It's our turn to celebrate! Homeschooling has grown by leaps and bounds over the past three years! And I think it's time to rejoice over the tremendous blessing that home education is to our families! As Catholics, we definitely need to support one another on this journey to be able to pass on to our children the treasures of our faith. So I have decided that #Catholichomeschoolweek is our week to celebrate! Especially here at the end of a long academic year, I'm hoping this infusion of joy will help us finish strong! Join me April 17-22, 2023 for #Catholichomeschoolweek by downloading your ..read more

One of my very favorite Catholic songs is “It Was His Delight to Walk Among Men” by Marie Bellet. Go listen and enjoy! Then come back. I’ll wait. So when I decided to write a Busy Moms’ Retreat for Advent, I knew I wanted to include her song as one of the retreat resources! Marie sings about how perplexing it is to her that our Lord delighted in being with us here on earth, among pathetic sinners like you and me. It is equally perplexing, to me, that God came down and humbled himself to be born as an infant in such wretched circumstances as Scripture describes. I think it’s why I’ve always ..read more

I've seen and talked to not a few frazzled moms after managing their small children at Mass lately, and this post on my old blog came to mind! I wrote this on Friday, August 5, 2016 when my children were 14, 11, 6, and 3. I was past the baby stage and able to actually think during prayer once again. Perhaps these thoughts might help us all get to daily Mass, at least once this month? Today I managed, via some excellent peer pressure (see text thread above), to get to daily Mass with my four children. As we arrived barely on time for the 9am Mass, I could see something was different. The c ..read more

When we were stuck at home in 2020, so many of us were posting on social media about how blessed we were to have our families. While we were driving one another a bit crazy, there was a genuine understanding, amidst the uncertainty of a pandemic, that it was better to be trapped in a house with these people all day every day than to not have them in our lives at all. And yet. How easy that is to forget when life carries on and the days are long. Our Treasures Inspired by that sad reality, I wrote a new Busy Moms’ Retreat on the theme Treasures at Home. I began it while I was not at home, aw ..read more

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is one of my favorite Catholic days! Celebrating the Cross on which our Savior suffered and died an unjust, painful, bloody crucifixion out of love for the world is so uniquely Christian. The non-Christian world (and maybe some Christians, too) cannot understand why we love this device of torture, and even many Christians would rather not think of the gruesome nature of Jesus’s death, preferring to hang serene crosses in their homes rather than the gruesome crucifixes most Catholics hang. My Catholic upbringing and formation certainly taught me ..read more

I'm so pleased to welcome back Selina to the blog today with an updated Day in the Life post. Dad is now working from home full time at their house, and they have ramped up extracurriculars! Maybe this window into their daily routines will inspire you to figure out what will work best in your family! Another school year (2021/2022) has started and ended for our young family. Before I get into the various ways we educate and lead our children, let us all have a good laugh at my younger self when one of our kids was struggling and we needed to address their needs.  What we didn’t realize w ..read more

Are you ready? It's back to school time! I'm a big fan of new school years beginning! I love fresh starts and new plans! But this is also a stressful time with a roller coaster of emotions and so. much. to. do! Every year I seem to get my planning done later and later, which robs me of some of my peace as I feel the time crunch before our first day of school. And I know I'm not alone! That's why I'm starting a new tradition. Amidst these busy days, I am determined not to lose my focus, not to lose sight of the real reason I choose to homeschool - to lead my children to Christ's will for t ..read more

Are you ready? It's back to school time! I'm a big fan of new school years beginning! I love fresh starts and new plans! But this is also a stressful time with a roller coaster of emotions and so. much. to. do! Every year I seem to get my planning done later and later, which robs me of some of my peace as I feel the time crunch before our first day of school. And I know I'm not alone! That's why I'm starting a new tradition. Amidst these busy days, I am determined not to lose my focus, not to lose sight of the real reason I choose to homeschool - to lead my children to Christ's will for t ..read more

We all know that homeschoolers are home a lot of the time, right? And being at home makes it harder to meet people. Being a homeschooler, even if you're not at home a lot, our educational choice does separate us from the rest of the world. We don't have jobs where we have colleagues. Our kids aren't in school where they interact with groups of other kids on a daily basis. It is up to us as homeschooling parents to seek out those opportunities for socialization. In fact, I believe that an important part of our job as homeschoolers is to help our children find friends, a challenging job but w ..read more

The couple in cutoffs with the boy on an ipad… The lone elderly woman staring adoringly at the altar… The group of unkempt young adults kneeling with pleading faces… The family with three girls in chapel veils, an enviable vision of tidy and tame… The mom whose baby is wailing while she struggles to keep her toddler in the pew… And me. Glancing around, grateful for my four incredible children and devoted husband, none of us perfect but all of us together in this moment. We are the Church. And we are all in Mass on a Sunday for the primary purpose to worship the God of the Universe. Isn’t th ..read more