In many European countries it is the custom to celebrate "Name Days" in place of birthdays. Your Name Day is the feast day of the saint whose name you share. We do this in our family, too. We don't have particular traditions associated with Name Day celebrations, yet. This is really the first year that Joseph is old enough to notice or care about things like that. This year was a really big one, though.
The Feast of St. Joseph is a big feast in the Catholic calendar. It is normally March 19th. But this year that day falls during Holy Week and we aren't allowed to have feast days during Holy Week. St. Joseph is important enough to transfer liturgically, however, so he got officially moved to March 15th this year. March 15th is, every year, the feast of St. Louise de Marillac, so it was also sort of the minor Name Day for Margaret Louise. (In case you are curious, St. Margaret is celebrated in November and St. Dominic in August). We also were excited to celebrate Eric's first day off in months and, to top it all off, our good friend, Brett, invited us to a St. Patrick's Day party for Saturday evening.
The kids celebrated by getting the stomach flu.
This weekend has me rethinking the wisdom of allowing children to sleep on absorbent surfaces. The kids' actually have an odd version of this bug. Joseph was sick Wednesday night and then more or less fine for two days. Both kids were sick Friday night and then fine all day Saturday. We canceled our Zoo plans and recovered from the night before by sleeping in until 10:00 in the morning but decided we were all well enough to go to the party. Bad, bad idea. We owe Brett big time. Fortunately, he lives only six blocks from us so when first Margaret, and then, an hour or so later, Joseph threw up all over all of Brett's absorbent furniture, we were able to get them home in a hurry.
Both kids' happily ate their usual Sunday pancakes this morning and are now happy on the couch with Joseph's Name Day gift from us, Tinker Toys.
Tinker Toys are pure genius. We struggle with building toys for Joseph. He really needs things that stick together but he's not quite up for the patience required for Legos. Legos, and even Duplos, take a long time to build up into something interesting. But Tinker Toys get big fast. It even advertises this feature on the can, so I guess Joseph isn't the only kids who gets excited by this. Joseph's own creations in the last 24 hours have been mostly limited to scepters so that he can reign as King Joseph. But the great thing about Tinker Toys is that Eric and I want to play with them, too. I began a space shuttle yesterday and Eric built a swing set and a roller coaster. After seeing that Tinker Toys have the ability to simultaneously occupy both of my children for the entire time it takes for me to make pancakes, I may never want another toy for them again.
1 comment:
St. Louise de Marillac is the patroness of social workers. But you probably knew that.
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