What Will 2015 Bring? And Reflections on Family Legacy

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="">

Survived Week One

That's week one back to homeschooling, back to dance classes, and Steven back to flying across the country. He was gone Monday through Thursday, in four different states, and we made it through. The weather was frigid (not as frigid as the below-zero temperatures where Daddy was), wet, and miserable except for one glorious day that we spent outdoors.  My lap and my bed always seem to be filled with these little humans. The two on the left may drive me crazy, but I love them so much.  I just need to figure out a way to have a little more of my own space and time, especially when Steven is gone.  I survived partly due to many, many episodes of "White Collar." Whatever it takes!

Somehow we had a week filled with friends, too. It made me feel loved in the midst of an otherwise lonely kind of week. It also made me so glad to be where we live, right in the middle of everywhere our friends need to be, convenient for us and for them to come visit! On Monday we had two sets of friends over for short visits, and another kind friend gave the girls a ride to and from ballet. On Tuesday (the sunny day), my Maria came to clean the house, so I took the kids out for Chickfila, the library, and a park for a few hours. When we were almost home, our neighbor asked if the boys wanted to play outside, so we ended up spending the afternoon with them. Then we had their Godmother and some of her kids over again in the evening between their wrestling classes. On Wednesday another set of friends came over so that Mary Clare could have a little cake with her buddies who had been traveling over Christmas and New Years.  Thursday was dance class and Daddy's late night arrival, and Friday was a rest day.  What a full week!

Back to all that fun school-y stuff like learning to read. 

This weekend we'll be regrouping, and hopefully we'll have some time to set some yearly goals and start some commitments to things like exercise, better diet, prayer, and frequenting the sacraments. I had hoped to attend a family retreat this weekend, but it just didn't pan out.  But we did enjoy some Chinese takeout tonight and I was struck once again by the fact that we are not just visiting here; we are HOME! I am so thankful.. So we'll enjoy this weekend together and start looking forward to all the great things that 2015 has to offer us!  Hope your new year has been filled with fun things like reading girls, cute puppies, and crawling babies :)

Nutcracker Night

On the evening of the Nutcracker, we all got dressed up in our Christmas clothes again, so I could actually get a shot of all the kids together.

(I've got a cheap flash in my Amazon cart. I think it's time to start working with a flash a little, after all these weird-looking indoor Christmas photos!)

So we moved outside for better lighting, but my settings were wrong again and someone was obviously done with pictures at this point!

We went to evening mass downtown, picked up some takeout from Spaghetti Warehouse, and then Steven dropped us off at the theater while he took the three littlest kids over to his sister's house. It was a lovely evening with my girls!

We ran into some of our good friends during intermission!

And afterwards, the girls got to meet Clara and the Nutcracker Prince! Such a fun time!

Next year we hope to attend one of the (much cheaper) student matinees, but this was a special treat to get to go to the last evening performance of the Houston Ballet Nutcracker! Thanks, St. Nick!

Five Favorite Gifts of Christmas!

I thought I'd share a few of our favorite Christmas gifts for Five Favorites! Linking with Jenna over at Call Her Happy!

1. Tabletop Foosball

My parents got this for my kids and it may be the most played with Christmas gift this season!

2. Walkie Talkies

This was one thing SJ really wanted and they had a lot of fun playing with them for a couple days, until...

Someone decided to "wash" them in the sink. We tried the rice trick to no avail :( So we'll have to eventually get some new ones!

3. Eye mask

This eye mask is the bomb, and Steven and I fight over it. It has some kind of beads inside and helps with headaches!

4. Chatbooks

These may be the coolest thing I bought. Chatbooks are purchased on a smartphone app where you can choose which Instagram photos to include. Each one has 60 photos.

5. Nutcracker Ballet

This was as much a gift for me as for the girls. We hadn't been to see the Houston Ballet in about four years, and we got to see a friend's five children perform in this show!  It was every bit as dreamy as the Nutcracker always is. 

We ran info a good friend and her two girls during intermission!

And after the show they were able to meet Clara!

12.

A few months ago, Mary Clare started making plans for her 12th birthday. What she wanted most was to spend a day with me, to go to a movie and get a manicure. The day after her birthday, we got to do just that. We went to see "Annie" (then made a quick pit stop with the others at the library so I could feed the baby), went to get her nails done, and went to Barnes & Noble so she could use a gift card.

The day went by quickly, just as these past 12 years have gone.  I don't know how it has been 12 years since we looked at that sweet swollen face of our first baby, or how she could go from a chubby toddler to a poised preteen. But what I do know is that we are blessed with a spunky, fun, creative, smart young lady. We are proud of who she is and who she is becoming, and I hope she will continue to stop for a second to let us in, to allow us share with her the beauty and joys of this world as she experiences them.

We love you so much, Mary Clare, and we look forward to the fun and exciting years to come. Thanks for sharing your special day with me. Happy Birthday!

Adding a few shots from her cake with the N family about a week later...

Exhaustion.

The Advent/Christmas season is physically exhausting, and we seem to get sick around this time every year. I've got a cold and am barely able to do basic things around the house. Add to that the fact that Steven has to work tomorrow, will be traveling all next week, and we have to start back to homeschooling on Monday, and I'm in a bit of a panic! Oh, and we also have a big girl turning TWELVE tomorrow! The holiday birthdays are so hard! Poor thing may end up baking her own cake, and I'm not quite sure when we will have an official celebration.

We ventured out to a fabulous New Year's Eve party last night, and I hesitated about going, but I was feeling much better (until about halfway through the party), and we just had a couple kids with slight sniffles.  Even more than having this head cold, I just started to feel so exhausted, and it was reminiscent of Christmas night when I just had to GET HOME NOW! I guess I'm getting old and I've got a baby who gets cranky late at night (really?), and the 1-2am bed times for so many days are just starting to hit me!  Not to mention, it's been so cold and wet! I am very much ready for the summer sunshine.

So one of my goals in 2015 will be to work on my 11pm bedtime again. I'm not going to make it tonight, but hopefully I'll crash by midnight and can have a good sleep without random 1-2 hour wake-ups! I do have something really great to look forward to tomorrow, besides my big girl's birthday, and that's the fact that MY MARIA is coming back! You may remember me blogging about my favorite housekeeper ever, and she was one of the things that I was most looking forward to about moving back here. Now that OUR HOUSE FINALLY SOLD ON MONDAY, and we no longer have to pay two mortgages, we can have her come and clean again! So I think tomorrow night my attitude will be much more positive because my house is going to look AMAZING.

So I'll end this little stream of consciousness here and head to bed while the Sudafed is working. I want to share about our Nutcracker night, some favorite Christmas gifts, our first house/yard project, as well as reflect on some goals and hopes for 2015. I'm going to try to do a little more blogging and writing in this new year, and hopefully I'll have lots of things to share about house renovations! I'm also working hard on my photography and editing skills, so I'll add today's best photo of my two boys reading Richard Scarry this evening.  Aren't they sweet? (Steven Joseph ran away right after I snapped it!)

12 in 2014

My top posts of 2014! Linked over with Dwija at House Unseen!

In late January, we moved into a rental cabin to await the arrival of our sweet bundle of love in February!  Here's the post where I give a tour of our cabin!

In February, our precious Katherine Maria Grace arrived!  Here's a post showing some snapshots of her first few days!

In March, I shared her birth story (my 5th c-section), and also shared the photos of her beautiful baptism!

In April, I wrote about our experience of meeting Saint John Paul II, and wrote a Five Favorites post about my Five Favorite baby items!

In May I got a new camera lens and shared some nice photos of the visit of our friends, and I also wrote about why we decided to enroll with the Mother of Divine Grace Homeschool Program for the next school year.

In June, we had some determined swimmers!

In July, I went to the Edel Gathering!

Katie turned 6 months in August, we crashed a family beach party, and I shared my crazy video of us lip-syncing "Can't Hold Us!"

In September, I shared about the Fullness of Truth Catholic Conference, and we started preparing our home to sell!

In October we moved back into our old house and attended the annual All Saints Day Celebration at the farm!

November was a month where Katie turned 9 months old and I did a House Tour!

And December included lots of fun Christmas Memories!!!

And we're off to a New Year's Eve celebration! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!