44/52: Pumpkin Carving, Snow White, and All Saints

7 Pieces to Stock Your All Saints Day Closet {7QT}

All Saints Day approaches, and with it comes the onslaught of slightly weird pictures of kids dressed as saints, so very niche that only those of us with ridiculous amounts of Catholic friends will truly appreciate it. Some people go all out, but... We are not some people.

I can't do the handmade costumes. It's just not my charism. But I can buy things to stock the dress-up bin so that when the All Saints Day party rolls around, the kids have decent options to choose from. Want to follow suit? Here are 7 of our must-haves:

44/52: All Saints Day!

41/52: All Saints' Day

This is the first year we've had an actual *event* to go to for All Saints' Day, and the kids were SO excited to go to church for the homeschool party! 

Well, we didn't tell Peter we were going... It was during his nap, so we dressed him up, took a picture, and then left while he was asleep...

Homeschool Wins, Vacation Crowdsourcing, Road Trip Favorites, and All Saints' Day {7QT}

Ahhhh, after spending most of my free time these past few weeks planning a blogging conference (which Rita and Ginny and Amanda have written about already! Winners!), I can finally sit down and write real blog posts again! Maybe... Depends on the whole "pregnant fatigue and pregnant brain" thing. But why not treat you to a total brain dump and call it Quick Takes? Of course!

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We've been reading about American History in This Country of Ours - it's the recommended text from Mater Amabilis for John Paul's level, and I continue to be shocked by how much the kids adore it, especially when I keep hearing about how other kids hate it! In all fairness, the beginning is tough. I think there's a reason that early history curricula basically go from Columbus to Jamestown, skipping all the in-between attempts at colonization, because those stories basically all go like this:

Then [insert country]'s colonists landed at [insert place] and tried to start a colony. But they ran out of food/made the Native Americans mad/got sick of each other and starved/were killed/sailed away, never to return.

But now that we finally hit Jamestown and John Smith and Pocahontas, there's a LOT MORE out there when it comes to outside resources, and they're ecstatic to be able to go to the library and check out books for free reading. They know a ton about Pocahontas and the Powhatan tribe and all of the surrounding history, and are basically totally owning me when it comes to legitimate knowledge about early American history.

All Saints & Halloween: Better Late than Never?

Pardon me while I mom-blog it up in here... I made the horrible faux pas of not taking ANY Halloween/All Saints pictures except this one:

And my sister was about ready to have my head, so I washed the costumes and we did a recap photo shoot this morning!

When you have a bunch of girls and you don't want to think about *making* them anything to wear for Halloween/All Saints' Day, you just buy a few princess dresses and tell them they can be any princess saint they want!!!

There are a lot of princess saints.

So Elizabeth chose St. Elizabeth of Hungary/Sleeping Beauty, Mary Claire chose St. Adelaide (or St. Clare pre-vocation)/Cinderella, and Cecilia chose St. Ursula/Ariel. 

Well, she chose St. Ursula like, a year ago... But then on Halloween she decided that she was NOT going to be a saint, JUST Ariel when she marries the prince.

She's never seen The Little Mermaid, but there are enough pictures in library books that she's figured it out. I even read the original story to her, death and all, and she's still obsessed. What can you do, she's 4! 

St. Adelaide is, of course, carrying the traditional badminton racket.

Just kidding. There IS no patron saint of badminton, I looked it up. Mary Claire just really wanted to hold it for pictures.

I think you'll agree with me that Elizabeth wins any posing contest, right?

And the dresses are wrinkled from going through the wash - we went to a part on Halloween and Mary Claire helped us cement our status as that family by peeing herself not once, but twice! Both times were outdoors, luckily... And Elizabeth insisted on staying inside and having ME inside with her, so really I'm sure we greatly endeared ourselves to our hosts?

John Paul was devastated when he didn't win the costume contest - I'm thinking next year I'm gonna have to shave him a tonsure to give him a fighting chance ;) Although if I had found Peter's cow costume in time, maybe that would've clinched a victory!

Although no way would Peter have tolerated it for an entire day on Saturday!

As you can see, he was not real enamored of the whole idea...

But St. Isidore probably had to deal with similar issues with his animals, right? So I think it's in keeping with the theme...