Combining a general update with some traditions. Since its within the Octave of Easter, I don’t feel like I’m too far behind in giving an Easter update. An update on everything else…well, I’m definitely behind there. Easter I’d picked Byron up on Holy Saturday around 8:30 a.m. for a 36 hour visit. He had to work Good Friday evening at Chick-Fil-A (c’mon Chick-Fil-A; you’re supposed to be the Lord’s chicken!!) On Saturday evening, Tony and Edie had attended the Easter Vigil Mass while I got the Easter baskets ready and cooked an Italian Easter pie for the next day. We all attended the 10:30 a ..read more

Just a reminder to take my reader survey! I promise the link works! It’s time for my third Family Traditions post! I’m really enjoying writing these up as doing so leads me down rabbit holes of old posts and events I’d forgotten about. And in the research, I’ve come across posts to add to previous month’s collections. I was notorious for giving my older blog posts titles and tags that contained little relevant information about the post’s actual content. As someone who loves to organize, and gets sense of peace from doing so, compiling these posts feeds my need to be in control with less mess ..read more

How about a general update? Nothing too major happening around here except a MURDER! …mystery dinner party! After our successful 80s party, I was trying to figure out another themed party we could host and settled on a murder mystery theme. My friend found a murder mystery dinner party game on sale and snagged it for the event. It provided the characters, clues and props. The mystery was set in a 1920s theater, so I encouraged all our guests to dress up and bring food from the roaring twenties. I prepared chicken a la king, deviled eggs, Waldorf salad and an ice box cake; all popular food from ..read more

Even though St. Bruno’s has a small class this year (just Edie). I still wanted to do a quick update on how things were going, and also update everyone on her post high school plans. I’ll also share a bit about how public school is going for Fulton and Teddy. As for Addie and Byron, they’re really excelling at the whole adult thing. Addie is still set to graduate in May (family road trip!). Byron has an internship lined up for the summer, and is acing all his writing classes. The Cleveland State University Fencing Team at a recent tournament in Chicago. Addie is sporting the bright hair in the ..read more

As someone who abhors winter, February is always the longest month of the year. When everyone was little and homeschooled, February was the month when we all wanted to give up. It always seems more fitting to me when Ash Wednesday falls early in February so that Lent and the dreariness of the month occur simultaneously. Now that we live in a well insulated house, and the kids are older, and we watch more movies and shows together in the evenings, it’s not as rough. It used to be if we got a sunny day over 45 degrees in February, I’d take us all to the beach. That’s not an option now, but it wa ..read more

A very solemn Ash Wednesday to you all. I’m happy to say my Catholic Valentines have been bringing in quite the traffic spike. It’s not too late to download a few to give to those whose eternal souls you’re enamored with….saving from the fires of Gehenna. And once again, it’s time for me to naval gaze, contemplate, and publicly proclaim what I’m sacrificing for Lent. Last year, one of my New Year’s resolutions, and something I really worked on during Lent was improving my spiritual life. I think what I realized was that I’m very immature and underdeveloped spiritually. I read things by the sa ..read more

In my ongoing desire to catalogue and organize a bunch of stuff I decided to do regular posts that record all (most? some?) of the traditions our family does each month, or season. Most will be liturgical stuff, some things will probably overlap with the online cookbook posts, and some will be collections of archive posts and ideas we did back when all the kids were little, but perhaps do less now. Regardless, this series of posts will be a collection of traditions that I might want to do with my grandkids, or hope to inspire my kids to do in their own homes. It won’t be like a book that conta ..read more

Because our family, and most modern American families, make so many different foods from all over the world on a regular basis, I forget how specialized cuisine can still be from one location or culture to the next. Nowadays its so easy to pull inspiration from the internet to make Chinese food, Somalian food, Indian food, Thai food or whatever, that we forget that these broad categories don’t reveal the wide variety of dishes across an entire country and its subcultures. It’s the same in America. There is “American food” like turkey on Thanksgiving with pumpkin pie, or burgers and hot dogs on ..read more

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been cleaning up the archives of this here blog. Old, irrelevant posts or those with information I’d now prefer to keep private, are being reverted to ‘Drafts’. Other posts are being removed from Google search results, so you’ll only find them if you’re clicking around on my site. And a few posts are updated, given more SEO friendly titles, meta descriptions, keywords, and images so that more people can discover them when searching online. It’s a slow process. But when it’s all done, it will make the funny posts related to our family’s life over the last ten ..read more

Starting off 2024 with a timely New Year’s Resolutions post. First up, how’d I do with last year’s resolutions? I only made two so how hard could it have been right?? RIGHT???!?!? 1. Be focused on spiritual improvement this year.  I think for the first half of the year, I did pretty good on this resolution. I attended daily Mass more often, managed to say my daily prayers, and I did get to confession almost monthly, only missing one month the entire year. But once the boys were out of school, and with all our summer plans, I definitely slipped out of a lot of the habits I’d developed. Whe ..read more