WIWS: I've been doing this long enough I can just use initials

mama:

shirt: Sears
sweater: Ross?

purple skinnies: LOFT

shoes: Mossimo

toddler:

sweater: Janie and Jack

dress: vintage

socks & shoes: unknown

headband (with a medal of the Virgin Mary on it, be jealous): Hair Bows 4 Life

On Friday night, we went over to David's brother's apartment for dinner.  If I haven't mentioned it before, David and I absolutely love the time we spend with them.  They just got married last year, are a young, faithful couple like us, and we have so much in common.  We feel incredibly blessed to have them (and to live only an hour away).  Anyway, when we go over there, we stay up way too late playing games and by the time we got home, we realized there was no way we could get up early enough to make it to Mass and confession Saturday morning.  We've been doing the First Five Saturday series (Mass, confession, the rosary, & 15 minutes of meditation on the mysteries on the first Saturday of the month for 5 consecutive months) and it would have been our third month.  Saturday morning, David looked it up and we could in fact go to the Saturday night vigil Mass and have it count for the First Saturday as well.  Our local church (not the one we belong to, because we belong to the parish of the school I teach at in the next city) has confession at 2:00 and the vigil Mass at 4:00, so we planned to go to confession, leave Lucia with my mom, then come home, get ready and go back for Mass.  Whew, that was a long background story for the fairly short actual story I want to tell, which is this:

We got to church at 1:45 for confession starting at 2:00.  There were already long lines at each confessional (about 8 people each).  We each got in a line, and waited OVER AN HOUR for confession.  When we left, we had barely enough time to run home, grab Lucia, and head back to church.  I wouldn't normally wear jeans to Mass, not even my super cool purple skinnies, but there was no time to change!  I've waited over an hour for confession before, but usually that meant that there were double the number of people in line.  When we finished, there were still many people in line behind us and one priest was still doing confessions when we got back to the church right before Mass started.  Which got me thinking...I know many, many Catholics don't go to confession often and many don't go at all.  If only 5% of the parishioners in our area went each month (which I estimate is quite a bit more that do currently), I don't think the priests in our area would be able to handle it.  It's not just that there isn't enough confession times, there just aren't enough priests.  Our city only has one church and two priests.  It just isn't enough.  

I got more compliments on how cute Lucia is yesterday at Mass than I ever have.  Which is shocking, because her behavior was anything. but. cute.  F---- according to daddy.  We weren't even safe in the church vestibule because the doors to the church were open and it's super fun to run into the church and scream loudly "dada, dada".  Or steal the collection baskets to play with.  Or wash your hands in the holy water dispenser.  (Have I mentioned that Lucia is a clean freak that would wash her hands 27,000,000 times a day if allowed?  Does OCD start this early?)  Yep, super fun.  What's not super fun?  Being held by mama.  Or dada.  Or being quiet.  Or reading the Mass book we bought for her.  But she did a lot of waving and a lot of "biay"s (think "bye" with a southern drawl) and was very sweet with a few elderly people, so there's that.  And no one seemed to mind her misbehavior one bit.  Which was nice.  So nice.  And shocking.  Anyway, I blame all the compliments on the darling vintage dress she wore and will now be wearing to every Mass until she outgrows it.

We don't go to Saturday vigil Mass often and I'm finding it's a Catch 22 - it's Lucia's nap time, so she's particularly animalistic, but I tend to have more energy than Sunday morning to deal with it.  And I get a whole Sunday without having to leave my bed, um, I mean house. And since I expended all my energy last night between Lucia and Jillian Michaels, I'll leave you with today's entrance antiphon, which as a nursing mother I thought was particularly lovely, without a proper reflection:

Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk, that in him you may grow to salvation, alleluia.  (1 Peter 2:2)

I'm linking up to Fine Linen and Purple's What I Wore Sunday linkup.  Check it out for more church attire inspiration.