Rainy Day Wednesday

This blog post is brought to you by "Beyond the Brick".
For a wonderful ten minutes and eight seconds, Benjamin is watching a reenactment of the North Africa Campaign built entirely in LegoVision.  
As far as I'm concerned, the dear soul who came up with that idea should be eligible for canonization.

Speaking of The Church...we were able to make it to the Beatification of Fr Stanley Rother last Saturday in Oklahoma City.
We were very fortunate to get in - we spoke with people that were there an hour and a half before the service started and were turned away because the Cox Convention Centre was already full.
Since us Watsons travel in bulk, the only place we were able to get seats all together was behind the altar curtain - and we were able to see the Mass on a movie screen.  I think it worked better that way for us because there was so much happening that the kids did better with having to focus only on the screen.
Plenty of Maryland representation was happening.  We saw lots of seminarians from The Mount and were psyched (in the Catholic-est, geekiest way possible) that the first person we recognized was Archbishop Lori's secretary.
The kids made it the the two and a half hour Beatification Mass with minimal intervention from us (this should SO be counted as one of Bl Stanley's miracles) and it was a super interesting experience.
Jim got a bug in his ear about another beatification happening later in the year in Detroit.
Maybe we head out on another adventure?

About an hour before the Mass, this was how full the convention centre was.  They ended up broadcasting the Mass on a big screen downtown and thousands of people watched it from a park. 

Blessed Stanley Rother

See?  They really did make it thought the Mass in one piece! 

Every family got a coin and two prayer cards that are third class relics.  We framed ours and put it up on the mantle.  After a family discussion, we decided we would like the patrons of our family to be t St Elizabeth Ann Seton and Bl Stanley. 

In an effort to get back into Regular Mode, Benjamin and I have been baking our hearts out the past couple days and using up all the apples we picked in Kansas.
Channeling our inner Martha Stewart, yesterday morning we had our two crockpots, a rice cooker and the two ovens all  working and filled with goodies - before nine o'clock.
Today we make a few dozen apple muffins.
Some for the neighbors, some to freeze.
We have landed in a neighborhood full of retirees.  This is rough for the kids finding people to play with, but good for our efforts to find people to pawn off give our baked goods.

Yesterday afternoon a convoy of antique military vehicles passed through Edmond.
They are driving Route 66 from St Louis to Santa Monica.  Watching them drive by, it was evident that Every.  Single.  Man.  in each vehicle was, in fact, a little boy living out a dream.
Even in the rain, it was fun to watch.
And even though Sam was super bummed that there weren't tanks involved (apparently, it's not worth being pulled out of school if there isn't a Sherman involved) and all he wrote about in his paper to his teacher was about how there should have been tanks, I do think the boys had a good time.