Squealing with delight

I have hit a point in my life where I realize I'm more than easily amused with little things.  When I got home from picking Ellie up at preschool I was thrilled to see that the mail truck was on my street.  With the quantity of books and things that I review for many places, I never know what treat might be in my mail box.  Some days there's nothing good (unless you count junk mail and bills as good mail), other days I'll find a new book and other times there will be a coupon for a store I frequent or a package containing an order I recently placed for something.  Today was a coupon for The Children's Place and a big box from The Catholic Company.

I think The Catholic Company likes their customers to feel like Christmas has landed on their doorstep.  Unless I've ordered just a book or some coloring books, my orders from them always arrive in nice big boxes.  If you have kids you know how prized a box can be.  Ellie was just as excited as I was because the box was something she wanted to commandeer for the purpose of coloring it.  If I'm going to tell you about my nice big box I might as well tell you what was inside right?  Well, there was some paper packing material which inspired me to bag up all the recycle paper that was taking over my garage.  Gotta love a company that prods you out of the sin of sloth and procrastination with their method of packaging, right?  Then there was some highly coveted bubble wrap.  That stuff was worth fighting over when I was a kid, but now that it's far more abundant in my household, the kids just get excited when I toss it on the floor and tell them they can have at it.  This of course, was after I had jumped up and down on it a few times to see if I could pop the bubbles. (I'm delightfully entertaining to watch if you ever have the opportunity to observe me in my natural habitat.)  The cheap bubble wrap will pop under your feet when you pounce on it, but the good stuff takes a little more force than my poundage can dish out.  Ellie happily scurried away with the bubble wrap after I gave it a few good jumps and didn't manage to yield any popping sounds.  It was the good stuff, ugh!  Then I moved on to the real reason the box was delivered to my house, the contents.

Nicely nestled inside the box was a First Communion Missal for my best friend's daughter.  I laughed to myself that I knew it would be vintage as soon as the new translation of the missal is implemented.  I'll just pretend I didn't know it was coming when I brought the gift.  That works, right?  Then I paged through the Baltimore Catechisms (1, 2 and First Communion) that I brought for the kids.  I'm fed up with the fluffy text books our parish uses for the religious education program and have decided that I need to just teach the girls at home.  I'm mostly excited about these books because I see it as the perfect way to make sure my kids know their faith and don't wind up being disinterested and uninformed Catholics like their dad.  The bargain hunter in me couldn't resist buying an Advent wreath that was on sale.  We didn't have one, unless we count the toilet paper one I made for my CCD class, so I decided to order one so I'd have it for this year.  Bryan will just LOVE it. (Don't touch that last sentence, it's dripping with sarcasm.)  And, because I haven't had enough of Lent, I also picked up a nicely reduced copy of Lent and Easter in the Domestic Church.  I came across a blog post during Lent where a family had used this book to do a Stations of the Cross craft that I really liked.  I decided that I needed to get a copy of this book.  I paged through it and found lots of great ideas.  I'll be sure to try out some of the activities and crafts listed in this book for next Lent.  Poor Bryan is probably going to curl up in a ball somewhere and try to hide next Lent.

Anyway, the bottom line is I'm tickled pink with my recent purchases.  The combination of getting books that exceeded my expectations along with my out of season bargains is enough to keep a smile slapped on my face all day long.  I shared my enthusiasm with Bryan via IM and there was no response. He's probably hoping if he ignores me and my exuberance over more Catholic stuff being imported into our home that maybe I'll forget about it.