Lent 2011

Lent is already upon us! I have a few plans for the kids for this Lent and will link up to them.

Being Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras today, we had waffles for dinner! Up until about 100 years ago, the faithful abstained from meat and meat products (including milk, eggs and butter) all through Lent. So, the day before Ash Wednesday, they used up all these products and waffles and pancakes were a great way to do so! So it is tradition to have pancakes or waffles for dinner on Shrove Tuesday! Of course, we topped it off with brownie sundaes for good measure :-)

Since we're all still so sick, we didn't do a whole lot today, but we did "get all our Alleluia's out!" Since the Church refrains from using Alleluia or Gloria in it's liturgies during Lent, we shouted out Alleluia's tonight for the last time until Easter. I am making this banner, and we are going to put it away tomorrow until Easter. We would have put it away today, but I didn't get a chance to finish it up today.

I was planning to take everyone to Mass for Ash Wednesday tomorrow, but we'll be playing that by ear with the sicknesses. Otherwise, dinner will consist of Lentil Stew and we'll put our Alleluias away and make up a Lenten calendar looking somewhat like this.

Since Lent focuses on three main things, prayer, fasting and alms giving, I want to observe each of these in some way with the kids. For prayer, we are going to choose something specific to pray for every day of the week. We will make a better effort to include the girls in the Rosary every night and say a children's version of the Stations of the Cross on Fridays. I'll print out these Stations of the Cross coloring pages and we'll be coloring them as we complete the stations. For fasting, we will be giving up desserts except on Sundays and special feast days and abstaining from meat on Fridays as mandated by the Church. We will also observe the mandatory fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday of course. For almsgiving we will do something like this with pennies. We probably will end up just putting a penny in an offering box every day of Lent for the "poor people" or putting a penny in every time we do something especially good. I'm not sure yet. I'm also planning to make one of these crowns and every time the girls do something especially good, they can pull a thorn out of the crown for Jesus. On Easter, I'll put some sort of flowers in it to represent their good works.

Of course, Pete and I will be doing our own things for Lent as well, but I won't be posting them on here for obvious reasons!

For more ideas for celebrating Lent with children, visit Shower of Roses and Catholic Icing, two excellent resources!

I'll try to post pictures as we do these activities. Now, before midnight hits, I'd better get in one last helping of Double Chocolate Fudge Ice Cream :-)