Until we return...

It's time to get away for a bit.

Blessed summer to you all!

Photo of Whidbey Island by Landingaday.wordpress.com

Audio books for children

We are getting ready to leave on our annual trip to the N.W.! We're spending the next couple of weeks getting a few things in order.

I want to order the girls some good audio books for the trip. We have a few of the "Adventures in Odyssey" and the "Chronicles of Narnia". The Narnia c.d. is great because it is dramatized and very exciting. What are some of your children's favorites?

A blessed week to you all!

Words from the Holy Mountain

Thank you Gretchen Joanna for posting this!

An offspring of [the sin of] pride is censure, which is unfortunately also a habit of many Christians, who tend to concern themselves more with others than themselves. This is a phenomenon of our time and of a society that pushes people into a continuous observation of others, and not of the self.
Modern man’s myriad occupations and activities do not want him to ever remain alone to study, to contemplate, to pray, to attain self-awareness, self critique, self-control and to be reminded of death. The so-called Mass Media are incessantly preoccupied with scandal-seeking, persistently and at length, with human passions, with sins, with others’ misdemeanors. These kinds of things provoke, impress, and, even if they do not scandalize, they nevertheless burden the soul and the mind with filth and ugliness and they actually reassure us, by making us believe that “we are better” than those advertised.
Thus, a person becomes accustomed to the mediocrity, the tepidity and the transience of superficial day-to-day life, never comparing himself to saints and heroes. This is how censure prevails in our time – by giving man the impression that he is justly imposing a kind of cleansing, by mud-slinging at others, albeit contaminating himself by generating malice, hatred, hostility, resentfulness, envy and frigidity. Saint Maximos the Confessor in fact states that the one who constantly scrutinizes others’ sins, or judges his brothers based on suspicion only, has not even begun to repent, nor has he begun any research into discovering his own sins.
~Fr. Moses of the Holy Mount of Athos

Sweetness

Guess what we've been up to?

A parishioner needed a babysitter for two weeks and the girls and I jumped at the chance. This sweet little one is four months old and is so much fun. So, we've been changing, feeding, burping and putting little baby to sleep for the last week and a half.

Thea was looking deeply into her eye's the other day as she was feeding her and with all the seriousness she could muster (and without breaking her gaze with the baby) said "Mommy, we need a baby."