Christmas Novena

Today (Nov. 30th) starts the St. Andrew Christmas Novena...to be said 15 times each day from now until Christmas.  Last year, the kids and I made an effort to pray this beautiful prayer a few times each day, but honestly, we never got to 15 times each day!  Well, this year we have some pretty hefty prayer intentions and we aim to offer them up!  We've made a chain with loops on it for the learning room.  We will slide a loop over each time we pray this prayer so we have a visual reminder of how many we have prayed and how many we have left to pray each day.

We are praying this prayer for two intentions: 1. For a friend that has been diagnosed with cancer...for healing for him and 2, for our desire to grow our family....however and whenever our Lord decides to do that.  We hope and pray for the child that God is calling us to adopt...that the details will become clear to us.

Here is the prayer....

Hail and Blessed be the hour and moment in which the Son of God was born of the most pure Virgin Mary, at midnight, in Bethlehem, in piercing cold.  In that hour, vouchsafe, O my God!  to hear my prayer and grant my desires (intention here) through the merits of Our Savior Jesus Christ, and of His Blessed Mother.  Amen.

Happy Holy Season of Advent

--Kimberly

Lunar Moth Caterpillar

Very cool, very HUGE Lunar Moth Caterpillar we found in the yard!  The kids scooped it up to put it in an aquarium so they could draw it in their nature journals and before we knew it, he was making his cocoon in there!  Now we have a cocoon until spring.  We are really into nature study at our house...lots of creatures, lots of field guides and drawing journals...we love it. 

Hearts Toward Home- Our Goal: To turn our hearts toward home, towards the value of family, towards traveling together to our eternal home and setting our hearts on bringing the orphan "Home". 


Getting Things Started... Well, here we are! It has been many years in the making, but our family is happy to say that we are excitedly starting several new journeys. We have felt called to more of a "homesteading" lifestyle and have wanted to move out of the suburbs to where we can live a simple life- faith, family, learning to provide for ourselves and have more space to really invest in making a life simpler and more sustainable. We had been praying and searching for the right "homestead" and our Good Lord has blessed us with a new place we now call home...its only a few acres, but its ours and we hope to spend many years loving our life here and making it fruitful!

Our other big adventure is that our Lord blessed us with an eye-opening call to adoption back in March of 2011...I will never forget the day I found "Reece's Rainbow" while browsing some favorite blogs...we are forever changed. And we plan to ACT on that call. Please join us as we strive as a family to turn our hearts towards home...our hearts toward our heavenly home and our hearts toward bringing an orphan to their forever home... Love and Blessings, The Perrys

As the family goes...

"As the family goes, so goes the nation..." (Pope John Paul II)




Working on our nation one little family member at a time... :)





You know the old saying "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world..."
I know I don't want to rule the world, but improving it for the better would be nice :)

As for us, we'll just be here changing the world one diaper at a time...

Blessings,
Kimberly

Our Domestic Church and the Liturgical Year...

Catechism of the Catholic Church:

1666 The Christian home is the place where children receive the first proclamation of the faith. For this reason the family home is rightly called "the domestic church," a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues and of Christian charity.

Knowing that our family is called to be a domestic church, we've always strived to really engage in the beautiful liturgical year of the Church...sometimes too much so... where Mom is working so hard to incorporate every single meaningful tradition or celebration into our home that it can get a little overwhelming! But it is always worth it when we realize how connected our life at home is to the life of the Church. So...in the midst of soaking up our "brand-new baby time" I'm hoping to gather up my materials and get ready for Ash Wednesday next week and the beginning of Lent. I'll try to post about what kinds of prayers and activities we'll be doing during this season. Pray for me....since I've gotten so comfortable in "the now" and enjoying our new little joy I'm finding it harder to get geared up to do anything else but sit and love on my family and the "down-time" we've been having...I know its going to be a little hard to jump into this season since its usually Mom that pulls it all together (of course ;) ).

The Bird Count Continues!

Well, we're in our second day of bird counting....the boys are absolutely loving it! The first day was a little disappointing because we didn't have even half the species of birds come to the feeder that we usually do so we weren't able to submit very many results to the Great Backyard Bird Count that we were hoping to. But today was awesome! All the birds we usually see...and then some...made a mad dash to our feeder and we counted frantically and ripped through our field guides trying to quickly figure out what bird was what so we could name them and count them in our tally. You probably had to be there but it had both boys and my husband and I screaming at the table getting excited about all different birds we were seeing....it was a pretty cool experience. We'll be adding our data to the website later today and checking out the real time maps of what others across the country have been recording thus far.

Elijah's comment: "I wish we could count like twenty more days!"

Speaking of birds...someone at the library saw me checking out a million different bird books and field guides and told us about a blue heron sanctuary at a greenway right near our home so we thought it fitting during our bird learning to go check it out and see if we could spot some herons. Heres some shots Dan got of the Great Blue Herons we saw...

Taking it all in and Loving It...

I've been wanting to get more done on this blog, but we've been a little busy soaking in the amazing blessing that God gave us 8 weeks ago...






Our Matthias Kolbe...look at all that hair! You could practically braid it!

Has it really been 8 weeks already? This is our fourth child so I thought I knew what the whole "having a new baby" process would be like....usually, as much as I love my children, the new infant stage tends to be a little bit of an exhausted blur. Theres so much to do and get settled, your tired and usually I'm wishing that they just came out running around and being a little more self-sufficient! But not this time...no, I am happy to say that I am truly "getting it" and finally basking in all that there is to be grateful for in each moment of this little one's life.

I knew this time around would be a little different from the moment our Lord spoke to me in Adoration shortly after I found out I was pregnant again...He was very clear with me about His plans and I have been blessed with this little one ever since. I am so grateful to be aware of what I have, to be appreciating and really ENJOYING who he is already. God never ceases to amaze me in how he can push to me to grow a little more with each child and now I am finally starting to enjoy some of the fruits of our life-giving love.

He's growing so fast...now that I'm becoming mature enough to take it all in, I wish he would slow down a bit and stay awhile with me like this...