Seven Quick Takes

1. While I was in Memphis, I did a radio interview on homeschooling and Catholic culture in the home Deacon Jeff and Tom Dorian of the Catholic Cafe. The interview will be playing on Relevant Radio this Sunday at 1 pm Central Time. (You can also find it in the websites archives, entitled "the Catholic home.")

2. We hosted our monthly Latin club meeting at our house earlier this week. It included the presentation of National Latin Exam awards (all of our high schoolers received medals or certificates - and 5 of them earned gold medals!). The members (and my younger kids) split into two teams for a skit competition on the Battle of Milvian Bridge. They were really great skits (with some delightfully funny moments) and my kids were delighted that the Battle of Milvian Bridge ended up coming up in Father's homily for Daily Mass earlier this week. I love it when those connections happen!

3. As I've alluded to in some previous posts, I had to make some fairly drastic dietary changes earlier this year in order to get my low blood sugar under control. It involved dropping most sweets (fortunately moderate quantities of dark chocolate seem to be okay), breads and potatoes. It was also recommended that I exercise every day since exercise has a huge impact on blood sugar. I'm happy to report that I've been walking 3 miles nearly every day and that I'm down 20 lbs. since last summer!

Ah, and a side benefit that was rather unexpected is that my seasonal allergies, which have gotten worse every year for the last few years, seem to have almost disappeared this spring, in spite of it being a particularly bad pollen season.

4. It's all my daughter's fault, really (well, I guess I can blame my big sister too). ;)

While we were in Memphis, Ria was on my case about starting a commonplace book for favorite quotes. After all, she had her quote book with her and it came in handy when we were setting up the conference table as she had the last-minute (and brilliant) idea of scattering favorite quotes around the table cloth. And since we found lovely notebooks in the airport on the way home, I've been collecting some of my favorites by hand in there over the last month or so. I really enjoy having them handy in my purse all the time (handy for certain discussions and such) and it's a great place to collect new ones too.

5. Working on this commonplace book naturally led to brushing off an old project I haven't touched in about a year - an online notebook for favorite quotes, photos and videos. Basically it's the commonplace book plus, um, illustrations. (The order is pretty random on the whole.) You can check it out here: Love2learn Notebook. I'm not quite satisfied with the name. If you have any ideas, please pass them along!

6. I'm always interested in learning more about sensory sensitivity as it's an issue for some of my children and for myself. I found this post on Sensory Perception Sensitivity at the Eide Neurolearning Blog particularly interesting and then jumped from there to the self-test on a site about "the Highly Sensitive Person". They say if you score 14 or higher, that you fall into this category. I scored 24 out of a possible 27. Interesting. And yeah, it seems to make sense out of a number of things.

7. I just started reading (meaning, I just finished the introduction to) Christ Our Joy: The Theological Vision of Pope Benedict XVI by Msgr. Joseph Murphy. It looks like it will be an amazing book. Can't wait to dig in further. Here's a great quote by Cardinal  Ratzinger that showed up on the back cover:

We need to have it said to us that only with Christ has true joy made its appearance and that, in our own lives, nothing matters apart from learning to see and understand Christ, the God of grace, the light and joy of the world. Indeed, our joy will only be true if it is not based on things, which can be taken away from us and destroyed, but thrusts its roots into the intimate depth of our lives, into that depth which no worldly power can take away from us. In addition, every external loss should become for us an initiation into that interiority and should make us more mature for living our true life.