Quickly popping in to say...

Sorry for the dump of coloring pages in your feed reader. There will be more. I'm trying to group all of the saints for a particular month together and then post them all at the same time. This makes it easier to create albums for the month over on Facebook.

This is only half!

Anyway... we are replacing the nasty, stained, matted down, 11 year old used-to-be-white-now-it's-kind-of-grey carpet in the kids' bedrooms this week (who puts white carpet in a kid's bedroom... a batchelor!!! That's who!) along with having baseboards replaced so we are in project mode over here and I don't know when I will get to pop in again. I painted 230 linear feet of baseboards over the weekend and now my back is yelling at me. Just shut up already! Not you... my back.

I did want to share a couple of things that were shared on FB this week because I found them so fascinating. First, teenager Ethan Metzger tells the Bronx Youth Poetry Slam what he responded when told his parents brainwashed him. The video of his presentation is kind of hard to understand at times plus I had to explain the snapping thing to my kids but it's worth watching. Maureen Witmann said, "As a mother of seven children, I can tell you it's pretty hard to brainwash kids. They still have free will. They still have thinking brains. They still see the world outside our walls. We set examples. We show them the world through our eyes. We share values. We demonstrate consequences of actions. But brainwash? As Ethan says here -- it's teaching." Amen!

And also, this photographer is doing something amazing...

It's so easy to forget that some of our feelings are about choice more than impulse. We can choose to love someone that we aren't in love with, choose to care for someone we don't naturally care for. Sometimes, it's a matter of creating the environment and then waiting for the feelings to come. Sometimes, just sharing an experience is what it takes to make a connection. Watch this.