Holidays and Holy Days: 7 Quick Takes XI

by | May 10, 2013 | 7 Quick Takes, Doctor Who, Liturgical Year, Parenting | 6 comments

 
— 1 —
So . . . holidays and holy days first.

Happy Ascension Thursday (yesterday) to those of you in Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and Omaha.  I wish wish wish our Bishops wouldn’t take feasts away from the rest of us!  I wanted to take the kids to a midday Mass for the Ascension on Thursday, but since I live in Los Angeles rather than Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, or Omaha it wasn’t Ascension Day for us.  Not at Mass anyway.  Since they’ve moved the observance to Sunday none of the Parishes around us offered their normal Holy Day of Obligation Mass schedule.  

Going to a 9am Mass means we really don’t get any school done all morning, and with the way I feel in the afternoons, that would mean we just didn’t get much done all day.  So we had to content ourselves with the Angelus and some ice cream cones. And wait for Sunday.

— 2 —

And speaking of Sunday:

Happy Mother’s Day to my wonderful mother and my equally wonderful mother-in-law!

I am truly doubly blessed to have you both in my life.

Thank you to my mom for teaching me how to be brave and strive for greatness.  Thank you for teaching me how to sew and how to be organized (that one’s a work in progress).

Thank you for always loving and supporting me even when I was an unpleasant teenager.  Thank you for bringing me (and now all of us) along on your globetrotting adventures.  And thank you for loving my children.

To my mother-in-law, thank you for raising my husband to be a man of honor and integrity.  Not to mention loving and faithful and hilarious.  Thank you for loving ME from the first day we met (the feeling was mutual!).

Thank you for teaching me how to cook and teach and raise boys and function in cold weather.  Thank you for loving my children and inviting us ALL into your home for the whole summer every year.

It’s truly an embarrassment of riches.  You guys are the best!

— 3 —
Let’s stay on Mother’s Day for a moment shall we?
If you haven’t read Amy’s lovely post: An open letter to pastors {A non-mom speaks about Mother’s Day}, well, you really should.  It’s great.  And it’s right.

Her sentiments, as well as those in the comments, are heartbreaking, and even as a woman with many children I can easily put myself in her place.

But I would add, that even from over here in plenty o’kids land I fully and absolutely agree that Mass (or any church service) is not the place to be acknowledged for human achievements.  Plus, I don’t want to be made to stand up in front of everyone (or worse, come up on the altar) any more than Amy wants to be left sitting in the pew.  Both are dumb.

Neither do I like the all women get a flower thing.  Please, let’s have Mass be about God.  We can celebrate or mourn on Mother’s Day on our own time in our own ways.

— 4 —
Frankie has started giving people this big goofy eyebrows-up grin:
It’s hilarious and adorable and he does it a lot.  Which is great, except . . . he’s still exactly as cranky and particular as ever, just “now with added grinning”.  So NOW people at the doctor’s office and the grocery store are all, “What a sweet happy baby.”  So I have to say, “Um, yes, thank you.”  ‘Cause it’s not like I could say, “Oh, don’t let him fool you with that grin.  He’s liable to fling that jar of pickles at you.  He’s a real piece of work that one.”
He’s befuddled them all!
— 5 —

And thanks to Abby for finding Frankie’s Capuchin monkey-equivalent:

(if the video doesn’t show up, try here or search “monkey cucumber grapes” on YouTube)

I have to say I took some small satisfaction in seeing someone else getting food winged at her for a change.

— 6 —

When we’re on long car rides I like to give the kids each a dollar to spend at the gas station, usually for cleaning the windows or something silly like that.  It’s exciting for them, of course, to be able to shop for treats, but it’s also a good lesson for them in how much things actually cost AND in how if they can work together and pool their money and agree on a couple of bigger items instead of each picking something for themselves, they can get a lot more for their money.

On our drive up to Northern California for the husband’s reunion, we stopped at one of those big gas stations in the middle of nowhere and the kids went in with their dollars.  Inside we found all the usual stuff in all the usual places.  But not a single price tag.  Not on the items, not on the shelves.  No prices.

And it wasn’t a case of Hawaii-style one price for locals one price for you, because the guy was ringing stuff up with a scanner.  He suggested that we just bring stuff up and he’d check the price for us.  But if you knew the amount of discernment that goes into my kids’ road trip treat selection you’d know that that was not going to be practical.

Unsurprisingly, everything turned out to be pretty overpriced, but we did find push-up popsicles for a dollar each and got those and got out of there.

But the idea of it still really bothers me.  The guy at the register seemed to think it was odd that I had a concern about it.  It didn’t seem to be something that other people had ever brought to his attention.  Which means that all those people stopping at this store just pick things up and buy them without particularly caring how much they cost.

It’s a scary window into a culture of credit cards and consumerism for there to be even one store in the world where people just grab stuff and swipe their cards and walk out the door, never to be bothered by the fact that they just paid $3 for a candy bar.

— 7 —
And finally . . . Doctor Who, because it’s my blog and so I can.
I’m into Season 5 now, which means tenth doctor is out and eleventh doctor is in.  And I have to say, to all the Doctor Who fans who told me that I would LOVE the tenth doctor by the end.  Not tolerate.  Not grudgingly admire.  But love. . . . You were totally right.
The story arc in which we watch the doctor bring all of his friends together, then slowly lose each one, watching his heartbreak and despair and self-sacrifice.  Wow.  I felt it.  He was awesome.
And all his storylines were wrapped up in such a satisfying way that I felt ready to give the new guy a chance in a way that I totally wasn’t ready to when the ninth doctor was so unexpectedly and suddenly ripped away with nothing resolved at all.  I liked that this regeneration acknowledged that he’d be a new person in a way that they tried to ignore in the last transition.
But I was left wondering about one thing.  Everyone came back, every loose end was tied up except one.  Whatever happened to the Doctor’s Daughter, Jenny?
Well, I looked into it.  It turns out that she really IS the doctor’s daughter.  Her name is Georgia Moffet and her father is the fifth doctor, Peter Davidson.  And now she’s also the doctor’s wife, because she married the tenth doctor, David Tennant, and they are expecting their third child.  So, perhaps it seemed a bit odd to delve any further into the whole being her real-life husband’s TV daughter thing.  And I’m okay with that.
For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

6 Comments

  1. Ann-Marie Ulczynski

    Best smile ever! Count me among the befuddled. I love the dollar at gas station ideas – real life application of money management.

  2. Melody

    Such a beautiful tribute to your mother and mother-in-law! I had read Amy's letter, too, and as a non-mom I also thought it was great. It is cool to hear a mom's perspective on it.

  3. Rosie

    Yes! Drives me nuts that only some dioceses get to celebrate Ascension Thursday!!! We live in a "good" diocese (Arlington), one of the last holdouts on adding female alter servers, but our current bishop is pretty lukewarm so it's moved to Sunday 🙁 My husband got to go to an EF Mass at our parish but it was at 7:30 PM and all the kids were in bed, so I had to stay home.

  4. Chris

    Love this vol of your QTs!
    #7 – Whovian that I am…wow….I KNOW..the whole Doctor's daughter thing… great right!??
    She was also in an ep of Merlin ..I believe season 1 as a potential love interest of Prince Arthur. (DO you watch Merlin? I think you;d really like it. Again, we don't get TV so we bring the DVDs home from lib.

    As for #3, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. I will never forget the pain of Mother's Day 1999..it was 2 mos after I miscarried our 1st and it took me almost a year to smile again. Seeing all those moms standing for the final blesing, remembering our mothers/grandmothers during prayer. There is nothing worse or more humiliating or saddening. Then top it off with feeling guilty that you feel this way b.c you should be happy for these women who were blessed with children filling the pews.
    It's a nightmare.
    Mother;s Day of 2000, I was in labor; my oldest was born just after midnight on the 15th~
    day after Mother's Day.
    I mentioned this very thing to out pastor a few weeks aga in anticipation of Mother's Day blessings…if he could eliminate this from the mass and why.
    We know him well and for quite some time. He thought I was crazy and he is not getting rid of the blessing at the end of mass.
    I hate to say it, but I dread mass on Mather's day b.c of this. Plus my Mom is now gone too…

    Despite all this though, I did want to mainly stop in and wish you a Happy Mother's Day!!

    I'm sure it will be delightful.
    xoxo
    Love the old pics.

  5. Amelia

    Ice cream on Ascension…sounds great! That's how we always celebrate holy days too (and with Mass…but our Diocese also transferred it to a Sunday, so we didn't make it either).

  6. Mrs. Mike

    I told my husband that I had seen enough references to Dr. Who this week that I think I'd be willing to give it a try. He about fell over. I said, "Well, you can thank Catholic All Year who tipped the scale for me."

Submit a Comment

Hi! I’m Kendra.

For twenty years now, I’ve been using food, prayer, and conversation based around the liturgical calendar to share the lives of the saints and the beautiful truths and traditions of our Catholic faith. My own ten children, our friends and neighbors, and people just like you have been on this journey with me.

If you’d like to learn more about what Catholics believe and why, and to be inspired by saints from every era all over the world, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with the prospect of how to teach your kids about the faith in a way that’s true, engaging, and lasts a lifetime, we can help!

Contact me at helpdesk@catholicallyear.com

This blog contains affiliate links and sponsored posts, for which I receive a commission. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.