7 Quick Takes Friday

--- 1 ---

40 Days for Life started this week. I took my girls to the kickoff event on Tuesday night. There was awesome music, prayer, and then we walked a mile and a half to a clinic and prayed. For some reason this event helped me stop being afraid of the idea of praying outside and I look forward to doing it sometime soon.

--- 2 ---

Tessa was tired at the end of the march and when we got on the bus to head back, someone offered to hold her. She curled up like a little tree frog on this guy like she had known him forever. It was so cute! I had to nurse Charlotte and sit with the other 2 girls because they wouldn't sit alone. My stroller got to sit with John Jakubczyk. Haha!

--- 3 ---

I see my OB at pro-life events fairly often. I'm socially awkward enough in normal situations, let alone seeing my dr out in the real world, who knows pretty much every single thing about me since I've been going to him for so long. It's a little creepy. But I do LOVE that I chose a pro-life dr, and I'm glad he's there, but still. Weird.

--- 4 ---

Is anyone else holding out on picking a favorite Presidential candidate like I am? I tend to go totally overboard once I start researching, and I don't want to fall into that pit too soon. I'm not sure when I will start paying attention, but as of right now, I'm not excited in the least. And to be perfectly honest, I don't care what people think about her, I really wanted Palin to run.

--- 5 ---

Does ANYONE know how to fix the sound on an old MacBook Pro??? I've Googled and Googled and Googled some more, and I can't fix it. :(

--- 6 ---

Between writing number 5 and 6, my sound is fixed on my computer. Not sure how, or why it was broken to begin with. Pretty sure it was Tessa. But we're also not sure how we fixed it. It's all a mystery.

--- 7 ---

Now I can watch creepily hilarious videos like this one that Leila shared a while back and I wasn't able to "enjoy" until now....



We'll just add this to the reasons I'm thankful I'm Catholic.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Current ramblings...

RCIA starts at our parish next week and I'm praying Kyle will join. I truly think that once he gets past being grumpy about going, that he'd really enjoy it. I also think he'd enjoy and understand mass a lot more if he understood what was going on... He has mentioned interest before but I don't know if he was just trying to make me happy or what. I guess we'll see. He was baptized as a baby but never confirmed.

We have the rockiest path to grace ever. And I'm trying to write up my conversion but it's really hard for me to put it into words that make sense, and a lot of it is so personal, I'm not sure I can put it all out there. My life has been rocky since the moment I was conceived, seriously... so it's hard. I think I need to read some other conversion stories to help give me confidence in posting mine.

Tomorrow, St. Thomas the Apostle is having a 40 Days for Life kickoff event. I'm planning on being there. I'm still too chicken to pray in smaller groups in front of clinics, so this event is perfect or me, and it might help me get used to the idea...

Divine Mercy Mass

Well, I finally made it back to Divine Mercy Mass after all these years. Fr. Oliver is still there, which is wonderful. I just adore him. Things were a little different, as they didn't sing the Divine Mercy (Boo!), and the Church didn't have the air on or something, so I was scorching the whole time. But it was worth it. Charlotte didn't cry at all (I swear the only time she doesn't cry is church...) and it was beautiful. Hoping to make it more often from now on :) Oh, and the creepy guy that used to hit on me was not there, so that was nice...

I came home to someone's status on FB about the death penalty and I asked her how she could possibly be pro choice yet anti-death penalty and it turned into a 189 comment debate. I was the only pro-lifer against a handful of pro-choicers, one of which works for Planned Parenthood. It was insane. I was thankful for the help of JoAnna and Leila on that one, because I was at a loss after a while and was ready to give up. I pushed through with some more info that they wouldn't read anyway, but I was reminded that it was for the lurkers, and that helped me through because I know that that's true. It finally fizzled out in the afternoon the next day after all the libs on my friend's page came out of the woodwork to pat the pro-choicers on the back. Please pray for these people. It's disgusting the things they believe. It had been a long, long time since I had debated so extensively, it's exhausting. But just like Abby Johnson, they truly believe they're helping people. Sigh!

7 Quick Takes Friday

1. I've begun to write out my conversion story but it's really hard! It's so, so personal that I'm not sure how I feel about posting it. It's about 1/3 done, so we'll see how I feel after I'm done.

2. This week went by really slowly for me. I'm not sure why, but Tuesday felt like it should've been Thursday, and so on.

3. Kyle asked for one of his days off at his new job to be Wednesday so that I could attend Wednesday night mass! <3 It'll be great not only for that reason, but Wednesdays are hard because the little ones have to miss their nap and it is nothing but havoc the rest of the afternoon because of it. So it'll be nice for them not to have to miss nap, and to have some extra help in the middle of the week.

4. I am so glad it's finally under 100º this week. I hope the triple digits stay away for a very long time. Can't wait until it's "cold".

5. The girls and I are loving this dancing chihuahua video...














6. And this picture cracks me up. I was laughing for 5 mins straight last night after seeing it: 

7. I need some ideas on how to go about this convalidation thing. If anyone has any pointers, I'd be appreciative! :)

Happy weekend!

3 things

When I joined the Church there were 3 things I struggled with. I couldn't understand why barrier method birth control wasn't okay, why, or how people prayed the rosary, or the importance of reconciliation.

The latter was because my RCIA class never taught us how to give confession, so it just ended up being this scary, ominous cloud that hung over me. My friend (who is now a nun) was in my RCIA class with me and had bought a small purse sized book about confession and passed it on to me. I'm pretty sure my first confession was at St. Thomas the Apostle in Phoenix and the priest was amazing. This was the time when Father Wall was their pastor (he's now a bishop). Anyway, there were a lot of things I was struggling with at the time. Kyle and I were having a rough patch in our relationship, I was having trouble finding a permanent job, and we had tons of money issues. I'm fairly certain that the reason this year was the closest I've ever felt to God was because I gave it all to him. I went to confession that first time and it changed me. I went as often as I could. Usually at St. Thomas, once in a while at my own parish. It took me a while to figure out what I should say or what I should do, and I found comfort in that tiny book I was given, because it led me through, gave me the beautiful prayers I needed, and helped me realize the beauty and necessity that is confession. I was able to actively confess and then work on the issues in my life I knew needed working on, and in a prayerful manner.

I will admit I haven't gone in a long time, because I can't take communion anyway, because we're not married within the Church yet. I know I should be going, but I haven't... in years. And because I want to be perfectly honest in this blog, I don't have a problem sharing that. It is on my list of important things to get back into the habit of doing, I just haven't made it that far yet. It was part of the loss of spirituality I had when my friend left for the convent. I lost my Church buddy, but I'm finally recovering.

Confession

Moving on to the Rosary.

Admittedly, as a new Catholic, I was pretty weary of the Rosary. I didn't understand the repetition and it actually annoyed me to have to sit through one. I was uneasy about the focus on Mary, and I truly didn't "get it." My friend and I were attending mass twice a week. Once was a Divine Mercy Mass on Wednesday nights which I adored, but I couldn't bring myself to pray the Rosary before mass. I'd purposefully show up late so that we wouldn't have to sit through it. We'd sit and talk about how mundane it was. And then I'm not sure what happened, but one day we went at the right time, and prayed the Rosary and the Divine Mercy, and heard the importance of it from Fr. Mohan, and suddenly it clicked! It was a mediation, that's why it's repetitive! It's biblical! It's beautiful! It's life-changing!

I cried through many Rosaries before these masses. My spiritual life was at a high even though my life itself was at a low. I miss attending this mass. Again, on my list of things I want to get back into the habit of doing. But this one might be impossible with my husband's upcoming work schedule.

Our Lady's 15 Promises for Praying the Rosary
Rosary Meditations
The Divine Mercy


Ahhh, now onto the fun one, barrier method contraception. It doesn't fit in all that well with the other 2 subjects but it was definitely something I struggled with.

I stopped using birth control pills well before I was Catholic. I didn't agree with the way they worked once I found out the truth, so I had no problems with that teaching at all. But I could not grasp the reasoning behind being against barrier methods. They didn't do anything to a baby, they seemed harmless enough in a marriage.

I starting reading up on it. And I finally started to get how much it undervalues men and women and their marriages. How it violates natural law by taking the creation aspect out of sex. How it can cause women to feel like objects and men to treat them as such. How it can ruin marriages because people get bored. And really, how it just made sense to me suddenly that the Church is against anything unnatural.

The contraception mentality. The negative self image. The societal impact. All of it from contraception? Yup. Oooh, I get it now. :)

Catholic.com on Birth Control

Jennifer Fulwiler on being open to life & On Contraception (this has all the awesome links) & A woman's self image

and of course: Humanae Vitae

Thank God for the internet. All of these "issues" I had with Church doctrine were easily researched, prayed about, and concluded in a pretty short amount of time.

Annulments...Part 2

I haven't always agreed with the annulment process. And actually, it was only a couple weeks ago that I had a change of heart.

Someone I know got upset when I mentioned my annulment because she felt it was wrong that the Church required it and that the Church was somehow trying to fool God. I didn't know what to say, because I didn't have a deep understanding of it myself. I just told her that while I didn't care for the process, the Church has held the same process for thousands of years, and if I wanted my current marriage convalidated, then I had to get it done.

I came home and googled "annulments in the Catholic Church" and started reading.

I found this site which put it very plainly: Annulment says you were never truly married in the first place. Something necessary for a valid marriage was missing. Annulment is a matter of Church law.

Valid marriage. Were we married? In the court's eyes, yes. Validly, no. We were never married in Church, so it was invalid from the get go.

Thankfully, my annulment was actually quite easy. There are times when an annulment isn't granted and there are long form annulments that take a lot more time.

Also from the site: ...even Catholic annulment can't dissolve a valid marriage! Annulment simply says that a true, sacramental marriage was never created in the first place — it was never valid.

Did we still sin by marrying civilly and divorcing? Yes. Does the annulment take away that sin? No. My marriage needed to be ruled invalid before I could validate my current marriage. Which I should've done the right way and done all of this before I  re-married, but the past is the past and we can only work with the mistakes we've made and make them better. So you know what? I do not have a problem with the annulment process. I see the need for it. I don't see any attempt at "fooling God" in there at all. Do I understand all of it? No, not completely. But I don't feel a need to anymore.

 And, for those that aren't Catholic, I see how they can see it as unnecessary. Because most protestant or "Bible" churches don't have a hierarchy or "holy government," they fail to see any need for declarations such as annulments. I am thankful for the hierarchy because it does well to guide us. And if that means I have to jump through a few hoops, then that's fine with me. I'll deal with it, because I'm pretty sure an institution that's been studying these things for thousands of years know a heck of a lot more about it than I do. And I trust them.

 

Annulments...

I've always done things in my life backwards. Not really intentionally, but I did a lot of things based on emotions when I was younger.

When I was 20 I was having issues with my ovaries. My doctors were afraid I had endometriosis because I had such horrible pain all the time. They had me on birth control pills from the time I was 16 until I realized at 20 the abortifacient properties and negative health implications.  Because I stopped the pill, my pain came back and I started worrying that I would never be able to have children.

So, I started dating a guy and we married 8 or 9 months later. Everything was okay at first, but he became increasingly more emotionally abusive. Yelling from the time I'd get home from work until dawn, literally. Nothing I did was right. I got pregnant and ended up having a partial molar pregnancy and miscarrying at 15 weeks. I was heartbroken. He was happy and told me so. He got rid of my dog. He screamed some more. One day, he yelled at me in front of the little boy I was nannying at the time and I lost it. I moved out a few weeks later and never returned. We were divorced just after I turned 23.

During my impending miscarriage, I began my conversion. I will someday write out my whole story, but my miscarriage was a big part of it. I was never able to find an RCIA that worked with my schedule, so I'd attend mass once in a while in the hopes that I would find one someday that worked for me. But I would travel on a whim, got a tattoo (that I now HATE), and slept and ate very little. I went to mass when I felt the ache.

Then I met Kyle, online, and we started dating. Again, because I was following emotion instead of doing the right thing, I flew up to California to meet him. A few months later we were pregnant with Amelia. I moved to Cali, and we tried to find a parish we liked. He was baptized Catholic, identified as a Catholic, but didn't practice. We never really found one we liked.... California has some weird dioceses... Until we moved back to AZ and started attending the parish near home. I liked it because the people were warm and caring and mostly because they had an RCIA that worked for me. I wish Kyle would have been confirmed with me, but he still, to this day, has not done it, unfortunately.

I was baptized and confirmed into the Church in 2006. I was baptized with Amelia. But I had to stop taking communion right after that anyway, because we were living in sin. We switched parishes and I realized that I wanted to get married in the Church. Unfortunately, I'd have to get an annulment first and even though it didn't cost a lot of money, it was still money that we didn't have to spend. It was $50 for the annulment, $28 for a divorce decree from the county, $28 for my marriage license from the county, and $5 for my ex's baptismal certificate. I procrastinated for years.

My heart and soul ached from not being able to take communion.

Kyle decided to reenlist in the Marines just after Lily was born, so we ended up getting married civilly instead. He wasn't accepted, so I had married outside of the Church, which is something I didn't want to do, for absolutely no reason.

I procrastinated more on the annulment.

Until this Lent. When I made a promise to myself that I would order the papers they needed, and get the stinking thing done, because I wanted to be in full communion with the Church. Not only for myself, but for Amelia, who would be taking communion for herself in 2nd grade, and I knew how fast time would go and she'd start asking questions and that is not something I wanted to face. I had no good reason to be keeping myself in mortal sin. To keep my marriage outside of the sacrament was not helping anything. I need it to be done. I need our marriage to be blessed. We need our sacrament. I truly believe that the Holy Spirit will bless us even more completely once our marriage is convalidated, and hope with all that is in me that Kyle will eventually go through RCIA and feel the Holy Spirit in his life.

I signed the papers the day Charlotte was baptized and I received a phone call today saying it was done!!! I asked her if they were sending anything to me and she said no, that the diocese just said to notify me that the annulment was done. I laughed that that was awfully anti-climactic, but that I was so happy and asked what the next step is. We can either go through the complete marriage process and have a full on wedding or we can have our marriage blessed by the deacon in a small ceremony. Due to money and time reasons, we will likely do the latter.

This was a pretty personal post, but I guess that's okay. I'm certainly not perfect. But this is my journey. This is my life. And I'm so thrilled that we are moving forward on the path that I know God wants us to be.

7 Quick Takes Friday

Here are some of my fav things from this week:

1. In Contraceptive Culture, Women Can Never Rest

The effects of the Contraceptive mind set are HUGE. I hope society starts to realize this problem. My husband and I are the odd people out in our family because we are Catholic and my family is not. His family is non-practicing, but still Catholic. Kyle isn't a devout Catholic like me, but I know he feels it's right, or he wouldn't agree to such an extreme lifestyle (NFP, private school, sacraments, etc). Anyway, we are constantly told that we need to be "fixed" or that we don't "need" to have anymore children. I'm going to write a whole blog post about this subject soon because this Contraceptive Mentality affects us personally, on a nearly daily basis. Women don't have body issues purely because of the images they see their whole lives, it's part of it, yes, but the other part of it is the over sexualization and liberal mindset that our bodies are for sex, not to create life or bond with our spouse, thus they must look perfect at every moment. Jennifer Fulwiler has written about this a bunch of times and I love it. It helps me in my daily life when I encounter the nay-sayers. (WOW this was not a quick take ;)

2. Homework Caddy

I want one of these!! But they're sold out. :(  I can't believe how much stuff Amelia brings home and I really need to get a good system in place before Lily starts preschool next year. This looks perfect and it's cheap. How do you guys keep your kids' homework organized?? I'm overwhelmed.

3. I posted this link on my FB page and it created quite the conversation about 80's music. Worst Songs of the 90's  I so disagree with most of them. While a lot of them are annoying, they're total classics, and I'm pretty sure make a lot of people smile. And I'm betting that anyone who lived through the 90's knows these songs, or at least the choruses. Charlotte and I rocked out to an Ace of Base Pandora station the rest of the night after reading this article. :)

4. I love this photo: 

I can't believe it's almost been 10 yrs.

5. And I also love this photo:

One of my friends on FB said that it looks like the Koala is saying, "MINE!!" Haha, I totally agree. Who doesn't love Blessed Pope John Paul II? The koala certainly does. ;)

6. I am still looking for input on my fashion board on Pinterest. I can't afford to buy anything currently, but I'm hoping to be able to soon, and to have an idea of what I would like. Please check it out! :) Fashion Board

7. 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling Too funny, and a great lesson! I like to read over these from time to time to make sure my grammar doesn't stink. There's a link on how to use apostrophes, too. hehe! I'm an english nerd, even though you can't tell by my horribly written blogs, lol!

"It's a dry heat."

This is going to be a cranky post, so bear with me.

"Summer" in the Phoenix metro area starts in May (sometimes earlier.) We easily hit 100º and stay there... for the most part... until November. 6 months out of the year, we live in an oven. The temperatures at the beginning and end of our summer will be, maybe 75º at night, but in the dead of summer it's easily 95º+ in the middle of the night.

So, I constantly hear, "Oh, but it's a dry heat!! I'd take that over our humidity any day!!"

Uh, I'm sorry, but I would take your few weeks of humidity and "hot" temperatures over living in an oven 6 months a year. No reprieve, no cool nights, no shade, no nice breeze. Then maybe *I* could complain that 75º is hot.

I know what you're wondering. "Why don't you just move?" I would. Really. But I haven't found a place I like that isn't swarming with liberals, has a corrupt diocese, or isn't a pit. Plus, I know this area, and as much as I hate the weather, I do like the amenities. I can be picky about doctors, dentists, and schools. I can shop at pretty much any store I can imagine.

So, I don't know. I know I won't stay here forever. But for now I have to.