I just finished reading Fr. Evan Armatas’ Toolkit for Spiritual Growth: A Practical Guide to Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving and highly recommend it. Especially as someone born and raised in the church, I think I can forget some of the why’s of our Faith’s ways and get caught up in the route doing without the true spirit of the task behind it. Or sometimes I get caught up in the not doing.…

I absolutely love teaching. I never knew this about myself and I’m not sure how far it extends with other people’s children (although I teach 2 others in our homeschool pod and enjoy it tremendously),  but I find that what I learn in and while teaching and the process of inquiry and discovery is so fullfilling. I teach my children’s Sunday school and we generally focus on the weekly gospel – although…

As with a blog post I shared a few weeks ago – Cultivating Daily Repentance: A Prayer – I found a prayer from my own prayer book that has now become a nightly prayer with the kids. We do have our own quick way of going around and each saying a “special prayer” for someone each evening, but they often fall very close to home – family, friends we saw that day…

I started to write this post just before the start of the pandemic last year and then suddenly death seemed to be everywhere and very close and I wasn’t sure it was the right moment. Things have gotten worse and better and worse and better and perhaps no moment is better to talk about this than now anyways. The truth is that we are wise to always keep death in our minds…

For a while now I have been thinking about this post. How is it that we bring the scriptures to our littlest? I was delving into the world of homeschooling this year in a slightly unusual way, given the pandemic, but had read about simply reading the Bible through with your children and a friend recommended The Word of Promise Audio Bible which we got. All was well in early Genesis with…

I have mentioned several times throughout the blog that a part of our evening prayers each night is for each child (and adult) to answer the question: “What did I do today to make God sad?” I really like this phrasing – surely a gift to me from my guardian angel – since it seems to cut to the heart of a spirit of repentance – a sense of not wanting to…

Welcome to 2021 (and Christ is born for those on the Julian Calendar!) While it may not be the church new year we still mark it as a passing of time and many of us still think of it in terms of reviewing where we have been and rethinking and reintentioning where we are going. I certainly do at least. I have always loved making new year’s resolutions. And we often do…

For an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies, let us ask of the Lord. – From the Liturgy of St John of Chrysostom My mother and I were sitting chatting the other morning when she turned to me – “I read in your blog that you don’t celebrate Santa with the kids”. It was so odd to me that my mother – my closest friend…

Sitting down to write this post I certainly find it the one I feel most incompetent to write and most curious about. In researching I have read lots of thoughts and ideas which I will try and distill and integrate in the post below. There is too much to cover even in one post, but I will try and lay an outline and come back to this throughout the coming year. After…

In our home we celebrate by the Old Calendar and so aren’t quite in Advent season yet – but seeing so many of you begin the celebratory season of the Nativity Fast in posts and pictures I couldn’t resist getting in on the good cheer. We need some good cheer right now. I even heard from one of our young Old Calendar matushka’s that she’s put the Christmas tree already up though…