Winter Sunshine

Perusing one of my favorite blogs, Like Mother Like Daughter, and I just read this:

So much of how we live the spiritual side of our lives as mothers and wives has to do with how we live the feeding and clothing side. Since that's inescapable, I long ago decided to embrace it.

That is one of the reasons I love her blog.  Down to earth, traditional Christian, practical, and so sweet!  The post that quote is from is something like preparing for Easter or something (which, crazily enough, isn't as far away as it seems!) but that little paragraph leaped out at me.

It's a good day here.  Sunshine is streaming through the windows, the kids all slept in this morning, so I could take a shower and blow dry my hair, and the house looks so clean and spacious after removing the Christmas decorations.  Plus, I just started a seasonally appropriate decorating project that I'll share with you when I've finished it.  It's great to have a project to work on when you don't feel like reading and learning something any more.  Use your hands!  I now have a craft cabinet, a craft bag (alas, full of unfinished Christmas ornament presents that are slowly being finished—should I mail them out super late, or send them along next year?), and a basket full of my aforementioned project in progress.

There's a sneak peak into my project.  Can you guess what it is?  There's another hint in the top photo.  Look above the TV.

All these physical things contribute to my good mood.  The clean house, the ongoing project, the sunshine.  I can't just think myself into a good frame of mind.  I can't ignore these physical things and their impact on my soul—which is I think what Dear Aunty Leila was saying with those two little sentences quoted above.

Anyway, it is now 10AM and time for some small amount of school here.  Some letter practice, a math activity (butterfly mosaics? board games? Cuisinaire rods?). We read about Saint Simeon from Christina's True Heros, by Maria Khoury during breakfast this morning.  Maybe we'll get some kind of project or activity in this afternoon, but it doesn't usually happen.  I do want to continue working on our Creation Book from The Garden of the Theotokos curriculum.  We'll finish it eventually.

Hope you are all staying warm and cozy in spite of this:

A photo of our street from the recent Thundersnowpocalypse on Wednesday morning.

Happy Feast of the Presentation!