Linking up with Blessed Is She and #BISsisterhood to talk about Crown of Creation.

I love Pope St. John Paul II, but that guy really made it very hard to ignore that the position of women in the church is simultaneously an honor and a huge weight of  responsibility. 

 He uses words, like "crown of creation" and "feminine genius", to describe the unique gifts women are in this world. 

Frankly, it's a lot of pressure to be a crown, and a jewel in the crown at that. Women are offered a share in creation through our ability to give and sustain life, and that is both awesome and terrifying.

Through our spiritual motherhood, women can play an important role in creating a more just and beautiful world. Through our physical motherhood, women are integral in the forming of brand new humans - new soul-bodies. 

But sometimes I tarnish creation. Sometimes I say exactly the wrong thing and lead someone else into error or pain. 

Sometimes I can't save everyone. Sometimes I feel I have nothing left to give.

Yet, I am not off the hook.

Even in my, significant, failings I do not get demoted from the role of jewel in the crown. 

Because this is who we are, not just something we are choosing to be.

So this little jewel might need a little, or a lot, of polishing, but I still get to be in the crown and so do you.

Harry Potter Halloween!

Happy All Souls everybody! We had our Harry Potter Halloween party this past Saturday, and had a blast.

It's baby Dobby! I know you were just dying to see this cuteness.

John also had a mace. That proved to be a very difficult aspect of his Halloween costume around babies.

Honeydukes! There was more candy later. I either made up names or used names of actual candy reference in the books to label the jars.
Colorful little jars in front are real herbs and spices I have that I thought would look cool.

The only food out was pumpkin seeds when I was going around and taking pictures.

Food was Chicken Tortilla Soup, with homemade tortilla chips, and crispy Mac and Cheese.

We ended up with many leftover wands. I think I overestimated how many of them would break/get slobbered to death by the baby.

How did I not get a non-blurry picture of this?!

 My favorite DIY, the thing I really wanted to happen, was the floating candles. They took about four engineering attempts before we had a successful design.

And I didn't get a single non-blurry picture.

It's a cactus! Holding Dobby. With unnamed Hogworts student.

Lesson: fully chill jello brain before dumping. Still yummy!
And Butterbeer is delicious! Especially when mixed with mead.

Our fierce Bellatrix Lestrange

It's Teddy, Lupin, and Tonks! Tell me how your heart isn't melting right now?!

Men in White

This party probably wins as the one I spent the most time DIYing things for, but it was also a lot of fun. I like for crafts to have a purpose and a party is a good purpose in my book.

The Other Things Are Still Happening!

Linking up with This Ain't the Lyceum for another round of 7 Quick Takes!

Some of you know it's been quite the week, but there have been other stuff going on in our lives. Promise.

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We celebrated a belated Feast of Pope St. John Paul II last Friday with dirt and worms! 

I learned that the only candy my kids agree on are gummy worms. I can roll with that.

I also made some for my Endow group. I make the grown ups have liturgical fun too.

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This little monkey has zero interest in walking, but an insatiable thirst for climbing.

Finding her under the cart is becoming a regular occurrence. 

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As is this.

Obviously, it is easier to climb over every single pot and pan than it is to go around the corner.

Babies!

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We have been in full swing Halloween prep time for a while, but things are coming together now!

I almost always carve my jack o' lanterns with a moon and stars.

Because I'm not trying to win any contests. 

But it's pretty, no?

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I thought about getting a better picture, but I kind of like photo bombing wand in the front there. He's got spunk.

One of the successful Potter DIY's...WANDS! 

These are made out of paper, hot glue, and lots of metallic spray paint.

They also had glow in the dark spray paint at the store, but I resisted.

But how awesome would that be though?!

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You might have noticed there have not been homeschool preschool updates for a bit. 

(Or not, that's fine too.)

We are on our halfway point vacation!

This is one of my curriculum policies. We steam ahead trying out different approaches on a curriculum until we find our groove. Once we reach about halfway, we have normally found the groove and a break will not be too detrimental to getting back on track.

Halfway is about how long I would give a little kid program to work. If it was not going well, this is the time I would use to find something else. 

But it's going fine, so this is Halloween fun time instead!

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Reminder, time change this Sunday! Don't let this be you!

Credit: Catholic Memes

It is really sad to be ready to sing awesome songs on Sunday....

....and then look out at a very sparse church.

Because they couldn't be trusted to notice things like Daylight Savings Time ending.

Don't make your church ladies sad!

Comfort in the Communion of Saints

Linking up with Blessed Is She and #BISsisterhood this morning to talk about Communion of Saints.

We're approaching two of my favorite feasts in the church year: All Saints and All Souls (November 1st and 2nd, respectively). 

All Souls is our feast for the dead. This is the day to visit the cemetery, add pictures and mementos to your home altar, and light all the candles!   It is the day we remember those who have passed on, but might not be in heaven just yet. 

All Saints is for everyone who has the joy of heaven! It serves as a catch all for those souls in heaven the Church has not managed to canonize. 

Perhaps one of my favorite church teachings is that of the communion of saints. It means that all souls are still connected, even after death. Those in purgatory still need our love and care, and those in heaven are able to know and love us here on earth. We never stop being family to each other.

We have an obligation to care for each other, even after death. I try to remember this by praying for the most forgotten soul in purgatory. The one who has no one to pray for them, who may have been forgotten for centuries or millennia. That is the one I want to help.

Saints no longer need our prayers to help them in their purification for heaven, but they can help us here on earth. Saints are capable of loving in a way we have forgotten. 

This year is bittersweet now that we have our own saint in heaven. Catholics know that we become saints, and not angels, when we die and are in heaven, and innocent children always go to heaven. Mary Bernadette exists now in perfect form. She may have died a very tiny infant, but she is now in her full soul form.

Through the communion of saints, my daughter and I can know each other. We will not physically touch until the end, but we can meet each other in prayer. She can intercede for me. I like to think she has a bit of a soft spot for her mom.

In this communion, we are never fully separated from each other and we get a glimpse of that closeness we were made to exist within. All of this hard work on earth is meant to have the final goal of getting back to that place of perfect communion with God and each other.

That's a goal I can get behind.

A Catholic Grief

Our family has gone through some very tough moments since October 19, 2015. That is the day we gained a very little saint in heaven.

We named her Mary Bernadette, even though there is no way to know for sure her gender. I like to think she is the official patron saint of the Hoberg family.

It is an odd thing to mourn someone you have never seen face to face. There are no pictures, no momentos, no favorite objects to cling to.

Instead, I've found pictures of her patrons, St. Bernadette and Our Lady of Guadalupe, and placed them on our family altar in her honor.

This is a particularly raw time in which to experience a miscarriage. October is the national month for pregnancy and infant loss, and November is the month Catholics remember the dead. Nothing like the rest of the world hitting you over the head with reminders for remembering how much this hurts.

I generally do not feel helped by national months/days for categories I represent. It feels like, because we have designed a time to talk and feel about this issue, everyone is off the hook the rest of the year.

But I don't get a day off. It's my every moment.

I'm not at a place yet where I can write things like "what to do to help your friend going through miscarriage". I don't know what I'll need tomorrow and I barely know what I need today.
All I really want to do is pray, and all I really need to your prayers right now.

Our little family is hurting right now, but we're doing our best to incorporate our little saint into our lives.
We will be a having a Blessing for the Parents of Miscarried Children, and evening prayer from the Office of the Dead. We will be adding her to our family altar, which I always build in remembrance of our dead loved ones during the month of November.

If you are currently experiencing a miscarriage, I would love to hear from you. If nothing else, we can pray for each other.

Other bloggers have been able to write far more on this topic. Mandi at A Blog About Miscarriage is amazingly thorough, loving, and real in her writing. Her resource lists are worth linking to in of themselves.

Fall Celebrations, Rosaries, and Crafty Crafting

Linking up with This Ain't the Lyceum for another round of 7 Quick Takes!

We have a had a very busy week/weekend! Since we are approaching the middle of John's preschool homeschool with 26 Letters to Heaven, we are taking a little break. It's a good thing too because we needed some time to do crafting to get ready for Harry Potter party!

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We went to the parish Fall Festival last Saturday! This was our first time attending post-wedding, so first time with kids. Like many things in life, it's a lot more fun with kids.

This is a game where you shoot a little boat with a water run and race to get it to the other side of the gutter faster than the next guy. Surprisingly fun.

John got his first face painting. He picked out the pumpkin image himself, but he was pretty suspicious of this process.

Check out that side eye.

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We also love our ecumenical relations in this neck of the woods. Check out the festival spirit shirt.

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We also had rosary making that evening!

You know what is a good idea to do BEFORE an hour or two before the event starts? Make sure you actually have rosary supplies.

I had nothing besides tools and string. I don't know what happened there.

We made an emergency Joann's run, and the event was saved!

Evidence that I ordered a LOT of new supplies. They got here yesterday. Sorry y'all.

For the interested, we did mediocre at trivia and did not succeed in securing the table with good light, so no rosary making at the bar. But someday...

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John played his first Monopoly game and it was pretty funny. "Gotta hold on to your monies."

When paying rent to Matt: "Con-GRA-tulations Dada!" 

The guy who has taken a vow of poverty beat us all though. 

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And it's prep for Harry Potter time! I made these pipe cleaner Happy Potter glasses just for fun to kill time on a no-nap afternoon, but John REALLY liked them. Might just make a few for the littles on Halloween. I don't know if I can size it up enough for an adult size.

I put together the sorting hat! This is precisely the reason I will go through the trouble of picking up stuff let by the side of the road. So many fun scraps of fabric!

Me and the hot glue gun are good friends now. This week, we'll include some spray paint in this party.

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Today on the left, late August on the right. I work on it at least an hour every day. Oh dear.

I am making progress on the enormously complicated Christmas stocking! Hopefully, I can get it done by Christmas. There is still a lot of work to do.

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Our bonus questions for Link-tober Fest on 7 Quick Takes is to add our most popular 7 Quick Takes post. Since this is only my tenth, ever, with only 59 views, it's....

7 Things That Make My Life Easier

And, for fun, my least popular, with 24 views is....

Friday Update!

Which is not at all surprising. It was clearly not a good titling morning for me.

The Way: Love and Truth are Besties

Linking up with Blessed Is She and #BISsisterhood to talk about The Way.

I went to my first big Theology on Tap event last night.

For those who have not heard of ToT, this is an event that was started to quite literally bring the Gospel to where the young people are: the bar. There is a speaker who will be talking about a particular point of theology or aspect of Catholicism, followed by Q & A, in the middle of this perfectly normal bar.

It's pretty great.

Last night's event was with Dr. Mary Davenport, our only NFP doctor in the entire SF Bay Area, talking about "coping with your fertility". She had her work cut out for her: trying to explain how we got here, historically, and all of the copious methods of NFP and artificial birth control in relation to church teaching.

Then a medical assistant stood up as the first question. She works in an OB/GYN office and sometimes has to walk patients through how to use artificial birth control. She wanted to know if what she was doing was morally wrong.

It was simultaneously heart rending for both of them. They both knew the answer, but the choice was in how to give hope. How to give this woman stuck in a difficult position some sort of grace and support in getting out of a moral trap.

Reading Aquinas' Summa showed me that a lot of theology is very logical, and can be arrived via human reasoning. But I still desperately need Jesus' example to show me how to show love to someone who is hurting and struggling.

Because our struggles are not always logical, it takes more than being a skilled apologeticist to explain church teaching. It takes walking in Jesus' way and seeing the person beneath the surface who needs you to see her and hear her.

Doing that cannot ever take away from the truth in theology, and we do noone any favors by taking away a moral center.

I appreciated Dr. Davenport's response that both heard the questioner's concern and her underlying worries: can I still work in this job? Can I be a medical assistant at all? Is there hope for me?

Responding in love and truth is Jesus's way, THE Way. It's hard, and I fail at it a lot. But it's the only way worth walking.