Happy All Saint's Day! ~2013~

Happy All Saint's Day!

Can you guess the saints?

We've had a fun and busy couple of weeks but our homeschool group's All Saint's party was a highlight…

Here we have St. Sebastian and Saint Apollonia with her golden tooth.  Just prior to being burned to death, St. Apollonia was tortured by having her beautiful teeth pulled out, one by one with pincers, while defending our Christian faith in the 3rd century.  Can you imagine?  I prayed for her help quite a bit when I had my front teeth smashed in so that's how I got to know her story!  Princess is going to be asking for her prayers very soon when she gets her braces:)  Here's her prayer for dental issues. In ancient art, St. Apollonia is often depicted with a golden tooth, hence angel baby's costume as St. Apollonia's partner:)   

We made this fun snack to go with St. Apollonia…Apples, peanut butter and mini marshmallows.  Thank you, Pinterest!  It was a secular Halloween idea that fit perfectly into our All Saint's theme:)

Ok, enough about teeth…Yikes, it makes my mouth hurt to think about it! (But these were yummy:) And a good reminder of the Christians before us and all they endured to preserve our faith…Talk about a big dose of grateful!

Angel baby also wanted her own costume so she dug out one of her favorite saint costumes from the plastic bin in the archives…St. Joan of Arc!

All the kids in our group stand up and give a few clues about who they are and everyone gets to guess…So much fun!

Afterwards, most of the kids strip off their costumes and race off to play some fun games!

On to Halloween…

Well, even though Halloween is the Eve before All Saint's, we celebrated in reverse order this year.  

We have a fun tradition of visiting all of our grandparents on Halloween…It's been neat to collect the photos from year to year.  This is my grandmother who is only 93 years young!  She looks forward to having the kids come over all dressed up:) 
{Highschool son is absent since he had a football game}

Here's my Mom and Dad…

They aren't together in the photos since my Mom had somewhere else to go…My Dad loooooves to give out candy at our house in town since they live in the country.  It's nice to have him "man the house" since Rod is often working and I'm alone with the kids.  We have a great neighborhood for trick or treating:)

Sadly, Rod's Mom wasn't feeling very well so she wasn't up for our visit this year.

Had a little "fun" with food this year...surprise, surprise:)

St. Lazarus Mummy Dogs

(How's that for ancient biblical history!?)

Saw these on Pinterest and thought they were so cute…OK so I changed the name a bit;-) Princess is studying ancient history so these were also a perfect addition to her mummy study!

Our version was just wrapping a hotdog with strips of Pillsbury Croissant dough and baking @ 375 for about 15 minutes.  Some little dots of mustard made the eyes:)

I shared and posted more on our cute little All Souls Prayer Parfaits over at Catholic Cuisine! All Souls Day is up next, November 2nd...

 I am so thankful for the rich history of our faith that adds so much to celebrating!  

Missing my 2 older boys being with us so had to post a "throw back" All Saint's Day photo:)  {This was before Angel baby was born.}