Our Lady of Lourdes Celebrations 2013

For today's feast day we kept it relatively simple!!!!
"Today marks the first apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1858 to fourteen-year-old Marie Bernade (St. Bernadette) Soubirous. Between February 11 and July 16, 1858, the Blessed Virgin appeared eighteen times, and showed herself to St. Bernadette in the hollow of the rock at Lourdes. On March 25 she said to the little shepherdess who was only fourteen years of age: "I am the Immaculate Conception." Since then Lourdes has become a place of pilgrimage and many cures and conversions have taken place. The message of Lourdes is a call to personal conversion, prayer, and charity." from Catholic Culture

While reading Our Lady of Lourdes aloud to the children they coloured in our colouring pages and did the word searches we made.

These were the word searches for both younger and older children

This one for the older children was very challenging and took over an hour to complete. They listened to some lovely classical music to keep up their spirits after I had moved on to other things.

This was one of the colouring pages we did and we loved using the colouring picture (from Charlotte)  to make this lovely paper grotto, the idea coming  from  here

This was a new colouring page for us this year and I found this one late in the day that I will record here for next year

To make the grotto inspired by Catholic Cuisine, first I found St Bernadette and Our Lady of Lourdes form my collection of Painted Saints then we used..........

these and just stacked them on top of each other. Really it was a time saving effort as the idea suggested required more preparations, but it still produced the results we wanted.
Well for a little while anyway because.........

It was obviously hotter here than I thought today for when I looked in on 'Our Lady' later in the day it had collapsed on her. Chocolate really does not do well in the heat.
We had the grotto for sweets along with

these vanilla cupcakes with white icing and blue flowers for Mary and pink for love.

As we had a simple dinner of Bacon and Potato bake it was as I said a simple day.

We certainly were blessed later in the day!
A day we prayed quite intently  to Our Lady for a most dear intention.
In fact i played this hymn over and over for quite a while this afternoon
and very late in the day we got word that we had been the chosen family to move to the new rental property we had looked at and loved on Friday.
Thanks be to God!!!!

May Our Lady surround you and bless you this feast day also.

OUR LADY OF LOURDES PRAY FOR US!!

Blessings to you and your homes,