Palm Sunday 2012

Yesterday was Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week. The Mass was absolutely beautiful! Father John came riding a donkey into the front of the church to bless the palms. It was quite exciting for the kids and I think helped them understand the importance of this day. I wish I could have taken a picture of the blessing and procession but I didn't bring my camera. Little Man and Squishy were very content holding their blessed palms throughout mass. We placed them on our home altar when were got home but I am hoping to try my hand at weaving them into crosses sometime today.

To celebrate today we created a family palm leaf made from our hand prints and hung it above our Lenten Calendar.  I also had helped the kids make caterpillars that will transform into butterflies on Easter Sunday. To make the caterpillars we used pom poms. I had the kids glue 5 pom poms together and add googley eyes to create a face then used a small pipe cleaner and bent it to form an antenna. I think they came out cute! The butterfly is a symbol of the ressurection and I hope that my boys will think of Jesus whenever they see a beautiful butterfly.

We have a butterfly house nearby and I plan on taking them during the Easter Season to have a hands on experience.

Something else I had to try was this adorable map I found at another blog called Raising (& Teaching) Little Saints you can find the post here.  Obviously from the picture I'm not quite done but I will update with a new picture soon. I printed the Holy Week cards from the above blog and I pasted the days of the week along the left side of the "road". As each day in Holy Week progresses I'm adding the corresponding card along the right side of the road and reading the bible passage from the children's bible. I think it is a nice way to finish our Lenten journey as a family and really reflect on what is important.

 To end the day I had hoped to make some palm tree shaped sugar cookies and place them in an ice cream sundae, therefore creating palm sundaes! :o) However, we had a playdate that the kids were enjoying so much I decided to lengthen the playdate and we had fig newtons as our dessert instead. Palm Sunday is also known as Fig Sunday since Jesus ate figs as he entered the city of Jerusalem. I wasn't sure if the boys would like these cookies since they weren't chocolate chip but they ended up eating them all! We had such an amazing start to Holy Week. I hope everyone else did too!