Feast Days - St Agnes and Our Lady of Altagracia and a little planning too ☺

January is such an interesting time for us.

WE have the 12 Days of Christmas and are still in the Christmas Season liturgically BUT as it is Summer here and School Holidays our family is technically 'on Holiday'.

However the children rarely truly love the unstructured time for long  and itch to get back to 'normality'.

I however am torn as it is often the time I plan our structure for our new year of learning and even with the best of intentions I end up taking longer to do this than expected. I also love the fact that there is lots of wiggle room and a relaxing time for us all.

This year as I worked (still rushing around madly on the last day- we are starting back tomorrow) I decided with my husband that we would return to the old way of learning this year.

Our old year consisted of year round learning and having 4 weeks on 1 week off. This worked really well for us for many years until the children started interacting with more traditional school based friends and loving the idea of 'school holidays.'

The other thing we find difficult is celebrating liturgical feast days during holidays and on weekends.

So our January Feast Days often get left out.

This year we actually managed to celebrate the Feast of both St Agnes, who is one of Vellvin's Confirmation saints, and Our Lady of Altagracia. When we were expecting Arwen I desperately wanted her to be born on this day as I love the story told in A gift of Gracias- The Legend of Altagracia clearly she was born a few days later but still I love  the warmth and love of the story.

As part of my planning this year I had wanted to have all  my note, ideas and colouring pages, crafts and cooking ideas printed out and in plastic sleeves ready to just pull out and use, to reuse each year.

With the help of Vellvin I have manages so far to get up to the end of February. It really is a mammoth task and I think I will go to plan B and try to get a month at a time done.

We had a recipe we have wanted to try for a long time which was a Grain free/Gluten Free Orange cake. Let me just say it is one of the most lovely moist and sweet yet tangy cakes ever.

To compliment this we made home made ice cream from frozen oranges and milk and cream.

We read about Our Lady, coloured pictures and ate some good food. This is what constitutes a great feast day in our home.

In the evening we celebrated St Agnes with a cake and Vellvin blowing out her Baptism candle. We sing a song to this each celebration of the anniversary of a child's Baptism-
'May God Bless you this Day
May God Bless you we Pray
Live for Jesus dear........
May you serve him always'
Once again we read about the life of St Agnes and her living her Faith as God asked her to.

Now as we are on the eve of a new month (already) and our new Learning Year I pray you have a most blessed Sunday.

Blessings to you and your homes,