Quarantine Good Friday and Tomie dePaola Tea

What a week! A second full one of trying to homeschool three children of three different grade levels, two of whom have distance learning parameters, one of which has special needs, another or which is a grumpy tween, and it is Holy Week. Whew! I'm tired! Fridays have mostly been a day for field trips, special projects, and such for us  this home school year. Today my goal was to make both Lenten pretzels for the last time of the season and hot cross buns for our tea time snack. The pretzels were supposed to go with a vegetable cheese soup at dinner time, but the way things worked out we just had tea time with both and skipped dinner entirely.

We always do some of the pretzels to look like arms crossed in prayer, but it is also an opportunity for the kids to get creative. Deuce likes to cut them into pretzel bites. T-Bone decided to make a pretzel man, which was fine until I I got to the step where I need to boil them for 30 seconds. I felt a bit guilty. While they were rolling out and shaping their creations I read Brother Giovanni's Little Reward by Anna Egan Smucker like I always do.

In between the mixing of the dough and waiting for it to rise I did some reading from Minecraft Holy Bible and Catechism of the Seven Sacraments by Kevin and Mary O'Neill in which the illustrations are all lego pieces while the children did coloring sheets. We did this yesterday for Holy Thursday too although I didn't mention it. The boys were remembering all the plagues that they learned about earlier in the year when we were studying Egypt and Moses. This format does a good job of keeping their interest to illustrate the stories.

And today we finally had our Goodbye, Mr. dePaola Tea. The children helped to set the table. Little Miss brought down her crucifix she scored while antiquing, Deuce arranged the two crystal crosses.

And I assembled a stack of all my copes of his books including the two new ones I ordered Quiet and The Birds of Bethlehem. We went through the stack and everyone said which ones were their favorites. We ended up reading from The Knight and The Dragon, The Legend of BlueBonnet, St. Patrick, and the Good Friday pages from Bible Stories.

Deuce made some tiny pretzels and Little Miss thought they were perfect for American Girl dolls so Mary got to join our tea party. So cute!

Deuce's pretzel bites that he topped with cinnamon and sugar.

I just like my pretzels as original recipe with salt and the basic shape.

And the tulips I planted last fall have bloomed in our front triangle. So cheery. I love the ones that have the more traditional Turkish shape.