I've found a few more photos from the first week of January, to finish off the Christmas season. With Steven traveling last week, I kind of feel like we are beginning the new year for real now. We'll start piano and register for baseball this week. We'll touch base over the phone with the consultant and evaluate how we're doing with homeschooling. We'll pray about big decisions in this new year...our house, our parish, our spiritual life, our travels.
Steven's Uncle John died last week. I think I met him only once, at his dad's surprise 70th birthday party. Reading Uncle John's obituary it is obvious that he was a man of faith and integrity. I met one of Steven's cousins on Sunday who is in town for the funeral, and got to hear more family stories about Steven's dad, his grandparents, and the many aunts and uncles who share a beautiful faith, an amazing family history, and an inspiring outlook on life. They've held big positions in the world in politics, law, the church, and the military, but their most important legacy is their family.
Steven's dad and each one of his siblings that I've met or spoken to have shared this joy and contentment with life. They are sincerely interested in every person they encounter. It's too bad that the family is so big and spread out that I haven't had the privilege of meeting all the extended family. But I'm grateful for those I have gotten to meet, and all the stories I've gotten to hear about the B family legacy.
It gave me pause today as we consider where we put our time, energy, resources, and our hearts. What will our family legacy be? What virtues to we uphold in our family and encourage in our children? How do the children relate to the older members of our family, to our friends and strangers? How do they treat people? It starts in the home, and it's always during a week playing "single mom" where I realize just how much work we have to do.
One of our goals this year is to find, explore, and create beautiful things. We are hoping to visit the art museum in the next few weeks. We attend parishes with beautiful sanctuaries, music, and liturgies. I try to make things beautiful around our home (but boy today I feel like everything around here is more disaster than beauty!), and I am hoping we can do more to beautify the interior structure of our home this year. We've added a nice new fence and can hopefully start creating a beautiful area for outdoor play. The girls explore beautiful music and body movement in their dance classes, and two of the children will hopefully start to make beautiful music in piano lessons starting this week. We are following a classical curriculum that places importance on beautiful works of art and literature.
And the below are the photos that should've gone with the stories above, but I've already taken over a day to finish this, so I'd better just post it. This was at Steven's parents' house on Sunday. The triplet nephews were interviewing them about their childhood for a school project, and we were all enjoying meeting Steven's cousin Pat who works at the US Capitol. I love the idea of, and the experience of, Sunday afternoons with family <3 p="">
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