I think it is the introvert's reaction to a long period with others. When she gets in, all she wants to do is slump in front of the TV ... and this seems to be the result of a real internal drive, not just inertia. Thinking in terms of personality types, I can now see it is her way of shutting out the world and giving herself the chance to recharge - a classic introverted response. If she was a book lover, this is where she would disappear into a book. As she is not, TV provides an alternative outlet. I suspect half the time she is not taking in what she is supposedly watching, it is just there as a block.

Whereas Angel will never miss out on any opportunity to socialise, it is not uncommon for Star to refuse the option of a get together with a friend. She often does enjoy being with others and has many friends, so I think we have fallen into the trap of not realising that social interaction drains her. She very much wants our company, but she wants it on her own terms - maybe this is because fitting in with someone elses preferences also drains her. Looking back on our homeschooling years, Star was often on the edge of, or outside, a group by her own choice. I put it down to her away-with-the-fairies personality, and had never twigged that people tire her. I wish I had realised this earlier, as there are things I would have done differently. Too often I assumed that what was good for Angel would also be good for Star. As it is, I think will help me respond better to her needs in future.

I'm not sure about Little Cherub. I think she is somewhere in the middle. She is certainly not another extreme extrovert. I can remember Angel getting the same buzz as a toddler from people - any people! anywhere! - that Melanie describes in Bella. That isn't Cherub. On the other hand, neither is she happy in her own world the way Star was as a toddler. She sits back and observes where Angel would have wanted to be in the centre of things. Star - again with hindsight - showed some sign of discomfort in group situations, but Cherub does not. Cherub is used to a much busier household and more people around than was the case with the other two, and I wonder how much difference this makes - my guess is that it may make her appear more extroverted. I'm going to watch with interest. My hunch is that she and I may currently be in much the same place - needing a few social outlets, but also happy with a lot of time at home or out and about by ourselves.

More Liturgical Boxes

Following a brainstorming session at the 4 Real Learning bulletin boards, I have put together a web page with suggestions for making a Rosary Box similar to the Stations of the Cross Box I have been using with Little Cherub.

I have also finished another page with a set of cards and box ideas for a Stations of the Resurrection Box to use during the Easter season.

Here they are:

• Rosary
• Stations of the Resurrection

Little Cherub's Book Choice: Ten Seeds

We have been on a roll with good picture books lately. Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown is a reverse counting book with a difference, combining the number aspect with the life cycle of a plant. Starting with ten seeds, it counts down to one big sunflower ... then the sunflower dies and sheds ten seeds, ready to start again.

What makes the book is the quality of the rich and detailed illustrations. On each page one of the seeds or small plants is lost - to an ant, a pigeon, a mouse, a slimy slug, a mole, a cat, and so on. For a toddler these are the main interest, but Little Cherub also now likes to point out the roots growing out of the seeds, and the little shoots. Like many good picture books, this is one that we can revisit later at another level.

Google Calendar Glee

My love affair with Google Calendar deepens. I have made two new discoveries.

1. Google Calendars can easily be imported into iCal. That means I can then synchronise my calendars with my iPod Touch. As they are read-only in iCal I can't add to or amend them on my iPod if it is offline, but I can at least check my diary. If it is online, then I can add to the Calendars directly through Google Mobile.

2. I can set my menu plan up as a Google Calendar. This means:

• I can adjust my menu plan as necessary according to what is on the calendar. We are going to be out one evening? Bump dinner to another night at the touch of a button.
• I can see my menu plan at a glance on either computer or my iPod.
• I no longer have to print out my menu plan and / or remember which computer I used to compile it.

Who would have thought a mere calendar could be the cause of such delight?

Mothering Style

Your type is: ENTP —The “Independence” Mother

“When I held my babies, I always faced them outward so they could take in the world.”

• Full of energy and confident in her own self-sufficiency and competence, the ENTP mother encourages her children—as a role model and as a teacher—to be independent and confident on their own in the world.
• A “big picture” person, she points out options and possibilities along the way. Objective and logical as well, the ENTP wants her children to evaluate their choices and learn from the consequences of their own decisions.
• The ENTP mother is resourceful and action-oriented. She likes going places and doing things with her children, exploring all that life has to offer. She is less concerned with rules, routines, and schedules. Introducing her children to new concepts and activities, challenging them, and stimulating their intellectual development are top priorities.

I put my ability to be relaxed about throwing my children out the door (well OK, not quite literally!) and letting them get on with things down to my years at boarding school, but it seems I am just naturally made that way. Or is my personality a function of those years at boarding school? Now I'm confusing myself ...

You can find your mothering style here.

Cattern's Day

A snippet I discovered at the museum yesterday, where there is a section on the history of Buckinghamshire lace ...

Saint Catherine is the patron saint of spinners and lacemakers. Her feast of November 25th was known as Cattern's Day, and marked the point of the year at which lacemakers in Buckinghamshire began to work by candlelight. The day was celebrated with "Cattern cakes" and the custom of jumping over a lighted candlestick. This was the origin of the rhyme:

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack jump over the candlestick

The candlestick on display in the museum was considerably higher than I would want to jump over, particularly wearing long skirts!

I love the way saints' days continued to influence the calendar of ordinary people in England long, long after the Reformation. There is lots more about the lacemaker's year here.

It seems to me that St. Catherine would also make a good patron saint for knitters, who are pretty close on the spectrum to spinners and lacemakers. I can't find anything definitive about a knitting patron - a quick Google suggested St. Clare (patron of embroiderers), St. Fiacre (patron of cap makers and associated with a knitting guild in sixteenth century Paris), St. Dymphna (why??) and an unofficial patron, St. Rafqa of Lebanon. I'm rather fond of St. Rafqa, so I'm happy with this choice, but as St. Catherine is my name saint I have a definite bias towards adding her.

Prayer Request

Please say a prayer or two for Melanie, in labour with her second baby. Her waters have broken but contractions have stalled. Pray that they will kick in again and baby Sophia will make her appearance sooner rather than later.

At least Melanie and husband Dom have a laptop with them and the hospital has WiFi. (When Tevye reads this I can guarantee he will be horrified!)

Edited to add: I see Melanie just commented on my previous post. Must be the first (and probably last!) time anyone has read my blog while in a labour ward!

History for Toddlers

Little Cherub and I finally took last week's postponed trip to the Buckinghamshire County Museum. She had a ball! We went by bus, which she considers a treat, and since I last visited the museum has become one of the most child-friendly I've been to. We stayed for two hours and she would happily have stayed longer. The Museum has a Roald Dahl Gallery with even more hands-on things to explore, but we didn't make it that far. That section has an entry charge (the main museum is free), so I decided I would see how much there was that would interest her in the rest of the museum first. Lots, as it turned out! Victorian toys to play with, a large wooden train with goods and drivers to slot in, drawers to open and close (and point in admiration at the contents, even though she had no idea what they were!), peep holes to peep through ...

Here she is testing out a Victorian hip-bath ...

And dressing Tudor girls ...


The main building looks Georgian from the outside, but inside it is a hotch-potch built round a Tudor core. This was only discovered in the late 20th century, and the upstairs rooms have been restored to show the Tudor features. The original Tudor building dates from the later fifteenth century, and was built not as a house but as a community facility for the Fraternity of the Virgin Mary, a lay society attached to the nearby Church of St. Mary. After the Fraternity was dissolved at the Reformation the building passed into private hands.

Here is one of the beamed Tudor rooms (though with a Georgian window, to fit with the facade). The Museum website suggests that this part of the building may have been living accommodation for a priest, reached by an external staircase.

After our museum visit we took lunch to the park (sadly, one of the most underwhelming town centre parks I've seen, with a few sorry looking flower beds, threadbare grass, a disintegrating hard surface that was once tennis courts and a row of trees pollarded within an inch of their lives). Then Cherub fell asleep in her pushchair and I pottered around the shops until it was time for our bus home.

New Picture Books

I've just had a mid-Lent online shopping splurge. Two batches of yarn from eBay to make these sweaters, and a book order from Amazon. I decided our picture books could use a top up.

On their way for little cherub are ...

• The Hat (Jan Brett)
• Annie and the Wild Animals (Jan Brett)
• Skip Through the Seasons (Stella Blackstone)
• Seven Ways to Catch the Moon (M.P.Robertson)
• Pascual and the Kitchen Angels (Tomie de Paola)
• My First Passover Board Book (DK)
• Benjamin's Box: the Story of the Resurrection Eggs (Melody Carlson)

Also in my shopping basket were Wholly Irresponsible Experiments (Sean Connolly), to put away for Star's birthday, and the DVD Stardust for Angel's birthday.

My Personality Profile

ENTP, Originator, Intellectual, Linguistic, Logical

That's me, according to MyPersonality.info

HT: Romany