Spring snow

Pausing for Tea on a Snowy Morning
(with sincere apology to Robert Frost)

Whose flakes these are I think I know.
His heart is with His children, so
I know He sees me pausing here
To watch His world fill up with snow.

My little children think it queer
To stop and sit at window clear
To gaze in peace and sip my mug
This fifth spring morning of the year.

They give my bathrobe sleeve a tug
And ask for lap and kiss and hug.
The silent morning wakes from sleep
With joyous shrieks and boots pulled snug.

The snow is fluffy, wet, and deep,
But I have school and home to keep,
And hours to go before I sleep,
And hours to go before I sleep.

Papal lapbook

I thought I was so original in planning to do a lapbook of our study on the Papal transition.  Then I went here and was humbled. Oh, well, it is Lent after all.

Homeschool resources

On Saturday, I hosted a tea for the local Catholic homeschool moms. After being the only Catholic homeschooler our last couple of years in Japan, I was very excited that there were nine of us!

Today, I thought I would write up a list of resources for moms who are thinking about homeschooling, especially for little ones, and I put it in an email to the hyattsmoms Yahoo group. But I want to keep it here, too, so I can find it again and not have to retype it.

Hello, Ladies,

Thank you all again for all the great ideas you shared on Saturday at tea. Below
are some links to resources that I mentioned or was asked about and a few that I
thought of later. Wendy, Jolene, and Therese, I hope you will have time this
week to reply with links for the awesome things you shared, too.

You truly don't need to purchase a pre-made program in order to have a
successful preschool at home, but it can help you to make your plan for the
year. It is easy to spend a lot of money on curricula that don't work out, so
please take me up on my offer to borrow or at least look through books before
you decide what to buy. :)

You are in my prayers as you and your husbands discern the best educational
paths for your children.

Blessings,
Judy

LENT STUFF:
Stations of the Cross pictures are available from Catholic Heritage Curricula
and Leaflet Missal Company:

CHC: https://www.chcweb.com/catalog/StationsofCrossPrints/product_info.html

Leaflet Missal 8x10:
http://www.leafletonline.com/8-X-10-STATIONS-OF-THE-CROSS-ILLUSTRATIONS/producti\
nfo/26363/

4x6:
http://www.leafletonline.com/4-X-6-STATIONS-OF-THE-CROSS-ILLUSTRATIONS/productin\
fo/26365/

I cannot find the 7-candle tealight holder online. I think it came from Craft
Warehouse out in Washington State in an after-Christmas sale. The thing is, if
you have an idea of how you could fit the Stations in your home and where you
might like to put them, you can find something for your space and in your own
style, and it will be lovely. Keep ideas like this in mind and the right thing
will turn up in a thrift shop or yard sale. :-)

For those who are still deciding whether to homeschool or not:
GENERAL HOMESCHOOLING books (an obvious classical and montessori bent here--I
haven't kept the books I didn't follow after we figured out how we wanted to
homeschool :-)) These are all on my shelf and you may borrow if you like:
Catholic Education: Homeward Bound, Kimberly Hahn and Mary Hasson
Catholic Home Schooling, Mary Kay Clark (a little dated, but still worth
mentioning)
Home Grown Kids, Raymond and Dorothy Moore (the only non-Catholic book in the
list, but worthwhile insights on readiness that led to Washington State's
decision to delay required public school entry to age 8)
Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum, Laura Berquist
The Well Trained Mind, Wise and Bauer
The Trivium, Sr. Miriam Joseph, CSC, Ph.D.
The Montessori Method, Maria Montessori

PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS and RESOURCES:
Little Saints Catholic Preschool program (I own this if someone would like to
take a look at it). You can purchase it here:
http://emmanuelbooks.com/product_detail.cfm/ID/649/OID//Little-Saints-A-Catholic\
-Preschool-Program-with-Classical-Disciplines/

Alphabet Path (all online, from a Catholic mom, Elizabeth Foss, who writes for
the Arlington (VA) Catholic paper) starts here with A, and other letters are
linked in the blog post:
http://www.elizabethfoss.com/serendipity/along_the_alphabet_path/

And one I forgot to mention on Saturday: I have found the book list in Catholic
Mosaic helpful in suggesting picture books and accompanying activities that
follow the liturgical year. I have this if anyone would like to take a look at
it. Or you can buy it at this link:
http://hillsideeducation.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=9_10

Another one I forgot to mention is Natural Structure (all online): an idea about
combining Montessori works with Classical Education that has inspired our
family's preschool:
http://www.nsmontessori.com/index.html

We have also had fun with the craft ideas for the liturgical year on the
following two blogs. You may already know about these or others that are also
great (please share!), but just in case:

Homeschool Goodies: http://thankevann.com/homeschoolgoodies/

Catholic Icing: http://catholicicing.com/

A.M.D.G.

Our New Home #2

Here are some different views of our Family & School Room.  We think it has everything we need to relax and spend time together...books, piano, pillows, light, books, games (in the cabinet under the windows seat), books, etc.  The only "television" we have is the computer monitor, which is tucked away in the armoire.  We occasionally arrange the pillows to recline and watch a movie together.  There's no end to the activities Matthew and Meghan can find to do in this room.  Every day, Joseph serenades us playing Pachelbel's Kanon and other songs as he practices on the piano.  Meghan sits at the little table for school while Joseph and Matthew share the white desk.  Judy teaches from the window seat.  (Katie does most of her school work at the desk in her room.)

From Rome to Annapolis

We found the grave of St. Justin Martyr himself behind the Carroll House in Annapolis.

Our New Home #1

This is our new living room!  It looks and feels homey.  Thanks, Judy and Katie!  I think this is the first time we've ever displayed my Bukhara carpet...

Washington Monument

This is the first Washington Monument.  It's located near Boonesboro, Maryland.  Joseph and I saw it during BSA Troop 224's monthly camping trip in October.

Prayer

Following Catholic tradition and the exhortation of St. Paul to "pray constantly", I attempt to read Morning Prayer when I arise each day.  I say "attempt", because some days I just don't manage it.  Nonetheless, this is the reading for Wednesday of Week III--and the reading I encountered the morning after the 2012 US elections.

Naked I came forth from my mother's womb,

  and naked I shall go back again.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;

  blessed be the name of the Lord!

We accept good things from God;

  and should we not accept evil?

Job 1: 21; 2: 10b

Very fitting.  Rather than be upset about the elections, I decided to concentrate on the things I can do something about.  Two that came easily to mind were Prayer and Fasting.  More to follow...

Packing Out

So it begins...

Catholic places we have visited in Japan

Because some of John's compatriots in the Catholic Men of the Chapel asked:
             (This is a work in progress. I will try to add links and photos and the real names of the churches as I find them.)

Our Lady of the Assumption, Misawa (Fr. Andre's church)
Sacred Heart Church, Towada
Seitai Hoshikai - Akita
Hakodate Catholic Churches
 -old church (and Lourdes grotto)
 - new church
Trappistine monastery in Hakodate
Furano church (Hokkaido)
Sendai cathedral
Tokyo cathedral (and Lourdes grotto)
Franciscan church in Roppongi
Narita catholic church
Kyoto cathedral
Niigata cathedral
Base churches:
Misawa AB
Iwakuni MCAS
Atsugi NAS
Nagasaki Urakami Cathedral
26 Martyrs Hill and Museum
Nyokodo--hut of Dr. Takashi Nagai
Seibu-no ______-- Franciscan monastery founded by St. Maximillian Kolbe
    (Kolbe museum, kindergarten, boys' school, Lourdes grotto, church with side chapel of St. Max)
Oura historic church and former Latin school - Nagasaki
Oura new church

Bonus! Korean churches
Osan shopping area church
Myeong-dong Cathedral (and crypt with relics of the Korean Martyrs)
Yongsan North chapel

Extra Bonus!!! Thailand!
Chiang Mai Cathedral

Double Extra Bonus!!! New Zealand!
Christchurch Cathedral [no longer in use due to 2011 earthquakes :-(]
            This is where Matthew threw up on John just as Midnight Mass was starting on Christmas Eve, so John and I went back to Mass in the wee hours of Christmas morning and found ourselves at a Traditional Latin Mass. Serendipity. :)

Wellington Church
Queenstown church

China - sort of
We did not have the freedom to leave our tour group in Beijing, but we did pass a large church while on the bus--we assume it is a government-approved church--and realized it was Catholic as we passed.

St. Joseph

Now that we have our orders and many of the arrangements to leave Japan are proceeding, we are beginning to think harder about what we're doing when we get to Maryland. In other words, we're looking for a house to rent and a van to buy. 

 

My second-youngest brother and his family live in Maryland, and we are hoping against hope to find a home near theirs. They have enticed us with stories of the neighborhood and, especially, their parish. Oh, my goodness, how we would love to participate in Mass at a parish that appreciates Latin! Even more, my brother is going way above the call of family duty to help us.

 

Whenever we need a home, St. Joseph always prays for us, and the right home comes available just as we need it. So, following Meghan's prayer for "Daddy to get the best job where God wants us to go," we are also praying for the best home where God wants us to live.  We will start our novena to St. Joseph tonight. :)

 

 

The Prayer to St Joseph

Oh, St. Joseph, whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the throne of God. I place in you all my interests and desires.

Oh, St. Joseph, do assist me by your powerful intercession, and obtain for me from your Divine Son all spiritual blessings, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So that, having engaged here below your heavenly power, I may offer my thanksgiving and homage to the most loving of Fathers.

Oh, St. Joseph, I never weary of contemplating you, and Jesus asleep in your arms; I dare not approach while He reposes near your heart. Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me and ask him to return the Kiss when I draw my dying breath.

St. Joseph, Patron of departing souls - Pray for us.

Amen.

Read more: http://www.prayers-for-special-help.com/prayer-to-st-joseph.html#ixzz1zuv881cF

And in advance thanksgiving, we have ordered an icon for our parish here in honor of St. Joseph. It will hang in our Blessed Sacrament chapel and it looks like this:

St. Joseph, pray for us!

AMDG

Counting down

This morning, I ground the last of our hard wheat and baked the last loaves of bread that I will bake in Misawa.

Every moment is bittersweet.

Unexpected

I didn't expect to find myself in tears after I wrote this letter. It's just a business letter.

John P. and Judith G. Riordon 

H223

June 28, 2012

Masaki Kojima

Northern Housing Office Co. Ltd.

Dear Masaki-san,

The purpose of this letter is to give 30 days written notice of our moving from H223. We do not yet have orders, but we learned today that we will most likely be leaving Misawa on 29 July 2012. For this reason, we wanted to inform you as soon as possible that we are moving.

Also, there is a family with 5 children arriving to work in John’s office in late July. They may be interested in renting H223. We understand that you cannot hold the house for a particular family, and we will do our best put them or their sponsor in direct contact with you as soon as possible.

Thank you for the past six years of rental in H223. We have been privileged to call this house our home.

Very truly yours,

John P. Riordon                        Judith Gibbons Riordon

June garden

 

I love to garden. Wherever we live, even when we don't own the property, I can't resist playing in the dirt. So when we moved here six years ago and I was given permission by the landlord to make a little garden along the fence line in front of our parking area, I was never so happy. A blank slate of my very own.

Now that we are in our last spring, I want to remember how it looks now that it is filling in and almost finished. (Because gardens are never really completely finished, are they?)

The farthest from the house, this end of the garden is the least developed, but I am very pleased with the way the large purple iris (far left) that we transplanted from the front of the house last fall has bloomed. None of that iris had bloomed in the front of the house since we moved in. It just needed a different home, I guess. The little tree was transplanted from the flowerbed that runs along the east wall of the house. It was taking up too much space and had to be removed. So John dug it out, and I found it a new home by the driveway. It even bloomed this spring with tiny white flowers. And see the little low ferns on the left? We transplanted them from the woods. Aren't they cute?

Katie and Joseph salvaged this yellow iris from the woods down the road. Another gardener in the neighborhood had removed it from his garden and left it there to die. Hooray for new colors of iris!

A quick shot of the front of the house. There is a bare spot now where the large purple iris plants were, to the left of the terra cotta pot, but a perennial chrysanthemum that I put in last fall is coming up there, so it will look fine in another month or so. The little tree and the hosta were here when we moved in, so was the clump of iris in the center back. We have thinned it considerably over the past two years, and it is blooming a lot better now, although not as fully as the plants we moved. The ferns were salvaged from the woods that used to be behind our house. We rescued a lot of plants from there when we realized that they were going to take down all the trees. The vinca was planted by the previous tenants, and is finally spreading enough to count as ground cover and actually help keep the weeds down.

This iris was transplanted from the front of the house in Fall, 2009

Here's what the same clump of iris looked like in Spring, 2010

 I will miss seeing these gardens grow, but I have loved making them, and I love leaving a pretty yard for the next tenants to enjoy. 

"I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees."

-Ecclesiastes 2:5

Kyoto Scenes

Lest you think we haven't been doing anything, here's a few scenes from Kyoto...

Dear diary...

When I was younger, I kept a diary. I wrote stuff in it. Depending on what age I was, I wrote things that were true and things that were not true. It's silly to think back on all that. In a way, I thought I was creating this persona for future readers of my diary. Weird to me now that I was dishonest in my own diaries. Was I that unhappy with my life? I wasn't all that introspective until later... I don't know. So diaries, or now electronic diaries in the form of blogs, are fascinating to me. It's an intimate form of communication open to the whole world. Why?

My personal reason for writing, and for trying to keep up with this blog, is to keep our families in the loop even though we live on different continents. And to share, directly and indirectly, what my family tries to live daily: our Catholic Faith. And to record the moments in our childrens' lives that are flying by so fast that I can't keep up. Truly, I forget even the things that I most want to remember sometimes. When I started this blog, I had five children. Now I have six children, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. How does it all happen so fast?

Even though clearly the blog is not nearly as active as it used to be, and honestly, not as active as I would like it to be, those still my primary goals. Many days, I think of blog posts I'd like to write, but actually having the time to sit down and write, well.... I'm here now because one of the children finished school and I have a little hole in my day now in which to muse.

Sometimes I wonder about the way other people seem to be bugged by postings on blogs. I guess I don't expect people to share their bad days or messy rooms online. I know that I prefer to write about the happy things: the things that make my day; the holidays when I really love how the decorating or the meal turned out or who was able to make it home to be at the table. The other ones, the ones that feel rushed, or frantic, or unsettled somehow, I don't like to write about so much, and I find that often, I don't. Partly because they don't feel like things I want to remember sometimes. And at least partly because if the holiday was rushed, life is rushed at that moment, and I'm not likely to be sitting down at the computer to write something about it. Am I creating an honest picture of life in our family? I hope I am. Is it a bad thing not to care to dwell on or record many messy days? I don't think so. I do try to post honestly. But the blog is not a complete picture.

And I don't expect anyone else's blog to be a complete picture either. So I don't completely get it when people are intimidated or discouraged by what looks like the perfect life of another writer. I have heard people who say they dislike one blog or another because it is "too perfect". Hmm. I guess I recognize that the posts that are present are usually, if the blogger is a good-intentioned person, and I don't think I read (m?)any blogs where that is not the case, they are usually meant to be of help to the reader in some way. To present positive ideas, to share joy and wonder about the world, to impart little bits of wisdom that have been gained along the way. So they are good, happy, funny posts about real life. And sometimes they are thoughtful posts about the challenges of life that the writer is grappling with, or is processing, or has had an epiphany about. Those things help others. They express real life.

With pretty photos on the side.

Who doesn't need more beauty in this world?

Home, but... (an explanation/apology of sorts)

After we got home last weekend, everyone promptly fell ill.

Okay, maybe it isn't that drastic, but Meghan came home with a cold, which she shared with Matthew and Daddy. And it is a doozy: a feverish, achingly-painful migrane-like headach-y, ending-with-a-horrible-cough type cold. Even Mommy got the horrible headache. And the only two left standing are so tired that I suspect they are fighting it, too. Poor Meghan was better Friday and all weekend, and now she is sick again tonight with a new wrinkle--higher fever and upset tummy. Thanks be to God for children's Ibuprofin.

Then, we had three birthday parties to attend this weekend, which those who were well enough did attend. (not complaining--they were fun, but they did make for an unusually busy first week home from vacation)

And Patrick's financial aid paperwork is due. And a friend asked for help with a last-minute Flat Stanley project (which I love, but it took a little time to put together).

And thanks be to God for the team concept of teaching Confirmation. One of the other team members stepped in and planned the whole of today's class. For which John and I will be forever grateful.

And Katie had two home soccer games!! Yay!! The first ones of the season, which has to start in Tokyo because we always have too much snow here at the beginning of the season. But, you must realize that this means....

THE SNOW IS GONE!!!

Except for the gigantic piles that make hills of empty lots and fields where it was dumped by dump trucks that had been filled by shovel trucks that were clearing out parking lots and city streets all winter. But the soccer field off-base where the Eagles play is clear.

And so is the "train park" across from the city offices. They have installed a new play structure, and if we ever get well, and if the weather warms up just a little bit more, we plan to go there and check it out. They even set up the cherry blossom festival lanterns this week. No blossoms yet, but the lanterns give us hope.

So please understand that this is why we have not even finished taking the photos from Thailand and Korea off our cameras yet, let alone shared any here. We're sorry (especially to our parents, who are waiting to see all the fun). And we will post pictures as soon as we can. Maybe later this week.

SO excited...

to be starting this faith study with my women's group after Easter.

Encouragement for moms

 

First this. Because we all have our days (weeks...):

http://catholicexchange.com/what-a-holy-woman-of-a-large-family-doesnt-look-like/

 

Then this (also linked in the first post) about active love:

https://momheart.sqsp.com/blog/8xxpul9dqbnes188tfgi3ytmey5958

 

And finally, this, because no one is perfect and it helps to remember that:

https://momheart.sqsp.com/blog/ltq98u1y71k5ny00yjq6l2jnghfldq

 

This second and third posts are from a new blog with multiple contributors called MomHeart. If you haven't heard of Sally Clarkson, she is a Christian woman who has written many books about Christian motherhood (and--full disclosure ;-)--homeschooling). Elizabeth Foss, who wrote the piece about active love, is a Catholic mom of 8 who lives in Northern Virginia. And if her last name sounds familiar (it will if you have spent any time watching Monday Night Football) it's because her husband is Mike Foss of ESPN sportscaster fame. She also writes a column for the Arlington Catholic Herald (diocesan newspaper).

 

MomHeart is here:

https://momheart.sqsp.com/

 

I am loving you all this Holy Week, my dear sisters in Christ!

 

 

Palm Sunday

Six days before the Passover,

when the Lord came into the city of Jerusalem,

the children ran to meet him;

in their hands they carried palm branches

and with a loud voice cried out:

Hosanna in the highest!

Blessed are you, who have come in your abundant mercy!

O gates, lift high your heads;

grow higher, ancient doors,

Let him enter, the king of glory!

Who is this king of glory?

He, the lord of hosts, he is the king of glory.

Hosanna in the highest!

Blessed are you, who have come in your abundant mercy!

-Entrance Antiphon (Cf. John 12:1, 12-13; Psalm 24 (23):9-10)