House Art Journal

A catechism-of-life lesson I tend to give my children when we go fruit picking is, "What does this tree tell us about God?" When He says He will look after our needs, how does He do this? Is He sparing, giving us only what we need? Or is He generous? Does He give us far more than we could possibly ever need The children look at the branches heavily laden with fruit, and at the fruit scattered everywhere on the ground, so much that you can barely walk without stepping on one, and they conclude "He is generous!" Amen!

My husband is our breakfast cook on the weekends, and one of his specialties is sausages cooked with apples. Simply fry the sausage in a covered pan on low heat, covered with sliced apple rings and sprinkled with brown sugar, until the apples are soft and the sausage is cooked through. We indulged a few weeks ago: here is one small portion with a buttered scone and cup of tea.

Following my upbringing in a charismatic covenant community, our family does "Celebrating the Lord's Day" prayers before and after the Saturday night and Sunday night meals. A sort of combination of the Liturgy of the Hours Evening I and II prayers and the Jewish Sabbath prayers, it's a tradition we retained when we drifted away from regular charismatic expression. I love the simple ritual of it, and the aura of solemnity it always gives our Sunday evening dinners. We made our own booklets out of parchment printer paper, as you can see. To make your own, you can download a PDF of the prayers here . And here is a page that gives some additional links. (Note: Blogger seems determined to blog these URLs for some reason. So here are the direct links: The PDF is http://sos-nar.com/Lord's%20Day%20Materials/Celebrate.pdf And http://sos-nar.com/lord's_day.htm is the additional resources link. Cut and paste them into your browser window if you have to!) My daughter ...

Filling out the final categories, casual clothes, turned out to be the hardest for me, because I have a lot of casual shirts. Plus we're still in the middle of "warm fall strangeness" and it hasn't yet become cold enough for me, in Virginia, to definitively put away my tank tops (I'm wearing one now). And there is the matter of my still-expanding pregnant waistline, which makes negotiating the lower half of the wardrobe tricky. So I cheated on the 35-item system - for now. Once the cold weather goes in, I shall banish the final remnants of the summer wardrobe and hopefully will report on having 35 pieces alone in my closet! Thanks to those of you who read and enjoyed this series: many of you raised questions I'm still pondering: including how to apply this to young children. I think I may do that soon: my toddlers have too many clothes right now. I used to have a system in place when I had two children, but I let that fall by the wayside. When I revisit...

To me, one of the funnest parts of being a woman is being able to dress up. I thank God I am not a man, forced to wear a suit and tie as the only socially acceptable way to celebrate. So even though the life of a housewife might not seem as glamorous as the life of a socialite or executive, I enjoy having some nice things in the till for a night out on the town. And even Sunday Mass, that weekly celebration of a more celestial sort, provides time for adornment. So, continuing on with the organization, my job was now to cut down my fall Sunday wardrobe to seven pieces of clothing. Fortunately this wasn't too hard this time around: staples for Sunday dress-up for me include my black wool suit (Talbots and going strong!) which fortunately still fits a pregnant figure, and a white silk blouse. I'd purchased a blue print skirt-and-blouse set on clearance (mostly to match a favorite vintage purse) and I can mix and match the suit and that set quite nicely. I also included a brown 80...

Just to post to say I really, really want to get back to posting my clothing series, but life has overwhelmed me just now. But I will get back to it, I promise! In the meantime, hope you enjoy this picture of the baby enjoying hot chocolate milk on one of the rare cold mornings we've been having this fall.... (It's actually the Reliv chocolate supplement, but she thinks it's cocoa, and I don't mind!)

So -- now the challenge after ruthless paring down was to separate each of the remaining pieces of clothing (which still numbered way more than 35) into one of the five categories I'd determined: (see the circle chart below) 1. purple circle: dressing up, the 'glam' clothing 2. red circle: daily Mass and shopping or visiting 3. brown circle: yard work, super casual clothing 4. green circle: ordinary casual clothes for housework (not as casual as #3) 5. blue circle: Sunday Mass clothing I started with the category of going to daily morning Mass, which right now I do three times a week, and I have this "thing" about not wearing pants to Mass. Like I said, I tend to use any excuse to dress up. If you check the chart below (and ignore how horribly I numbered it) you can see that I was trying to fill out this category by picking eight items that I could wear to daily Mass and for slightly dressy occasions, like visiting. Two of these items had to be able to be worn in ...

The first part of organization is ineviably, paring down. And that brings with it the sometimes heartbreaking exercise of detaching yourself from things you once loved. (Yes, loved in the lower, materialistic sense, but nevertheless, loved.) So, in my effort to cut down my wardrobe, I gathered all my clothes from off-season storage and the cranies of the laundry basket and heaped them on the bed. I did the same with all my accessories: purses, scarves, shoes, and jewelry. Then the winnowing began: ruthlessly purging the unfit: clothing that was stained or getting straggly, clothes that really didn't fit me except in my fantasies, clothes that I never got around to wearing, and so on. Then I further winnowed out the remaining spring and summer clothes (farewell blue and green, till summer when we meet again!) as well any clothes that won't fit my third-trimester-pregnant figure. Also excised were maternity clothes from the last baby that were just too worn or out of style. I con...

Forgive this intrusion into the Clothes Organization series, but I thought it might be of interest to some... This past summer, I gave a talk called "No Matter What Happens, Blessed Be His Name" at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference . It was the first time that I spoke about losing our son, Joshua Michael , in public. It was a hard talk to give, but I'm told that it helped people in the audience who were going through their own bouts with suffering. In the talk, I retell the Biblical story of Job and share how I found that God's story about suffering had real applicability to what our family experienced. I just found out that the talk is available on CD from St. Joseph Communications for $7.00. To order, call Monica at 1800-526-2151, ext. #413. Or, you can email her at monica@saintjoe.com . The item number for the talk is #MWCFC07-CDM#8.

Thanks for the encouragement, all! So, in the effort to pare down my thrift store wardrobe, I spent about a week trying to come up with a template that would work for me. It had to be specific, because my wardrobe is no ordinary set of clothing. No indeed, it is specially tailored to the tastes of one person in particular: my husband Andrew. Andrew likes two kinds of clothing on me: polished, simple, Audrey-Hephburn style clothing in strong colors and soft textures, and totally casual farm clothing like checked shirts and jeans. No prints, no muted or muddy colors, nothing too dramatic or too flouncy. Just simple, cute clothes. At least that's what his taste has currently evolved to this season. Of course, Andrew's never actually come out and told me this. Are you kidding? No, this is based on thirteen years of careful research, note-taking, and stealth inquiry. Because as most women can tell you, men are rarely forthcoming about what they like in clothing, and the question, ...

The change of seasons brings about the inevitable changing of the wardrobe. I'm forever trying to come up with some organizational model for reining in the amount of clothing in my closet. About a decade ago, I first formulated the plan known as the Seven-Dress wardrobe, (also known as Liturgical Dressing ) which worked well - for a while! But I confess I found it hard to maintain such a minimalist approach to dressing, and age took its toll on both my figure and my ability to regularly sew myself a new wardrobe. Now, some ten years after writing the above article, I'm back to my old standby: thrift store dressing, and for some reason, keeping up with the fashion scene has become more important to me as I age. But when you shop constantly at thrift stores and through bags of hand-me-downs, wardrobes have a way of ballooning out of proportion just as much the closets of those who hit the mall every Saturday. I still find myself in need of a template, a directive for how much...