Goodbye, 2021!

Oh, 2021. So different from 2020. And still so different from everything before 2020.

Baby

Because this is fresh news, it’s stealing the headlining spot. My biggest life event to report is the birth of my newest baby. It’s a boy: Paschal Joseph! His birth story is coming soon in its own post, but for now, I will share our thoughts behind his name.

First things first: pronunciation. Say “Pass-Cal,” with “cal” as in calorie; the same as the chameleon in Tangled, or Pascal’s triangle.

I have had Paschal on my list for years, after having scoured lists of saints’ names just for anything I liked the sound of. There is a Pope St Paschal, which was my intro. Rapunzel’s chameleon in Tangled makes the name more familiar/approachable to modern ears. It was in our top 2-3 boy names when I was pregnant with Cecily, so we were researching more about each name, and found St Paschal Baylon, who had a great devotion to the Eucharist, and according to some sources is a patron of vocations to the priesthood (although he was a lay Franciscan brother himself), but finding this particular saint sealed the deal on this name for us (had Cecily been a boy). Then this time around, I took the positive pregnancy test Easter weekend – and “paschal” (rhymes with rascal here) as an adjective means relating to Easter (ie the paschal mysteries) so that sealed the deal that it was still the right name—if it was a boy—this time. We chose the spelling Paschal to associate it more with Easter and less with math (ie Blaise Pascal / Pascal’s triangle).

Joseph has been the plan for a second boy’s middle name basically forever. My grandpa was a Joseph (“Joe”), and Justin’s grandpa was Bobby Joe – we lost both these grandpas before having any kids. Plus, Miryam’s middle name is after me, Luke’s is after Justin, Cecily’s is after Justin’s confirmation saint, and my confirmation saint is St Josephine, so Joseph for a boy fits right in. And then OF COURSE with it being the year of St Joseph, it was just too perfect.

I’d been hoping this baby would be a boy—we waited until birth to find out—especially so that my Luke would have a brother, but also because I had gotten so attached to this name during my pregnancy with Cecily!

Birthday Cakes

Since I’ve already elaborated on all my recent baking escapades here, here I will just showcase everyone’s birthday cakes from this year.

Miryam turning 6: Vanilla cake with sprinkles inside, green frosting + more sprinkles outside, and a dinosaur on top. 🥳

• 

• 

• 

Justin’s annual angel food cake. 🎈 

Cecily turning 2: A yellow cake with experimental mango-flavored frosting. Not my favorite thing ever. After her 1st birthday cake disaster, this was an improvement, but Justin says I really owe her something spectacular next year, since she’s had “bad” and “mediocre” cakes so far. IMO though, she better just appreciate that I make her cakes homemade, and that they’ve gotten better every year! 🎂 

My Guinness and Bailey’s chocolate cake. It was every bit as delicious as it sounds. You can make it, too, from this recipe. And I totally had it for breakfast the next day. 😛

• 

• 

Luke turning 5: A chocolate cake made to look [more or less] like a yellow kitty cat on the outside. 🐱

Favorite Books

I read a lot of books this year. You can read about all of them in a lengthy upcoming post! But for this yearly highlight post, I’ll just mention the very best ones.

Non-fiction

Consecration to St Joseph by Fr Donald H Calloway was so great! Even if you’re not up for doing the consecration itself, the bulk of this book is a collection of essays about the life and person and patronage of St Joseph, that would be informative and interesting in themselves.

Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women) by Pope St John Paul II is full of beautiful insights. I read this in a women’s small group my freshman year of college, but most of it went over my head then. Reading it again over 11 years later, with the experiences of being a wife and mother under my belt (as well as having familiarized myself with a lot more Catholic teaching since then), I got so much more out of it. The message of this work is what so many hurting female hearts need to hear: You are valuable and lovable, you are valued and loved, just the way you are, because God made you, on purpose, the way you are! And, You are a gift to the world, just the way you are; your femininity is a gift to your family and community, and you need to embrace it and let it shine, in order to be your best self: the person God made you to be. I will re-read this with anyone who needs a reading buddy! JPII’s language can be a bit difficult if you haven’t read it before, or if you’re tired while reading it (um, every mom ever lol). I read it this time with a small group of other moms and we all learned so much together, and felt affirmed with and by one another.

This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey with St Elizabeth of the Trinity by Claire Dwyer introduced me to one of my new favorite saints. Not only because I share a first name with her, but also because her spiritual insights are so exactly suited to a busy mom’s life, I’ve now taken St Elizabeth of the Trinity as a personal patron. I received another book of St Elizabeth’s own writings as a gift this year, and I can’t wait to dig into it once I get out of the newborn baby mind haze.

Fiction

The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. Judge me all you want that I managed to not read these for the first three decades of my life. I can assure you I’ll be reading them again, as my kids get old enough to read them, too. The stories were an absolute delight, and so easy to digest. I read the entire series in about five weeks, with three kids under age 6 about me. If you haven’t read these since you were a kid (or at all), I simply cannot recommend them enough. Side note: I chose to read the books in original publication order; Justin has begun reading them to the kids in story-chronological order (which is the order they’re numbered in, in the set we have). Do you have a strong preference for one order or the other for first-timers, if you’ve read them before?

Middlemarch by George Eliot was probably my single favorite book I read this year. This classic novel took me five weeks to finish just the one, but it was worth every minute of my free time. The prose was witty and lovely, just my cup of tea; the story was fresh, complex but followable, the characters believable and interesting; the town was painted so real. It was totally a treat.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie is the first mystery novel I’ve read since the kiddie mysteries I read when I was a kid. I could hardly put this down; I liked it so much more than I expected to. It was full of surprises for me. I will be back for more!

Life Events

My darling oldest daughter got glasses! I just got glasses for the first time last year, and Justin has never needed vision correction of any kind, so we never expected to have a kid who needed them. But behold, need them she does. She also had to have her first ever surgery, to remove a sneaky extra adult tooth hanging out above her already-in permanent top front teeth. PSA: Take your kids to the dentist regularly, to catch these weird random things early.

• 

• 

We got a membership to the natural science museum here, and that’s been worth every penny. In fact, Justin took the big kids there yesterday, so I could take a nice quiet nap with the baby, and/or, you know, work on getting a blog post published. The bug exhibit and butterfly conservatory are easily the family-favorite parts of the museum.

The kids got to go to their first baseball game. My sister and brother in law wanted to go, while they were visiting, and we decided to bring the whole crew. I’m pretty sure the kids’ favorite part was the ice cream their daddy got them, but we all had a good time.

Many of us in this household had our first covid tests! #2021! Luke once when he had croup, and again when he had who knows what. Cecily when she had an ear infection. Me when I was going to have labor induced at a hospital. Justin when he had pneumonia. Always just in case; always negative. Miryam managed to avoid the need to be swabbed at all, lucky lady. But these are the times we live in.

Cecily moved up from the crib to a toddler bed, and then moved with her toddler bed into the big kids’ room. We have 3 in one room, now. The transition phase is over, thank goodness! Sometimes still one of them will wake the others before 6am, though, and that, of course, is super fun for all. 🤦‍♀️

• 

• 

We did a lotttttt of kid puzzles this year. Sometimes all of them on the same day.

We went to Florida for a little family beach vacay, akin to last year’s Corpus Christi trip. It threw us some curveballs—rain at least part of every day; museums being closed due to covid—but we had some great family quality time, we did get to swim in the ocean a few times, and we found a gem of a delicious Italian restaurant. And Cecily rode in an airplane for the first time. And we made the kids carry their own snacks, jackets, and airplane entertainment in backpacks through the airport, leaving our hands free for car seats, boarding passes, and wandering children’s hands, which was a game-changing upgrade, honestly, from me trying to stuff absolutely everything into one diaper bag.

• 

• 

Justin and I became godparents! It’s my first time being a godmother, and I just love that sweet baby boy so much. I wish we lived closer so he could be best friends with Paschal. They’ll be long-distance best friends, anyway, I hope. Maybe pen pals when they learn to write? Lol. PSA: Get your family a best-friend-family. It will bless your life so much. Work hard to build that friendship. And keep working when you move 17 hours away from each other. 😭 And then use the Marco Polo app, the USPS (or Amazon delivery), lots of texting, reciprocal godparenting, maybe a virtual book club, and definitely mutual prayer, to stay “close.” 😘 

Circling back to St Joseph: a friend invited me to do a consecration to St Joseph, using the book I mentioned above, in a small group, and I said yes, this fall. I had unofficially adopted St Joseph as a patron for our whole family, as he was head of the Holy Family, several years ago. I learned so much from the book, and have been enjoying asking for St Joseph’s intercession more since the consecration. We have this image of the Holy Family, and a prayer card for “St Joseph, Terror of Demons” beside the crucifix, displayed at our little home altar (or the “prayer table” as we call it around here) right in the entryway of our house. I loved seeing the increased devotion to St Joseph over the past year since Pope Francis declared it the Year of St Joseph. He’s a powerful patron! We finished the consecration a few days before Paschal was born, which was extra special.

Last, but not least, we made new friends. We’ve befriended all the priests at our parish. We’ve had several of the families from my moms group over for dinners and birthday cakes. We started and hosted a couples’ small group this fall. We’re having regular play dates. We’ve made friends good enough to spend Easter and Christmas dinner with this year. We’ve made friends good enough to take care of us with weeks of delivered meals upon the birth of our baby. In short, we feel comfortably settled into our new community here, a year and change after moving. This is super important to my mental well-being, and I’m so thrilled to report the positive progress we made this year. PSA: Moms of littles, join a moms group of some kind! It opens many doors into real friendships and support!

So, 2021. That’s a wrap. 🎁