Dear Friends in Christ,
Each year we ponder on our role as parent catechists. Asking ourselves: Where do we want to grow in our vocation of parenting and teaching the faith? By now we had envisioned a return to the classroom setting for at least one of us. Again this year we decided against it. We learned in January that our daughter and her long time gentleman friend have officially become engaged. Our two families have been intertwined for the past 5 years as our children began dating their Senior year of high school. To say this announcement was exciting is an understatement. The happy couple began their Pre-Cana in February and are to be married this October.
As for this year we are enrolled in the same Family Faith Formation program. We have 2 children in a non-sacramental year which we assumed we would have a year free from sacramental prep yet here we are working on another sacrament with a child!
We anticipate this to be a year of more silence on this page.
Our intent remains our time is much more limited. The 2025-26 Family Faith Formation year in our parish is focusing on Salvation History by traveling through the Bible learning about how all of the stories point toward the coming of Our Lord. This is some of the material from 2020-21. We will be depending on the use of those past posts when teaching the lessons to our children. This year we may not end up writing anything new.
Our interest still remains. Our calling is still quite present. It has been a season of intention for us. And a season of joy. We have begun a new chapter of parenting: parenting married children. What wonders lay ahead what love we have to share and lessons to learn for us all.
With a child’s wedding comes much time commitment. This is where our free time has been channeled. All else is on hold.
This is where we are in our journey.
Pax Vobiscum,
Yvonne & Keith
Note: The default plan is to release supplemental lessons based on the sessions we feel will be helpful resources. I will make a note in each post with the original date of the topic. Any and all will be published after the date, many months later, but will be published in relation to the year they occurred. A revisionist history it is not. This backdate publishing is with intent to help us keep track of when this lesson was originally taught. As a point, much of what we wrote did occur in that precise moment, we are only getting to the editing months later.
Author’s note: For those who have not followed us long we decided to step away from teaching in the classroom in 2021 because our son was born in 2020. We thought just a short break would be good for us to be more present at home. Now that baby is an exceedingly active little boy that really does take far more of my attention than I would like to admit. Long days with little time for extras we had to be intentional with our time to the family. We enrolled our children in the catechism program at our parish. Continuing the new format where the parents attend class with their children: Family Faith Formation.
If you are not familiar with this type of catechesis our parish sets the program up based on a particular focus for each week of the month. The first and last weeks of the month are taught in group form (think one room school house ages together) with a Leader and the mini-lesson activities are taught by the parents. The second week of the month is reserved for the sacramental children. Only those families with sacramental-prep children attend in class and the others remain home to teach an assigned lesson. The third week was reserved for the children being taught in class by the Leader while the parents attend a lecture/discussion on challenging topics relevant to raising Catholic children. The parent classes are very much like continuing education. Topics for adults vary from social media safety, importance of marriage, teaching skills, deeper catechism, and book suggestions.
The Small Pencil Catechist 