Here at Last!
Dominic Gregory Frederes was born around five thirty AM Thursday morning, and weighed eight pounds and fourteen ounces. Praise the Lord for his safe delivery!
Mother Mallard
A mother duck has chosen our backyard to build her nest, and she’s been sitting on it for a week or two. I counted at least nine eggs when she got off the nest for a moment, but I think there were more that I couldn’t see. Everyone here is excited for them to hatch.
Symbols of Holy Week-Part 2
The passion flower is an unusual and extraordinary flower, and many of its parts are used to represent different aspects of the Crucifixion. This makes it a wonderful symbol for holy week, especially Good Friday. The tendrils represent the whips used in the Scourging, and the hundreds of filaments surrounding the center of the flower are associated with the thorns that pierced Our Lord’s sacred brow. There are five anthers which stand for the five wounds, and the three stigmas surmounting them resemble three nails. Even the leaves, which are long and pointed, stand for the lance which was used to pierce the side of Christ.
Symbols of Holy Week-Part One
I have always been fascinated by the history of the myriad of symbols of the Holy Faith. Great paintings often portray Our Lord and the saints holding one or more of these emblems, and much more can be understood about the meaning of the painting from decoding these items. One example is in Botticelli’s ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’ a painting that shows Our Lady and the Child Jesus hold a pomegranate. The pomegranate had several meanings based on the multitude of seeds it carries hidden inside, including the many afflictions of the Passion and the fruitfulness of the Resurrection. Using this one symbol, Botticelli remind the viewers of his work of the Child’s future.
Holy Week is especially rich in symbols, two of which were mentioned in yesterday’s Gospel of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. The first to come to mind is the palms strewn on the road in front of Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. Palms have been symbols of victory since ancient times, and Romans would give them to those victorious in battle, and later they were painted on the graves of early Christian martyrs to show their triumph over evil. As the Jews waved the palm branches in the air and laid them on the earth, they may have been expressing their hope that the Messiah would lead them in the conquest of their enemies.
However, Christ had not come to be a military leader, and this he announced with the very means of his arrival in Jerusalem. He chose to ride a donkey, which in those times represented peace since messengers would ride upon donkeys when conveying tiding of peace, preferring the faster horse in times of war.
I will post about more Holy Week symbols that I find interesting later!
Pure Deliciousness
I’ve been wanting to try making cinnamon rolls for a long time, but they seemed rather intimidating. I finally got up the courage to try, and they turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. Since it was my first time kneading bread dough, I was afraid I was going to mess something up. However, they turned out perfectly, and everyone in the family gobbled them down. They were soft and sticky, and being fresh out of the oven, they were much better than the ones I have tasted from the store.
Tulips
We bought some tulips from the store a few weeks ago, and every time I saw them sitting in their vase on the countertop, they brought a smile to my face. It was a lovely bridge to make the path between winter and spring easier to walk. Just after the petals began to fall from these beautiful flowers, I noticed a bulging stalk emerging from amidst the tulip leaves in my garden to show that soon we will have flowers out of doors as well.
The Fashion Expert
Joseph: Mom, you got new pants!
Mom (pleasantly surprised): Why, yes they are, Joseph. How nice of you to notice.
Joseph (approaching and pulling a sticker off of the pants): They still have the tag on.
March
March flew quickly past, as I kept very busy with schoolwork, vision therapy, and preparing for my grade 4 ballet exam. I’ve been working hard on my geometry, getting in an extra lesson a week on Saturday mornings to stay on track, since I’m a bit behind because of the problems my eyes have been causing me while reading. Fortunately, I just made a breakthrough in my vision therapy that I attend once a week, and it seems to be the beginning of the end of my eye pain.
Ballet exams for Maria and I took place at the end of March. I had to wait almost a week for my score, and I just found out tonight that I received a pass plus for my score.
The only other exciting thing to happen this March was my sixteenth birthday, which was made even more special by the robins arriving on that day for the second year in a row. My cake also turned out nicely, and it was six layers of white cake with raspberry frosting and jam in between the layers. It was delicious!
Advent of Spring
Every year, the same signs herald the rise of spring and the death of winter, yet every year these changes are as exciting and as fascinating as before. Today, the first of the annual signs appeared, as the first of my tulips emerged from below the earth.
The columbine also, one of my favorite spring flowers, decided it was time for a second try at coming up. (It was fooled by the short warm week in mid February, only to get nipped by temperatures in the single digits.
There was also an enormous migration of snow geese in the morning and early afternoon, with large V’s of birds visible in the sky at any moment. I looked them up in a bird book, and found that they winter in the southern US, and are now journeying to the uppermost region of Canada and Alaska for the summer. They were very loud, and although they were only small shadows high in the sky their distinctive honk was clearly audible from the ground.
One of the smaller flocks of geese.
Refined Defined
Maria, Johnathan, and Alexander were going to an Irish Caeli dance, and were getting ready to leave. John was wearing a polo shirt neatly tucked into his pants. As his favored apparel is a sloppy T-shirt and jeans with holes in them, I commented that it was nice to see him looking refined. John simply stared at me, glanced down at his clothes with a confused expression, then replied with slight annoyance: “Well, of course I’m going to put on socks!” Realizing he didn’t know what refined meant, Mom and I began to try to explain it to him. However, he persisted, “No, she meant stupid!”