10 Favorite Posts, The 2012 Edition

January 1 will be the fourth anniversary of this blog.  This past year has been a light one, as my posts have been particularly few and far between.  I expect this will be the case for quite a while, at least until the school year ends in June.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!  We had a busy, but quiet, one here at home (Relatively quiet, that is, considering we had twelve people here including one AMAZING AND ADORABLE three-week-old baby plus two dogs), and I spent the day after Christmas doing literally nothing.  The next few days will be busier; you'll find me grocery shopping, cleaning up from Christmas, and catching up on some mundane tasks I've been putting off since before Thanksgiving.

We've seen our new nephew twice now since he was born in early December.   His mommy, my sister-in-law Jenn, has a wonderful blog called The Cookie Jar Adventures where she has been posting lots of cute photos and video of "Baby E."  Yesterday we got to spend some time playing with him, watching him wiggle, holding him, and taking some family photos with him.  Jenn posted some of their photos and memories of E's first Christmas here!  I can't wait until we see them again!

Last year around this time I published a list of my ten favorite posts of 2011.  Since 2012 has been a light blogging year (I've posted nothing since the tragic shooting in Connecticut, for instance; I've kind of been at a loss for words on that one), in the spirit of Seven Quick takes I figured I'd choose only seven of my faves from this year.  When I came up with eight and didn't want to eliminate one, I thought, oh heck, surely I can find two more good ones.   Here they are, in chronological order (click on the title to read each post):

--1--

7 Takes, 7 Choices, The 2012 Edition

Each year on January 22, Jill Stanek invites prolife bloggers to ask, "What exactly do you mean by choice?"  This was my seven-part question.


--2--

Get Thee To the Church:  St. Stephen Martyr, Washington, DC

In which Joe and I spend a night on the town, and enjoy Mass and a pretty spring walk the next morning.


--3--

Take a walk down this Broken Path

In which I, somewhat reluctantly, review a book and learn a little something in the process.


--4--

Get Thee To the Woods: A Couple of Blacksburg Parks

I like to blog about our adventures in the out-of-doors; here we explore two parks while visiting my parents for Easter.


--5--

Today

I picked this one because it was the last day of CCD classes last spring, and I really miss teaching CCD! (despite the fact that with so much going on in our lives, not teaching has been kind of nice, too)


--6--

The Marvelous Gift of...well...

Possibly my most bizarre post ever.  But there are lots of pretty pictures, and links to some cool animal sounds.  Besides, I had fun posting it.  So there.


--7--

Friendship. Loss. Rock and Roll. Gavin DeGraw. And Rick Springfield.

Mostly Gavin DeGraw.  In which I act like a teenager one memorable evening.


--8--

7 Long Days: The Alaska Edition

Lots of photos of our summer vacation.  You'd be hard-pressed to find prettier scenery, and I expect it will be quite a while before we go anywhere like this again.


--9--

Get Thee To the Church:  Immaculate Conception, Fairbanks, Alaska

The first place we went after arriving in Alaska.  Possibly the prettiest little church in the 49th state.  One of the oldest, anyway.


--10--

A Visit to Monticello:  Life, Slavery, and the Pursuit of Religious Freedom.

In which we spend a wonderful day with my parents at Thomas Jefferson's home, and I share some random thoughts.

My apologies for not including any posts this year from my other blog, Cooking Nick's Books; for one thing,  I've all but abandoned it (temporarily, I hope), plus I'm hoping to publish another "7 Quick Takes" over there highlighting some of my favorite posts (and if I can't find 7 good ones from this year, perhaps I'll include some earlier ones, too).  Maybe that will motivate me to jump-start that one again, and maybe chew on some ideas to make it better.

UPDATE:  Done.  Read it here.

Merry Christmas, and many blessings for the coming year!

And for more Quick Takes, visit Jenn's Conversion Diary blog.  And be sure to read her post; you'll laugh your head off!  Have a wonderful Last Weekend of 2012!

The Marvelous Gift of...well...

Do you know what household chore is my favorite?  The one I actually enjoy doing?

You're going to think I'm crazy.

Poop patrol.  Yes, you read that right.  Walking around my yard, plastic bags in hand, looking for dog turds and scooping them up.  When I was a kid, I HATED that chore.  Ick!  Well, after becoming a mom and changing I don't know how many thousands of dirty diapers and potty accidents, I got over that real quick.  OK, it's not the actual picking up of the turds that I enjoy; and if I miss one and it ends up on the bottom of my shoe, I am VERY annoyed.  It's the quiet solitude I love, the slow stroll around the yard; guilt-free because I'm actually doing something useful.  I have to move slowly so as not to miss any (of course, I always do; if I were smart I would scoop it up as soon as it leaves my dog's butt and I wouldn't have that problem) and look carefully at the ground around me.  I notice things I might not see otherwise.

The time of year doesn't matter all that much (although on really cold days the poop has a tendency to freeze to the ground, in which case I'm forced to abandon my task until a later time).  In the winter I admire the frost on the ground and the way the dirt crystallizes into tiny little stalactites (or would that be stalagmites?  I can never remember the difference).  If I'm lucky I might see or hear a bird or two flitting around in the bare branches. Most likely there will be crows cawing to each other from the tops of the trees.  

In the spring and summer I listen to the birds twittering and the wind whispering through the leaves, and admire the blooms on trees and shrubs. 

The fall is trickier; if I don't stay on top of it the leaves tend to hide the "treasures" I'm supposed to be finding. 

And I think when I'm searching for turds. (Sometimes I call it poop-caching--like geocaching for poop.)  Joggers say they think best and work out their problems when they're running.  I get into that zone when I'm making my way back and forth across my yard, eyes on the ground.  Sometimes I pray.  Occasionally I'll plug in my earbuds and listen to music, but usually I prefer to hear the nature sounds-- albeit against the constant buzz of traffic noise.

Yesterday there was a wood thrush singing right above my head.  I don't know if you've ever heardthe song of a wood thrush; it's a beautiful melodic sound.  Wood thrushes like to sit high up in the trees among the foliage, and they are difficult to spot; and when one is singing near you its song surrounds you and it's sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly where it's coming from.  It seems to be coming from everywhere.  

Even when one is singing off in the distance you can't help but stop and listen.  No wonder it's my dad's favorite bird.  When I worked at a summer camp I would wake up in the morning to their beautiful song, and go to sleep at night to the rhythmicsound of katydids.  Ever since then, those have been my two favorite sounds of summer.  (And ocean waves.  That makes three.  Oh, and when we were in Bermuda a few years back we were treated at night to the call of a tree frog that sounds like bells ringing.  I would move to Bermuda just to get to hear that every night.)

I remember one friend telling me how much she enjoyed the walk around her yard, picking up her dog's poop, and how relaxing it was.  When I realized that she wasn't joking, I felt...relieved.  I must not be so crazy after all.  So yesterday, as I scooped up droppings and deposited them into my plastic grocery bag, with the soft moss underneath my feet and the song of the thrush in my ears, I couldn't help but thank God for the gift of poop patrol.  

Evening Grace

I borrowed the title for this post from Adam Baldwin.  You may know him, especially if you're a "Firefly" fan.  I love following him on Twitter.  He's one of the few conservative voices in Hollywood.  Every night he tweets a photo of something lovely and titles it "Evening Grace."  Often it's a sunset or ocean waves or something peaceful like that.  Here's his tweet for Memorial Day.

The photos above are ones I snapped after we returned home from dinner out, when Moe went for a ride in the kayak and I took a short walk around the lake.  Now that it's almost summer I hope to have many more slow and quiet evenings like this in the coming months.  Perhaps this "evening grace" theme will be a regular feature here...we'll see.

This is our last week at preschool, and the boys have a couple of weeks left before they're finished for the summer.  I hope you all have a grace-filled week!

Get Thee To the Woods: In Search of an Ancient Pyramid

Well, not ancient, exactly; one that was erected in 1897 as a monument to the Civil War. Here is where General George Meade's Union troops broke through Stonewall Jackson's Confederate lines during the Battle of Fredericksburg in December of 1862.

I had heard there was a pyramid in Fredericksburg, and the other day Moe and I decided to set out to try and find it. We drove to the end of Lee Drive as directed by various websites that told us to do so, and started to look around. At first we weren't sure we were in the right place.

First we headed down a trail toward the site of a former train depot called Hamilton's Crossing.

There was no pyramid to be found here, but plenty to see.

We wandered around in the field for a while,

...and finally we spotted it.

Unfortunately, the pyramid is on the opposite side of some busy railroad tracks, but we walked down a trail through the meadow to get a closer look.

"Take my picture so it looks like I'm holding it up with one hand!"

(I'm not sure the point of this sign, since there's no way to get anywhere close to the thing.)

It was a lovely afternoon, and reluctantly we headed home to start dinner.

Soon spring break will be over, and there won't be much time for adventures. I hope we can squeeze in a little bit of outdoor fun in the days and weeks to come!

How about you? How have you and your family enjoyed the great outdoors this week?

Get Thee to the Woods: A Couple of Blacksburg Parks

On Holy Saturday while visiting my parents for Easter, Joe and I were anxious to get the kids out of the house for a while. They all wanted to go to see the Hunger Games movie; I thought we should do something more physical than that, like a hike. I prevailed, and a hike it would be.

My mother suggested a relatively new park on the western side of Blacksburg, Heritage Community Park. It's so new it isn't on Google maps, but we found it easily.

A network of trails lead past ponds, through meadows, and an old farmstead.

Tom's Creek.

The park was once the Brown Farm, although I don't have any idea who the Browns were or how long ago they lived here.

Nearby is Gateway Trail, which leads into the Jefferson National Forest.

We greatly offended a couple of chickadees, apparently; they scolded and fussed at us loudly as we passed.

When we began to climb, I wondered briefly if maybe we shouldn't have gone to the movies instead.

There were a few muddy spots like this, but not many.

See this rock? Moe picked it up and tried to heft it over this fallen tree. It fell short and landed on the tree instead, and stayed there. The log bounced up and down from the weight of the rock, but still the rock stayed. We were pretty impressed.

We hiked to the top of a ridge, where there was a teensy bit of a view. The trail kept going up, and there are many more that branch off into the forest. We vowed that on a future visit we'd take a day and hike more of these trails.

A couple of years ago when I started this Get Thee To the Woods theme, it was in response to a blog challenge to get your family outside together. I haven't posted under that tag much lately. It isn't that we haven't been going outside; I just haven't documented it as much. (Well, actually, I have; I just haven't posted it under the outdoors theme). Anyhow, this Lent has given me the chance to re-evaluate my place in the social networking world; giving up Facebook and Twitter (mostly) was hard at first, but I realized after visiting those pages again that truthfully I haven't missed all that much. I'm happy to be able to connect with family and friends again this way (and it's FUN, let's just admit it right now), but I'm thinking I probably wont spend as much time on those sites as I used to. At least not for a while.

We're on spring break. We're doing some housecleaning (which means it's time for me to wrap this up here and get out of my pajamas and tell the kids to turn off the TV so I can give them their chore lists) and swapping winter clothes for spring ones, and I'm hoping to drag the kids to at least one natural and/or historic site in our area. Wish me luck. And hopefully I'll get my behind out of bed early enough to go to daily Mass at least one day this week.

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter, and Happy Spring!