Category Archives: Munchkin Mondays

I take my responsibility as a Catholic parent to pass the Faith along to my children very seriously. For a while it felt hypocritical – teaching, for example, the lives of the Saints to my kids when I didn’t know the stories myself. As the years have gone by I’ve come to see it differently – I am teaching my kids, but rather than always passing on knowledge I already have, I revel in the opportunities for us to learn together. After all, the learning is a lifelong process; it doesn’t end until we’ve reached our Heavenly destination.

In that vein, at least a couple of years ago now I asked for a guide to celebrating feast days with children. I received as a Christmas gift this book: Feast Days and Holidays: Living and Celebrating Our Catholic Traditions (Living and Celebrating Our Catholic Customs and Traditions). I had used it quite a bit before my 2-year-old was born, and just this week pulled it out from where it had been buried for the past year since we moved. It includes both Catholic feast days and secular holidays (everything from Mother’s Day to Human Rights Day, which is apparently this week – December 10th), and has a brief explanation, a prayer, and a series of activities. Some of them are much too advanced for my kids, but it usually gives me a good starting point for talking to my kids.

Just yesterday was the Feast of St. Nicholas. For the past few years we’ve all been getting little gifts – usually candy canes – in our shoes on St. Nicholas Day, just like I did when I was a little girl in Catholic school (I actually remember putting my shoe outside the door of my kindergarten classroom and getting a candy cane from St. Nick) and as suggested in the Feast Days book.

For Saints’ feast days, I also used two books about saints for kids: Picture Book of Saints: Illustrated Lives of the Saints for Young and Old and My First Book of Saints. The first is more comprehensive and easier to navigate (the index is in alphabetical order), but the second is a little better for little kids – it is simpler and a little less explicit (particularly in stories of the martyrs). I use both of them, though, and often put the stories together from both for a more complete picture that I paraphrase for the kids.

So, we’ll pull out the Feast Days book again tomorrow for Immaculate Conception, and then again on the 10th for Human Rights Day (if I remember, of course, for both days…), and hopefully get back in the habit. The kids love it, and it’s fun for me, too! 🙂

 

Happy Advent, everyone, and welcome to the Christmas season! We put up our tree this weekend, lit the first candle on our Advent wreath at dinner last night, and, of course, both read and watched Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

I’m going to make a little assumption that everyone who might ever read this post has heard of the Grinch and skip any explanation. Instead, I’ll just share my favorite quote:

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! “Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

Now all we have to do is keep that in mind this Christmas season! 🙂

We go to the public library pretty often. I almost wrote “a lot” in all caps, but then that seemed to be a little too much. We do go, though, every two to three weeks, on average. The kids love it, and we actually have two community branches within 10 minutes of home; we get to switch it up a bit! So, I thought I’d share what we picked up last time we visited the library. As you can see, I haven’t managed to read all of them. Try as I might to get the kids to read all the books we check out, they wind up having favorites and some get ignored. I’ve commented on those books the kids or I found to be particularly good or interesting. By the way–all of these books are hyperlinked to their Amazon pages in case you want to check them out for yourselves; I can’t seem to figure out at the moment how to change the text color to make that more prominent. Enjoy!

Little Pookie by Sandra Boynton

A Birthday for Frances by Russell Hoban  (I haven’t read this.) (UPDATE – I have now. I liked it – it had a good message about not being jealous when it’s your sibling’s birthday. It was a bit advanced for my kids, though.)

Don’t Get Lost! by Pat Hutchins

Stella, Star of the Sea (Stella and Sam) by Marie-Louise Gay  — I really enjoy this one. I can sort of relate to Stella as the big sister (and now, as Mom) being asked SO MANY QUESTIONS. I felt compelled, though, to tell my kids which of Stella’s many explanations to her younger brother are just wrong. Now they point it out to me, which makes me proud. I can’t have my kids going around saying starfish are stars from the sky that learned how to swim. 🙂

Annie’s Ark by Leslie Harker (I haven’t read this, either. That needs to change.)(UPDATE: I read this, too. It’s a great adaptation of the Biblical Noah’s Ark, with Annie as Noah’s granddaughter, with him on the Ark.)

A Thanksgiving Turkey by Julian Scheer

Tallulah’s Solo by Marilyn Singer — My four-year-old likes Tallulah a lot; this is the second Tallulah book we’ve borrowed recently. She doesn’t seem to want to read the actual story too often, but it’s the sort of thing she will just bring up out of the blue weeks down the road. I think it’s because she finds ballet intriguing.

Serious Farm by Tim Egan — We REALLY like this one, kids and parents alike. It’s a silly story about a farmer whose animals leave because he’s too serious, and the illustrations (check out the animals’ eyes!) are perfect! I can’t help but enjoy the larger lesson-learned here more than anything else: “‘Well that’s no way to solve a problem,’ said Farmer Fred. ‘You don’t just leave…And, besides, we’re a family.”

Put Me in the Zoo (I can read it all by myself’ Beginner Books) by Robert Lopshire — If we owned this book, I think we’d read it over and over and over and over. The kids just love it.

Goldilocks Returns by Lisa Campbell Ernst — This is a great story about Goldilocks returning to “fix” what she messed up at the bears’ cottage- 50 years later! The kids love it, even though they don’t know the original Goldilocks story well enough (or at all?) to understand what’s going on. This is another one with perfect illustrations; I’m beginning to wonder if they’re just better when the author is also the illustrator.

I Know a Rhino by Charles Fuge — This is about a little girl and her stuffed animals. It’s fun, and the kids seem to really enjoy it.

 

Well, that’s what I have for today. Have you read any of these? As always, let me know what you think!