Welcome to the RoL Pinterest Party. Normally we would link up and share how we made, cooked, baked, crafted, planned, organized, followed or created one of the pins on our Pinterest boards OR share something original that others can pin onto their boards.

This month we will be sharing our Lenten and Easter crafts, ideas, meatless recipes, posts and reflections.

Not on Pinterest? No problem. Link-up your own creation to inspire us so we can pin in to our own boards.

Don’t have a post ready? The link-up will be open until Easter Sunday so there’s plenty of time. Plus, feel free to link up a new post or an older post that hasn’t had much traffic lately. 🙂

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It’s hard to believe that Lent starts in a couple weeks! I saved all my items from last year and I actually remember where I stored them so I’m ahead of the game. 😉

I have been wanting to incorporate learning about the saints with the kids and I thought Lent would be a good time to start.

I purchased the Happy Saint flashcards and I thought they’d be perfect for a simple introduction.

Each week we will take one saint, read about them, and ask for their intercession that week. Week 1 we will start with A for St. Agnes.

I’d also like to order the Happy Saints Way of the  Cross.

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As for our other Lenten activities, we’ll be doing some of our usual family traditions. I am reposting them here for new readers.

I love putting wreaths and welcome signs on our door. For Lent, I made a simple Lenten wreath to mark the season.

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We have our regular family altar in the entryway of the house and that stays pretty much the same all year. However, we have a shelf in the family room by the table where we eat that we decorate according to the season. Here is where we keep our Lenten things.

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We set up a candle centerpiece using a long rectangular tray filled with six votive candles for the six weeks of Lent.

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I purchased tiny wreaths from Michael’s that fit around the candle. We add a wreath to a candle on each Sunday of Lent.

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We printed off Catholic Icing’s Lenten Calendar and I placed it in an inexpensive frame from Ikea. I use a dry erase pen to mark a cross on each day as it passes. It is great for the kids, who have no sense of time, to see how many more days until Easter.

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One of the kids favorite activities for Lent is their Act of Love and Prayer jars. The Act of Love jar has different things they can do each day such as share a toy with your sibling or be extra nice to someone at school or do an extra chore. The Prayer Jar has a special intention for each day. With our evening schedules, we have found our best prayer time to be before dinner since we are already gathered together. Since the altar is right next to our table, we light our candle, Brian leads us in prayer and then we chose an act and prayer intention for the next day. (The morning of the following day I remind the kids what our act of love and prayer intention is for that day.)

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This year we also added Kendra’s idea of using Sacrifice Beans. Every time the kids complete one of their Acts of Love or makes a sacrifice they put a dried kidney bean in the bowl. On Easter Sunday the dry beans are changed to jelly beans or some other treat. (I’m thinking a visit to the library or the Aquarium.)

UPDATE: Last year, this was the kids’ favorite activity. They loved collecting those beans!

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In case you think we are a holy family with heads bent in prayer, let me also give you a dose of reality. I also had to add a “prayer helper” of the day sign. When it comes to who gets to offer their prayer intention first or who gets to blow out the candle or who gets to choose the Act of Love that day, we have had the boys literally come to blows and screaming, which ends in me yelling at them and Brian sending them to their rooms for misbehaving. (Aw, peaceful prayer time.) Since they are used to having a “Student of the Day” in school so we took that same concept with the “prayer helper of the day.” The name rotates and we have greatly reduced the yelling and body blows. (Now if we can just get John-Paul to stop praying for things like “more Star Wars toys” as his prayer intention. 😉

Lastly we added our Stations of the Cross pictures to the altar. If we say the Stations of the Cross as a family, we follow this book The Way of the Cross from Magnificat/Ignatius. (Reality check: we actually have yet to do the stations. We’ll try again this year to do it at least once…)

Here are some other Lenten activities we will be doing as a family.

• Turn off the TV and the computer/iphone more. I have a basket of religious type books that the kids can look at or we can read together. I am also using the Lenten Adventure Activity Books from Holy Heroes, which are great! There are activity pages and coloring pages for the young ones for each day of Lent up until Divine Mercy Sunday.

• Visit Jesus – Make more visits to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Let the kids light a candle before they kneel and pray.

• Donate – Spring clean the toy box and donate toys they don’t use anymore to our local St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.

• Crafts – Make Lenten crafts such as one of these Resurrection Crafts. (Reality check: Yeah, this never happened last year. I’m not sure if we’ll do it this year but I’ll leave the link for you more creative moms. 😉 )

For more ideas for your own family, check out these sites.

• Lenten Calendar for Kids – Eyes on Heaven

• Liturgical Living at a Glance: March – Carrots for Michaelmas

• 40 Simple Lenten Activities for Kids – CallHerHappy.com

• Lenten Activities for Children – CatholicIcing.com

• 40 Ideas for Lent from Joe Paprocki

My final note – Don’t let the sheer number of activities available overwhelm you! Chose just one (or maybe two) things that your family can realistically do. It is better to do something simple and well, than to try to do too much and feel like a failure because you couldn’t possibly get it all done! (Believe me, I’ve learned that the hard way!)

Okay, that was my idea for the month. You can find me on Pinterest here – Pinterest.com/bobbi_rol

Does your family have a favorite Lenten tradition? A favorite meatless meal? Maybe you wrote a reflection about Lent. If you have a blog, link-up! If you don’t blog, share in the comments. We’d love to hear from you. 🙂

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Now it’s your turn!

1. Choose your creation, recipe or Lent/Easter related post and snap a photo if you can.

2. In your post, link back the original blogger/idea, rather than your Pinterest pin. That way credit goes to the proper person. 🙂 (But feel free to add your Pinterest profile link so we can follow you!)

3. Add a link back here so others can play along.

4. If you want to use it, here is the html code for the logo:

<a href=”http://www.revolutionoflove.com/blog/?p=2157″><img title=”Revolution of Love Blog – Pinterest Party & Link-up” src=”http://www.revolutionoflove.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/pinterest_2_medW32-300×240.jpg” alt=”” width=”300″ height=”240″ /></a>

5. Link up below. Make sure you’re sending us to your actual post, and not to your general blog address.

The link up will be active until Easter Sunday. Have fun!

PS – You can follow RoL on Bloglovin, Feedly or another news feed. If you are a social media fan like me, we can stay in touch through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, GoodReads, Letterboxd or Instagram. 😉

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