Too Much On…

Possum is 6 years 9 months

Bandicoot is 4 years 7 months

Little Princess is 2 years 1 month

What a hectic week this is!  I love to mark the passage of the year by celebrating the various significant events and feasts.  This week, however, is a doozey.

Today, as you may know, is Chinese New Year.  Good Fortune to You!

We had planned to go into the city today to visit the CNY markets – to enjoy the food, the music, the crafts and activities for the kids.  We got as far as the train station where we discovered that there was trackwork across the CBD, meaning that we would need to catch a train partway then change to a bus (and, honestly, rail-buses are NOT something that blow my hair back).  We ditched that idea in favour of visiting a much more local Chinese restaurant for lunch and DH is in the process of cooking pot-stickers for dinner.

I had planned to do some crafts with the kids – movable cardboard dragons (I have the templates), spiral paper snakes (it is the Year of the Snake), paper lanterns…  Instead we came home and cleaned out the guinea pig hutch and cubby house and collapsed from a busy day.

Aah well.  Maybe we will have a chance to go and watch the dragon boat racing next weekend.  (I am not sure how I will go with that.  I was a highly competitive dragon boat paddler, way back when – you know, before kids.  Hopefully I will be able to be a good sport as a spectator if we do go watch.)

At least I got a chance to explain the significance of eating noodles and dumplings at CNY to the boys.

But that is not the only event this week.  St Valentine’s Day is looming.  I know it is not until Thursday, but the kids need to get their “Valentines” sorted for posting/delivery.  Bandicoot will need to have his ready for his fiancée girlfriend sweetheart BFF (and his other BFF) for Tuesday, for example.  We don’t celebrate St Valentine’s Day in a big way, like in the US, but it is nice to remember our nearest and dearest.

However, those two pale into insignificance when we consider that this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday.

Lent is a significant time for us.  Easter is the most important occasion on our calendar and Lent, as the preparatory time has a lot of meaning.  This all starts with Ash Wednesday (or Shrove Tuesday – don’t even talk to me about blini and pancake pressure!), and that means this is a heavy focus week.

It is a struggle to explain Ash Wednesday, Lent and Easter to children, especially to young children.  It is hard enough for me as an adult to get my head around (I guess that is why Mother Church gets us to take this journey every year), let alone their sweet little heads.  I feel the pressure, too, because our kids do not have the benefit of the kind of Church or school that I did – one that took the gravity of the Lenten season quite seriously, and made sure even the youngest understood what we were doing and why.

And so I turn to the internet.

Have you tried Googling Lent for kids or similar?  The response is overwhelming.

There are so many entries, many of them not suited to our family (ages or stages), quite a few are.  It is a huge job sifting through this information to find what would work for our kids.

And then, once I have found the ideas that are suitable, to thin them out and choose the one or two that we can actually do consistently enough for the experience to be meaningful.

Oh, and then there is the actual implementation.

And somewhere amongst all this I am trying to fit in English and Maths and preschool activities and family life and….

Never rains but it pours!

Tags: Ash Wednesday, Chinese New Year, CNY, Lent, St Valentine, Valentine's Day