Preparing Our Hearts during Lent

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With all the chaos that having a new baby AND moving brought during December this past year, I felt like the observance of Advent fell by the wayside in our family. Instead of spending time on activities that would focus our hearts on Christ’s coming, we were focused on caring for Little J and trying to purge our home of items we did not truly need before the movers came the Monday after Christmas.

I was really hoping that Lent would not get as short-changed as Advent and Christmas did this school year. However, I fear that it just might get less attention than I desire as our lives continue to be in flux. We are purchasing a house here with a closing date sometime before the end of the month. But, with the date not set yet, things still seem to be up in the air. We are in our seventh week in temporary family living on base. We have to vacate this 3 bedroom unit on Friday. Thankfully, we are able to move into a 2 bedroom unit on base that day rather than moving off base into a hotel room or suite. Even though we do not have all our stuff here, there is enough between clothing and homeschool books we are actively using that moving units is not something I am looking forward to doing.

Assuming that all proceeds in a timely fashion, we hope to move into the new (to us) house by the first week of March. As much as I want to have the family preparing our hearts during Lent, I fear that more emphasis will be placed on setting up the house and making sure that the boys continue to complete schoolwork after a LONG break in November and December.

All that being said, I did recently ‘find’ a few great online blogs to help us during our Lenten journey this year.

Catholic Icing has several great ideas gathered in one spot for the younger kids. One item shared here is a Lenten calendar to print and have the kids color. I think this will be right up D’s alley and something easy enough to implement.

From that blog, I found Catholic Cuisine, which features recipes to celebrate the liturgical year. There is a recent post that gathers up recipes for Lent and Holy Week in one post. I really appreciated reading a post about whether to use chicken broth in recipes on days of abstinence. This is something that has been questioned several times during my life. I always took the no chicken broth stance, but now see that I can use and be within ‘the law.’ Once we are in the house, I plan to visit this site frequently to try new dishes that fit with the liturgical season.

I Blog Therefore I Am has great resources for the kids, including several for Lent. There is a post about making a Lent Lapbook with links to other sites to help you pull one together. Included on that page is a link to a Catholic homeschool lapbook company’s lent lapbook. I’ve heard great things about their products, but have not purchased one yet.

Faith Filled Days has a page of links to ideas for Lent as well. I have not followed this particular rabbit trail yet, but see a LOT of great potential. Considering that it is easier to cruise the web while nursing Little J, I suspect I will have time to explore more ideas in the weeks to come. It will be implementing them that will be tricky.