31 days of creating a {real} domestic church: Michaelmas celebrations!

Creating a stylish home space is kind of above my pay grade. As in, we don't make enough for me to copy the Pintrest pins I've stalked and drooled over and I'm not creative enough to walk into a thrift shop and Ty Pennington up my living room.

When we moved into our current house, Joseph gave me carte-blanche permission to get new bedding. To a wife who's lived on student loans and hand-me-downs for the last few years, I was in Heaven. Our bedroom walls are this dark, dark blue and since I tried the painting thing and found it lacking [in leisure for my arm muscles], I didn't want to change the room, just my bedding which was conveniently also dark, dark blue. I prowled aisles and aisles of every big box and site after site for inspiration. Want to know what I ended up with?

Behold the poster of creativity. I mean simplicity, because that is what I claim.

I didn't even get myself new pillowcases. I just use our dark blue sheets. It all works out since the cheap white cotton blanket now has little fingerprints on it from well-meaning but sticky little fingers. If it had been an expensive set, I would have cried. Instead, I just wait until Christmas when I can wave pictures of on-sale bedding under my poor husband's nose and drop hints as heavy as the atomic bomb about which one I want.

On that note, since I can't create stylish settings in my home, I've been blessed with the gift of being able to really see clearly and embrace what it takes to make a house a little domestic church. Because after, all that's what a home is, the smallest faction of Holy Mother Church and the building block of society. 

Pope John Paul II focused much of his papacy on renewing and supporting the family. In his Letter to Families (Gratissimam Sane), Pope Saint John Paul II recognizes the struggles the world presents to families and the crosses families in the future will need to bear in order to grow in holiness and overcome this world. 

This same pope once said that, "As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live." 

I believe that with my whole heart. And holy families don't just happen. They are something that need to be shaped, and nurtured, and watered (with holy water if it's available...ba dum ching!), prayed and loved into existence. Rinse and repeat over and over every moment of everyday in order to maintain the beauty and fruit that intentional Catholic parenting brings forth in a family. 

So, for the next  thirty-one days (give or take a few days because obviously I'm a day late and one hundred cents short on this challenge already), I'll focus a post on how we try to make our home peaceful and focused on Heaven. They'll be all-encompassing, as the way we try to create a domestic church doesn't just lie in the art on our walls and the statues adorning our bookshelves, but foremost in what we put inside our heads, and hearts, and souls. We shape our domestic church with homeschooling, nurture it with feast day celebrations, water it with wholesome and enriching stories and intentional parenting and living.

And as an aside: this is about creating a real domestic church, not one for the Pintrest. I'm exhausted, have little ones, homeschool, and, God bless my little heart, haven't an iota of creativity. But I try and we live intentionally and that's what matters. One's homeschool and home doesn't have to look perfect for it to be fruitful. So I'll be honest here. 

I'll also try to stick more to pictures than words, but you can laugh alongside me when I don't do that at all.

Numero uno for this late post.

Feast of Michaelmas. What can we do that doesn't involve sugar and sweets (which is a big way we celebrate feast days in our house)? It gets a little old (and we get a little unhealthier) when there is a major feast day every single day this week.

We made a mini-version of Pin the Sword on the Dragon. It's more fun when there are a dozen children, but we're not there yet, so with two kids we tried! The girls had more fun acting like they didn't know where they were at in our little house than they did trying to get the sword on the dragon's head, but I'll take it. Next year, I'll have to plan better and make a poster-sized version of this and maybe have some friends over to play with us.

The dragon was this simple uncrafty craft:

Next Monet.

Give the kids some scissors and glue and markers and you've got yourself a dragon flying out of the depths of hell, only to be struck down by the Prince of the Angels. Or something like that.

Next up, Feast of the Guardian Angels, which is today, so I should get to planning since it's 10:30 already.  I have high hopes for celebratory activities, but since my printer is broken, my dreams feel a bit dashed. I'll throw a few feathers that fell out of our down blanket at the girls and tell them to glue them on some paper and toss a bit of glitter on it.

As you can see, domestic church.

Did I mention that creativity and craftiness isn't a huge part of ours?