Moms, you’re great like chocolate cake
A love poem from my girls. And this is saying a lot because my kiddos really like their chocolate cake.
Happy Mother’s Day!
O Sacrament Most Holy
O Sacrament most Holy,
O Sacrament Divine,
All praise and all thanksgiving,
Be every moment Thine.
My dear Madeline, yesterday was the happiest and most important day of your spiritual life! Congratulations on making your First Communion. And remember this: As beautiful as the day was, your second, third, fourth, twentieth, hundredth, and beyond Communions are as special and as profound as the very first.
I have so many hopes and dreams for you. I hope you will have good health and heaps of happiness. I hope that if it is your desire as it was mine that you will someday be a wife and a mother, especially since you are so nurturing and such a relational person. I hope you will find a husband worthy of you. I hope you will lead a fun life and will set out, like our beloved Miss Rumphius,
Yesterday clothed in white you looked like a princess. But even when life is not ball and you don’t feel like you look the part, you are always God’s beloved princess. You are my princess, too.
Be kind. Be faithful. Be grateful. Seek joy. Seek Him. And you will have your happily ever after.
I love you, Madeline!
Blessings Today and Always,
Mama
***
Now a word from Jesus:
When your friends go away, you often give them a gift or a keepsake to remember them by; when I returned to heaven, I left you my very self to remember me by. When you are separated from friends for extended periods, you occasionally make yourself present to them through letters and calls and emails; while I am reigning in heaven, I stay with you all the time in the Tabernacle. You may think that my love is kind of generic, because the Eucharist is so simple and ordinary, and because everyone gets the same kind of host. But that’s not how it is at all. I am fully present in every host. And each one of you receives me personally, from the hands of the priest, one-on-one. And don’t forget that I am God, so nothing limits my love – not time, not space, not tiredness, not bad moods, nothing: I love you as if you alone were lovable. When I come to you in Holy Communion, and when I wait for you in the Tabernacle, all my thought and all my desire is focused on you. I know it’s hard for you to understand this, but it’s true. Think about me waiting for you there in the Tabernacle, interceding for you, offering myself for you at every moment. For you. You never have to doubt my love again.
~Excerpted from The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer
***
A special thanks to Catholic Family Gifts for generously giving Madeline the beautiful veil she wore on her special day.
Happy Birthday, Flower Child!
Sweet M.E.,
Happy 3rd birthday, my big girl! I’m late writing your birthday letter this year. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re the third child in a growing family.
Both Nana and Gaba forgot to bring their cameras to your cupcake birthday party.
“You can tell Mary’s not our first grandchild,” Gaba laughed.
True, but don’t ever think for a minute that you’re any less loved or cherished.
At this point in your life, I don’t have to worry one iota about you feeling special. Oh, child, you’re not lacking in confidence – or happiness. You float through the day, batting those gloriously long eyelashes that frame your earthy green eyes while (mostly) getting what you want and (sometimes) getting away with what you shouldn’t. You may be a new 3-year-old, but you know how to run this place. Yet, you’re easily appeased (usually) when life doesn’t go exactly the way you’d like. Even when you do get upset or someone else upsets you, once things have settled down the not-so-nice memory seems to vanish. You’re not one to hold grudges.
My lovely Mary Elizabeth, if you’re not blissfully floating, happy in your own little world, then we might find you dancing around on the tips of your toes. You naturally walk on pointe even on our hardwood floors. After observing your twinkle toes, I tried it – ouch! But you’ve been doing it since you were young. You’re definitely our tiny dancer. You love to spin around, especially while wearing one of your frothy tutus.
And your dancing is always carefree. No stiff, overly choreographed movements. You express your joy and happiness with life and your simple world with your mellow movement. Two separate people on two different occasions laughed watching you tote around a purse and twirl around. Then each of them referred to you as a hippie. You’re definitely a free spirit, a true sanguine. Bouyant, you waft through the world without too many cares. You also have a proclivity for wearing flower-shaped sunglasses outdoors as well as indoors. That might have something to do with the flower child description.
Then there’s your scatterbrained ways. Oh, my little klepto. You’re always taking things and making them your own trinkets to hide away in one of the many purses you’ve claimed as your own. You never put things back. You undress every single doll in our house, and you always leave mismatched socks, ribbons, hairclips and rubber bands you’ve pulled out of your hair, and other odds and ends in your wake. Sometimes it drives me absolutely crazy. Yet, I’ve learned that while like every child you need boundaries, you won’t be happy if I insist on everything being organized and regulated all of the time. I hate for things to be out of place, but you seem to appreciate the beauty of chaos. I’m trying to not demand perfect tidiness from you.
However, when we can’t find something (um, like our handpainted doll of St. Anthony of Padua; the irony has not escaped me that the Saint of Lost Things has been missing since Christmas), we do automatically look to you and raid your loot in search of the MIA object. Just this week I couldn’t find a pair of chic flats I’d just had on and was on a search and rescue mission when you told me they were in my bathroom by the bathtub. Sure enough, there they were.
“I was trying them on,” you confessed.
