On Saturday, the Healy's celebrated the onset of autumn (some week and a half earlier) by traveling an hour west to Goebbert's Pumpkin and Farm Market. For parents with grade school age kids, and for others who want to enjoy plucking your own pumpkin right off the vine, I highly recommend Goebbert's. It's an eighty-cent toll on I-90 (one way) and five dollar per person-over-1-year admission (Sofie was free, though technically was over a year). But the weather was great. They have some great cider and (of course) pumpkin pie, with some other more substantial goodies. We found some great pumpkins. And Sofie just loved the petting zoo. Especially llamas. She also was enamored of the chickens and goats. Sofie didn't care so much for the bunnies. (Daddy mentally scratches that item of the future family pet list.) Being out on the plains, though the weather was comfortable in the city, the breeze was pretty nippy on the farm. Bring a jacket or windbreaker.
Sunday we were back at All Saints. It was convocation Sunday, or, in other words, the annual parish meeting. What an amazing parish we go to. We are very, very fortunate and blessed. Half our membership added in the past year were infants. (By the way, for all you evangelicals out there: Trust me, this is a good thing.) In fact, ten percent of our membership is under two years old. (Sofie, when she gets baptized, would make it twelve percent.)
The convocation, as you might imagine, went quite long. Sofie only lasted a short while down in the nursery. So we brought her upstairs with the rest of us. She did pretty well, in terms of noise, but literally walked a path in the carpet through all the chairs and around Father's podium. She didn't seem to disturb too many people, so we just sort of coralled her away from the stairs and let her go. If I may be so bold: this is a quintessential sign of our parish--we are a family, and little children wandering around during a mandatory and official parish meeting doesn't cause very many of us to bat an eye.
In fact, there was one moment which pretty much sums up our parish. While the Sunday School superintendent was talking about the past year and our needs (which have more to do with finding space than volunteers or class members), Sofie decided it was time to go up to the iconostasis. She just about wandered through the Royal Doors, but Anna deftly stopped her. At which point Sofie decided to venerate the diptych of the Annunciation which adorns the Doors. Sofie kept wanting to go through the doors, which Anna was holding shut, so I came up and grabbed her up in my arms. As we passed the icon of the Forerunner, Sofie leaned forward to venerate the Saint. So I brought her up to the icon, and she kissed it with a resounding smack.
How's that for an advertisement for Church School?
Posted by Clifton at October 4, 2004 11:06 AM