Liturgical Living: John Paul's Name Day

I love the idea of celebrating the liturgical year as a family. Christmas is an easy one. We're working on celebrating Easter in a way that acknowledges how important that feast is, too. We've done some things for Advent and Lent that worked really well, and some other things that need tweaking.

Beyond the obvious major feast days, we try to celebrate baptismal anniversaries and the feast days of our family's patron saints. I say "try," because despite each of those dates being marked on my Google calendar, I invariably fail to realize a feast day is coming up until the night before... or sometimes the day after.

I'm usually not too good with baby steps. I want all or nothing. There are dozens of better blogs out there with incredible ideas and tips for liturgical living, and so I need to do all the things too! And when I take that approach it usually results in a whole lot of nothing. But in this case I think I'm actually doing a pretty good job taking baby steps. I have high hopes that we'll move on eventually, but for now I'm quite happy if we manage to note each passing feast day in a timely manner.

And so yesterday we celebrated the feast day of St. John Paul II, patron saint and namesake of our little John Paul.

who me?

Because we are definitely in an extended season of survival mode, the thought of crafting a celebratory meal and dessert in the middle of the week was totally overwhelming. The fact that I realized Wednesday was such an important feast day after our weekend meal planning and shopping trip may have contributed to the seemingly impossible nature of the task.

So we decided to celebrate with Polish sausages at Costco. Clever, no? It was Alex's idea. Actually, I think he was mostly joking when he suggested it... but I thought it was brilliant, and he gets the credit whether he likes it or not.

Michael and Liam thoroughly enjoyed the outing. Polish sausage and lemonade, followed by 1/5 of a (giant) frozen yogurt? High point of their week, easily. And it was a hit with John Paul as well. He got his first taste of frozen yogurt (because Costco doesn't sell Pope cakes), and he definitely prefers it to the regular stuff he tried over the weekend.

perk of being the 3rd child--I NEVER would have given M a taste of
sweetened anything at 7 months old

We thoroughly enjoyed our celebration. And to top it all off, John Paul slept better than he has in 4+ months last night. A fitting tribute, as JPII has been our family's patron saint of sleep.