Holy Thursday and Good Friday

St. Stephens has this neat thing that they do for the kids. They give them Holy Week passports. For each service they attend during Holy Week, they have to have their passport signed and they get a special treat. If they attend at least 3 out of the 4 services, then they get a surprise at the end. We were already planning on going to services on Good Friday and Easter so we only needed to attend one more to get the surprise. I asked Shawn if he wanted to do it and he said yes so we went to church on Holy Thursday. Then I found out what the surprise is...they can take their passport to the information booth at the Spring Jubilee and get $10.00 worth of food tickets-Not bad! I was really surprised at how nice the service was. It kind of reminded me of going to Midnight mass on Christmas Eve. You could just feel the Holy Spirit in that church! Shawn did great considering how long the service was. I think it ended up being around 1 1/2 hrs.

On Friday, I took Shawn to St. Stephen's Catholic School for a Good Friday Children's Retreat. They were making a big deal about the amount of kids they had participating but I can't remember what the count was. I picked him up at 2pm and he said he had fun. It's hard to get much more information from Shawn. If I ask him what he did, he'll say nothing or he can't remember. When I picked him up he was playing with a boy he knew from his CCD class so I'm glad he at least knew someone there. From there we went on over to the church for the 3pm mass. I wanted to make sure we got there early so we could get a good seat. We ended up sitting in the first row, right in front of Father Bill. I thought it would be better for the kids if they could see what was going on but I was kind of regretting it later. Shawn did pretty good but Joshua...it wasn't that he was bad in the crying/screaming sense but he's so loud. He's talking so much now and he doesn't know when to be quiet. Thankfully, Father Bill likes kids and always praises the families with little kids in church because that's where they belong. So I just repeat that to myself when Joshua is a bit noisy in church. He did do a few things that were actually kind of funny but embarrassing at the same time. He started singing after the song ended which Father Bill smiled at. Then when they were bringing the Eucharist in the church and the alter servers were leading the way with the candles, Joshua started yelling candle, candle, Mommy candle. I'm whispering in his ear that I see the candles and that he needs to be quiet like everyone else and then he starts singing happy birthday to you Cha Cha Cha and then pretends that he's blowing out the candles, lol. Then during the Veneration of the Cross, I think Joshua tongued the cross, lol.

I couldn't believe how packed the church was on Good Friday. There were tons of people standing. Father Bill made me laugh when he started his homily. He asked us "what are you doing here?" "NO, really, what are you doing here. According to the news, we should all be at the beach." It did kind of irk me when people made comments that everyone was making such a big deal about taking Good Friday off and that most people just wanted the day off and not to celebrate the holiday.

Tomorrow's going to be an early day for us. We are going to try to get to the 8am mass and I know we'll have to get there early if we want a good seat, especially after seeing how packed the 3pm Good Friday mass was. Then we'll come home and enjoy a nice breakfast. We are going over to my parents for dinner and will have an Easter egg hunt for Joshua, Shawn, Alex, and Aiden. I hope everyone reading this enjoys their Easter!