It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Advent-Or is It?

Happy Monday, everyone! Today is the glorious feast of St. Andrew, the 141st birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery (the Google browser today has a wonderful animated Anne of Green Gables!), and the Monday of the first week of Advent. Whew! That's a lot of awesomeness for today! I want to drop a quick note here to talk about Advent. I love Advent, and there have been different awesome Advent traditions that my husband and I have picked up over the past couple years. But you know what? Right now, our apartment does not look like Advent, and I am okay with that. 

Nothing Like an Ice Storm to Start Off the New Year!

Happy New Liturgical Year! I hope that you all are having a lovely start to your Advent season, full of blessings and grace. As I mentioned the other day, my husband and I traveled to Kansas for Thanksgiving, and after some awesome games, discussions of politics, literature, & liturgical things, and much Emma Approved (I totally got my mom and sister hooked on it!) we drove back to Oklahoma on Saturday evening...to find that Northwest OKC had been visited by none other than Princess Elsa in our absence. 

And so I begin my Thanksgiving festivities by discussing the Avengers

Hello there, everyone! So Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and for the first time since high school, I will get to celebrate this holiday with immediate family members. For my 4 years of college, I had some great Thanksgiving experiences: a very memorable week-long stay at a convent (think: Maria Von Trapp at the convent in The Sound of Music. It was hilarious), a super awesome stay with a few friends at their grandparents' house, and some peaceful, relaxing celebrations with my husband in our apartment. I have to confess, though, I feel quite grown up because this year, we are visiting my immediate and bringing food. We're excited, but it's also weirding me out-I feel so adult now. Bringing food to a relative's house for a holiday just seems like a very adult thing to do. Since I need to go turn a monstrous bucket of dough into dinner rolls, I can't really greet y'all with a thought-out blog post. (I have a few of those in the works, which will make an appearance sometime) Instead, during this time of family, friends, and thankfulness, can we just pause and think about the Avengers?

"The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" vs. "Emma Approved:" A Few Thoughts on These Epic Shows!

Happy Solemnity of Christ the King!!! It's the last Sunday of the liturgical year-wow! It seems like this past year has flown by. Seriously, it's crazy. I'm still working on hammering out my "New Liturgical Year Resolution" for the coming year, and I'm thankful that I still have a few more days to figure it out! In the meantime, let's talk Jane Austen adaptations. Last Sunday afternoon, I began watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and within a few days, had breezed through all amazing 100+ episodes. Then, many of my good friends informed me that the same company created a series called Emma Approved, which is also quite spectacular. Yesterday, I finished Emma Approved, and I've been thinking about how these two shows are different, similar, and both amazing. So, let's talk Jane Austen!

On the Bookshelf: Mysteries, Vampires, Adventure, and Romance!

Happy Thursday, everyone! I hope that you all are having a splendid week. Lately, I've been a big negligent of this ol' blog, since I've been watching a little lot of Youtube lately. In the past 4 days, I  marathoned all 102 episodes of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and my life is forever changed! Okay, maybe not forever changed, but they were really, really good. In the days before I binge-watched this series, though, I was reading lots and lots of books. Seriously, even though the weather isn't that cold yet (50s-60s), it's a lot cooler than it was in October, so I just feel like curling under blankets to read all the time. So, without further ado, I want to share some of my recent library finds: 

Learning How to Live Without Stress in my (Prayer) Life

Hello, everyone! Today I'm linking up with the beautiful ladies of Tuesday Talk, and I'd like to discuss how I am a recovering Control Freak, and I now to achieve stress-free living. Okay, not really, but kind of. See, stress is super lame. Stress makes me exhausted, cranky, crazy, worried, anxious, overwhelmed, and a bunch of other things that health professionals have probably laid out nicely in a list. You can look all over the internet for self-help articles that deal with stress-free living, but I'm not going to head that route. Instead, I want to talk about living stress-free in connection with another area. See, there's another source of stress that people really don't talk about much: prayer. 

Submission to God's will (Mercy Monday)

Happy Monday, everyone! I've decided that, with the Year of Mercy rapidly approaching (it begins on December 8), I really need to get my act together and bring back more posts with St. Faustina's Diary. There are so many amazing chunks of epicness to munch on, pray with, and implement in our lives! Today, let's look at what God tells St. Faustina about following His will. 

A Sprinkling of My Life (Paris & Lebanon, Oklahoma living, and a whirlwind of grace)

Hello, everyone! The other day, after reading Christy's great post about blogging every day life, I realized that I don't do it enough anymore, in a flowing, stream-of-conscious way. So today, as I sit here on my couch, all sleep deprived and full of delicious food, I present you with some of my latest thoughts on life in Oklahoma, on the tragedy in Paris, and on God's whirlwind of grace. 

NFP and the Franciscan Order

NFP and the Franciscan Order? What can these two things ever have in common? 

It's totally fine if this question ran through your head upon reading the title of my post. In fact, maybe I am crazy, and the correlation only works in my mind, but not in anyone else's. After all, how can the followers of St. Francis, a poor man of Assisi, have anything to do with fertility awareness? As I've pondered this question more and more over the past couple days, I will venture to say that while the Franciscans may not have much to do with the fertility awareness of NFP itself, they can relate to how we speak about NFP. So I'm linking up with the ladies at Tuesday Talk to discuss this today! 

Giveaway Winner!

Happy Thursday, everyone! 

I want to congratulate Allison for being randomly selected as the winner of the Weeping Angel Doll in my recent giveaway. Allison, I sent you an e-mail with further information. 

Thank you so much to all who participated in the contest and to all my fellow Whovians out there. I love geeking out about Doctor Who and Catholicism, and it is such fun when others join me in this endeavor! 

I hope that you all have an abundantly blessed day! 

Why The Swan Princess is Amazing!

The other day, I spotted The Swan Princess at my local library. I grew up with this movie (I would watch it all of the time!) but I hadn't seen it in at least 3-4 years, so my husband and I ended up watching it on Halloween. Honestly, I had forgotten how much I love this movie. This 90s animated movie is considered a failure by many people because of its cliches, bad puns, song and dialogue failures, and because many people think there are far more superior movies. In fact, word is that John Cleese was offered a role in The Lion King, but declined and instead chose the role of Jean-Bob in this movie, because he thought it would do better-and I'm guessing that he regretted his decision later on! Nevertheless, I love this movie for the childhood nostalgia that it brings and for so many great elements. So, for all of you who love, hate, or haven't seen the movie, I want to share with you why I think The Swan Princess is amazing! 

A Grand Catch-All of Ingredients: Moving Day Cookies!

Hi there! When Laura, over at Life is Beautiful, mentioned a cookie swap for today, I got really excited. I mean, what can be better than a bunch of bloggers sharing their cookie recipes???? I went through some deliberation about what recipe to include, and I decided to gift you all with an original recipe that I crafted this summer. For all y'all who are new here, in June, my husband and I made the big move from Ohio to Oklahoma. As we prepared for our road trip, we were trying to figure out food. We gave some food away, but we still had some random bits of food here and there that we didn't want to throw away, and, since we lived in a college town where many of our friends were gone for the summer, and I wasn't sure who was around to take more food, I wanted to use up as much as we could. I love cookies, and I wanted something to snack on for the hundreds of miles that we would travel, so I decided that cookies would be a good route to take! Ergo, I created moving day cookies: a grand catch-all of ingredients from my kitchen. 

The Liturgical Year, Giveaways, and when the Holy Spirit and Lady Gaga work together (my late 7QT)

Hey there! Happy All Souls Day! I hope that you all are having a very blessed day and had an awesome weekend to celebrate the saints and eat sweets! Today I'm linking up with Kelly for some 7 Quick Takes. Yes, I know that I'm a little late, but as I thought about blogging today, I realized that the 7QT would be a great way to check in with everyone and tell you a lil' bit about my life as of late! So, without further ado, let's dive in!