Let Love Light the Way

Our December meeting focused on St. Jane de Chantal and the virtue of Love of Neighbor.  What a perfect time of year to be thinking about who our neighbor is and how we can show God's love to them. 

As all of our girls arrived, they began creating a pile of toys to be donated to the local Toys for Tots campaign.  By the time everyone had arrived, we had filled our gathering table with all sorts of wonderful Christmas gifts for our neighbors in need.  Thanks girls, for practicing this beautiful virtue.

As always, the girls began with a coloring page for their binders.

We used the same image on the coloring page to create our holy card:



This is also the image that we use in our Year One binder page.
For our holy card, we added a simple prayer:

O, Sovereign Goodness,
I abandon myself
forever in
Thy arms.

Our craft centered on love and the spreading the light of Christ to others by giving that love away.  So...we made candles.

The girls had the choice of two types.

The first was a simple candle of stacked-hearts.

The other was a little glass votive decorated with jewels.

Both projects were completed nicely, but they didn't hold a candle (pun intended, of course) to the treat Mrs. A brought this week!

The Buds couldn't wait to dig in...

But not if it's hot!

MMMMM...Just a lick?

Or maybe a whole bite!

Keep planting seeds...

Maiden's Wreaths

It's been too long since we've had a Rose Bud post!  We have had a couple of meetings since our fashion show, but I was terrible about posting, so I do apologize.  This one should hopefully make up for it!

We are down to our last two virtues and our last two meetings of this school year.  We are preparing for a special May Crowning of our Blessed Mother at our next meeting, so at our April meeting we did some getting ready!

First...the virtue: Love of Neighbor

We have a lovely local women's association that services the community in so many wonderful ways.  This season, they have been collecting self-serve breakfast items for their Weekend Snack Pack Program.  This is an outreach program for area children who need healthy breakfasts on the weekends.

We saw this as a great way for the Buds to get involved and help their neighbors, and dedicate themselves to some spacial alms giving this Lent.  We set donations boxes in our school, made some posters and started collecting!  Each Bud also brought her donation to our meeting. 

We were overrun with items!  It was wonderful.  We took them to the collecting box that was located in our church and it literally filled it to the brim!

Thanks to everyone for their generous donations. 

The rest of our meeting was dedicating to preparing ourselves for our May Crowning.  Of course, we know that Mary is our Queen Mother.  And we know that Jesus is Christ our King.  So that must make us all princesses! 

So, we began this portion of our meeting with a story, followed by a lovely "princess" craft and then another gorgeous treat from Ms. A.

One of our Buds received this book from her Daddy in celebration of her First Holy Communion this year.  It's a sweet story of Gigi, who discovers she is royalty... the daughter of a great King!  The girls just loved the humor and it was beautiful to see the looks in their eyes when they realized the answer to Gigi's question, when at the end she wonders...

"When will I get my crown?"

We decided to make some "temporary" crowns as our crafts. 

We constructed a Maiden's Wreath.  It was a lovely little ivy headpiece onto which the girls placed some of the flowers that represent the virtues we are learning about: 

peony ~ love of God

violet ~ humility

forget-me-not ~ piety

carnation ~ obedience

daffodil ~ industry

ivy ~ hope

It was also filled with ribbons and bows and all things princess!  We will keep these wreaths safe and wear them next month as we crown our Blessed Mother.  Of course, we plan to dress like the princesses that we are for the occasion too!

What do you think of these lovely ladies?



What a group of cuties!



Of course our meetings are never complete until Ms. A gets out those reusable Gymboree boxes that we all know will be filled with goodies of one kind or another!  What would we have done this year without her amazing yummies?

And this time, we even had royal service!

What did he get himself in to?

Well, I think we can say this meeting was a royal success!

Keep planting seeds...

Working for Christ

Our Buds gathered for our last November meeting ready to put the virtue of Love of Neighbor into action in a whole new way...using the virtue of Industy too! 

We began our meeting by adding another picture of the Blessed Mother to our binders.  The girls have quite a collection of beautiful images of Mary to inspire them to live a life of virtue.



Then we were off to the kitchen!

Our service for this meeting was baking cookies for our local Missionary Sisters of Charity soup kitchen.  The Missionary Sisters spend their whole lives serving others, dedicating themsleves to hard work and sacrifice for the good of other people.  And our girls had an absolute blast emmulating this virtue.  They all did such a fantastic job of working together to get their recipe made and into the oven on time.



There were definitely some interesting techniques to cookie baking in the kitchen with these gals...

The girls were all promised ONE cookie as a treat when the task was complete, so in the oven went all the pans and into the gym went all the girls. As we waited for the cookies to bake, we played a game which reminded us that we need to try to recognize Jesus in everyone we meet...even in those strangers we don't know, and that we must reach out to Jesus by being a good neighbor to everyone we meet...even those we don't know!  Our hands are the hands of Christ.  He uses us to do His work!

We played "Who Loves You". 

One Bud was "it".  She had to sneak up behind another Bud and say "I love you" either in her own voice or the voice of a "stranger".  The Bud in the chair had to see if she could recognize her neighbor.  The girls got very creative with disguising their voices...interesting that Christ can sometimes be just as creative when He disguises the way He comes to us in our daily lives!

The revelations Christs bestows on me as I watch these girls is sometimes overwheming.  I learn so much more from them than they do from me!

The cookies came out of the oven just in time for each Bud to take one home and all the Moms stayed to box them up for the soup kitchen...over 10 dozen in all.  Great job Rose Buds!

Keep planting seeds...