Lent for Little Kids

Talking to Jesus also makes Him smile!

I've been talking to friends who still have little ones, and it made me think about what I learned from all those Lents with littles (I'm thinking 2-4 year olds, but if you're just starting to celebrate Lent, this would apply up to around age 8.  Below 2 it seems like it's enough for them to watch you).

I know I just did a big post on ideas for Lent, and a lot of those ideas work for little kids, but here's what I learned specific to young children:

The most important thing you can do is to share your love and joy in the Lord with them.

If I only had really young kids, I would just do the Walking with Jesus poster so they could see where we were on the journey, and each day I would ask: What could we do today to make Jesus smile?

I would explain "the gospel on five fingers," Mother Teresa's explanation that the heart of the Gospel is Jesus' saying that whatever you do to others "You Did It To Me."

If they had trouble coming up with something in the beginning, I would make suggestions, but pretty much whatever they came up with I would try to do, and add flowers around the footprints for each "smile."

I'd also skip sweets except on Sundays (although we ate a lot of sweet dried fruit which my kids called God's candy"), but that's it!  You can always add more as you go if you decide you need more.

Keeping it simple and doable was the key for me, not only for keeping the kids engaged, but for giving me a real love for Lent which I didn't really have before I started celebrating with my kids.

A Really Great "After"

 My problem is that I forget to take the "before" picture.

My parish, which had been redesigned in the 80s to give it a plain austere look, has been re-redesigned to make it a simple but beautiful place to worship. 

I am so happy!!

We switched parishes last summer because we felt the Lord was calling us to Holy Redeemer. 

We had been attending here for daily Mass for years, but had never been members, mostly because it was a very hard place to take kids - there was nothing to look at! 

It had a large gray striped tapestry covering the back wall, a very small crucifix,  seven hanging candles, and a plain wooden box tabernacle.

 Imagine our surprise and delight when they announced, a month after we signed up, that they were going to redesign the sanctuary!

And now it's done, and it really is lovely! 

They divided the sanctuary with the wall with three arches (now there is a small sacristy in the back) and they brought back the parish's original tabernacle with the Annunciation on it. The crucifix and statues of the Holy Family are new.

I particularly like their statue of Our Lady with Baby Jesus - love those baby toes!

I know it's better for the kids, but I also find it so much easier to pray when I have a concrete visual reminder of heavenly things.

The Rosary Project

 We have a  book that we love to use while praying  the Rosary.  It's an enormous three feet tall, and it features beautiful icon-like images for each decade and smaller, cartoon-like images for each Hail Mary (along with a scripture quote for each Hail Mary).  It's a beautiful, thoughtful, prayerful work that makes Rosary praying easy, even for distraction prone young kids (and parents).

If you aren't Catholic, the Rosary is a prayer in which you say decades (groups of 10 Hail Marys) while meditating on events in the life of Christ.  The Hail Marys are there to keep track of the length of the meditation, to involve your body in the prayer, and, originally, as a way for illiterate people to "say" all 150 psalms like the monks did.  But the heart of the prayer is the meditation, and the greatest difficulty is distraction, and that was what was so great about this book!

The problem?  They only made one book!  They started with the Joyful Mysteries and then... stopped!  It must not have sold well enough, and it must have been very expensive to produce. It's also out of print. :(

I've been griping about the lack for several years now, and it finally occurred to me that I could make something similar.

Lacking in the kind of talent which produced the first book, I turned to Google.  The kids and I googled the first Luminous Mystery, the Baptism of the Lord, and did an image search.  We picked out 12 diversely appealing images, then printed them and cut them out as 3 by 5s.


I then wrote out scripture verses on the backs of the cards.  I totally cheated on this one, using my scriptural Rosary app.  Then I realized I could get the quotes on line, so, for the next batch, I printed them out and glue sticked the quotes to the backs of the pictures. Easy peasy!

I lay the cards on contact paper, then folded over the contact paper so the cards were laminated.  I cut these out, then punched a hole in one corner.  I unfolded a paper clip and used that as a ring to bind them together.

The reason I use 12 pictures is this: one is the cover, and on the back of that one, I write the fruit of the mystery and the words "Our Father."  This way, when you flip over the cover, you have your picture meditation for the Our Father.  The next flip gives you "1st Hail Mary (and the scripture quote)" across from the meditation picture for that Hail Mary.  The 12th picture (the 10th Hail Mary meditation picture) has the Glory Be on the back of it.

So far we've made The Baptism of the Lord and The Wedding at Cana, and I hope to do them all!

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A Million Roses for the World

I thought this was really cool!  The Family Rosary Crusade of the Phillipines  is sponsoring this thing where they are getting a million people (in the Philippines, but I want to do it, too!) to say the Rosary every day for 200 days, with each day being for a different country with the ultimate goal being world peace.

I heard about it in Zenit and the eLumen (Dominican newsletter), but I had a hard time tracking down which country was which day.  That information (and the website) is here.

To reach the individual countries, click on the region (e.g. they are starting in Africa, so click "Africa" to get the country list - it looks like they are doing everything alphabetically).  I think that the countries go Monday through Saturday and Sundays are set up to pray for your own country and for your family.

I'm thinking this would be a great ongoing Geography lesson.  We could do a little Wikipedia session on each country as well as finding it on the globe.  UPDATE: If you click on the country names, it gives you the flag and a bunch of information about the country (including what problems you may be praying for).

If you aren't Catholic, it would still be great to be united in prayer for peace with that many people.  I'm sure you could just pray for each country on that day.

If you'd like to say the Rosary but are hazy on the details, you can find it here.  The usual would be 5 decades (one set of mysteries - this usually takes about 20 minutes) a day, but you could certainly do more or less.

It is starting October 10th, just after the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and ends May 30th on the feast of Mary, Queen of all Nations.  Wow!

Lent Ideas

I won't do all of these, but these are some of my favorite ideas.

1. Walking with Jesus, explained here. I'll do a new poster with this year's Gospels.
2. Eat pretzels instead of cookies and dried fruit ("God's candy") instead of candy. This was Leena's idea
3. Invite the kids to donate some allowance to Loving Heart Home, a place for dying orphans in China.
4. Eat only bread without yeast (Zorg's idea).
5. Study the capital sins and their opposite virtues, one of each every week.
6. Sacrifice bean jar. (Klenda's idea) One bean for each sacrifice and on Easter they are replaced with jelly beans to show that Jesus' sacrifice makes our sacrifices sweet.
7. The vine and branches poster. Basically it's a 7 foot tall vine cut out of brown paper with branches for each member of the family. We cut out tons of leaves and grapes and put them in a basket. Whenever anyone sees someone doing something good, they put a leaf or fruit on that person's branch. On Easter we decorate the vine with Easter lilies. We often put a picture of Jesus and the "vine and branches" quote on the vine.
8. Lent Calender - like an Advent calender, but shaped liked a 3D Noah's Ark and going through salvation history with pictures, prayers and scripture reflections. I got it here. I also got a 50 day Easter sticker calender from them here. That one is usually $20 and is on sale for $3.
9. A Christian Seder. My dad was Jewish and I went to seders when I was growing up. I was always amazed at how similar it is to the Mass...well..the Mass is the Last Supper and the Last Supper was a seder. You can find lots of free Christian haggadahs (passover booklets) online. We modified one to make it short enough for the little ones to get through.
10. The Lenten Cross. This is made of 40 squares of light purple paper. You do a scripture reading, have a kid draw a representation of the reading on a square, and then tape the square to a wall. By Easter you have a large cross representing Salvation History. We've done this several times and the kids loved it. You can find the readings and more info here.
11. More lists of ideas here, here and here.

My problem is that all these ideas look great, but I've seen over and over that if I try to do too many, I lose focus and stop 20 days in.

So, how do I decide? Pray, see what we are attracted to, look at what my kids needs are, and analyze what each activity would accomplish. The three traditional Lenten activities are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Most important to me is that my kids experience a living encounter with Christ. That, for me, seems to require an immersive, indelible experience of salvation history (so they know who Jesus is) combined with communal and private prayer experiences tailored to their developmental levels. It's also important that they see themselves as part of the Body of Christ, the Church, so we will be doing as many of the beautiful Lenten liturgies as we can.

I'll probably do 2, 3, 4 (those 3 don't take time), a combination of 1 and 7 (if I can make it simple to follow through), 8, and 9 (if I can get Angel to do it with me!) and I need to think about how to provide meaningful prayer experiences.

The Last of the Lenten Gospel Desserts

Yet another plan vs. reality post, I'm afraid! I had planned, last Sunday, to construct Lazarus' tomb out of rice crispy treats (not cut into squares, just molded while warm). Instead, we continued celebrating Leena's birthday with her third and final birthday cake: the Squirrel Cake. She loved it!

I figured I'd do a great Palm Sunday dessert: a long coffee cake alternately sliced to look like a palm branch!

Actually, we had our Medieval Feast today, and so ended up eating spice cakes with stewed apples... Sometimes it's hard to do all the themes at once.

Here's what happened. The Emperor was slated to go on a rare trip to a teacher's conference. When the kids got wind of it, they flipped! Klenda declared, "One night without Daddy would be terrible! Two nights would be horrible!!! Three nights, I couldn't stand!!! BUT, I CAN'T LIVE FOR FIVE NIGHTS WITHOUT DADDY!!!"

So, what did they do? They all began to pray feverishly that Daddy would not go. That was Sunday, he was supposed to leave Thursday. When the Emperor went into work on Monday, he discovered that The Powers That Be had actually forgotten to send in his registration and hotel reservation. So, he couldn't go. That thumpity-thump-thump sound was the noise 4 pairs of knees make as they hit the floor to praise and thank God.

So we could have had the feast Thursday after all, but then it was too late. We rescheduled for Sunday but Leena woke up with a fever. She's OK now, but we couldn't have guests... The upshot was the 8 of us and an enormous feast and a lot of leftovers.

Still, we had a great time! The reports went well and there were lots of questions and answers. It's always interesting to hear the kids discussing with each other what they have learned. The Zoomlians had learned more than I had realized!

Tomorrow the castle will come down and Holy Week stuff will go up.

Teaching Kids to Pray 1

First: I am not an expert here. Most of what I have I got from Fr. Pinto or learned from my Mom and other moms. All these are good ways for grown ups to pray, too! If you have ideas, I'd love to hear them! I will do 2 methods per post.

Rote Prayer
We usually pray formally several times a day: when we get up, have meals, go to bed , and before we start our home school day. We use a lot of rote (memorized) prayers this way: Prayer before Meals, Our Father, Hail Mary, Morning Offering, Glory Be, Act of Contrition, and each child has their own "special" prayer which corresponds to how we dedicated them to God when we discovered their existence. Rote prayers are great! The kids memorize them with basic understanding and their understanding should deepen and grow throughout their lives.

But. Rote prayer gets boring for kids if it's the only way they pray!

Empty Chair Prayer
Use 2 chairs. Sit in one and invite Jesus to sit in the other. Really use your imagination and faith to picture Jesus in the chair. Just talk to Him. Little kids often need to do this out loud, so it's good to do this in a quiet room if you have one. For adults, this is great to do while you are driving if you have no one in the passenger seat, put Our Lord there.

Often kids (and grown ups) feel bored or tired with prayer because they can't physically hear or see God speaking. They have to learn to hear Him with their hearts. The imagination is part of what God uses. Not that everything in our imagination is from God, but God does use it to speak to us in prayer.

Sometimes my kids say they don't know what to say to Jesus. I often suggest they tell Jesus a knock knock joke or anything else they would say to their friend. The point is that Jesus is real and really present. I like to tell my friends jokes and laugh with them, it's part of who I am, so I like to tell Jesus funny things. Realistically, A) you're not going to find a better friend than Jesus, and B) if you can't be yourself with God, who already knows what you are like and loves you anyway, where are you going to go?