Five Favorites

(I had this started in the draft file before the Boston Marathon tragedy.  It's trivial and fluffy, but I'm putting it up here anyway.  My prayers are ascending with everyone else's.)

Doing up the favorites with Moxie Wife and coterie, where you can also find eleventy jillion other bloggers' favorites.  That's a lot of favoritism.

ONE

This post by Betty Duffy is the standout of my weekly reading.  Maybe the month.  I have read it several times already and shared it on Facebook (which I usually never do).

I'm excerpting quite a bit here, but only because it is particularly resonant with me these days:

"Our culture cannot decide how it feels about new life. On one hand, people want children on demand, whenever it’s convenient, with in vitro and fertility treatments. On the other hand, people want abortion on demand, anytime, anywhere, no restrictions. Kids are either a malignancy to be avoided, or conversely, something you must want desperately.

There is no longer any room to allow children to happen, to receive them graciously, and to care for them because it’s the right thing to do. Culture demands that women make a choice between loving motherhood or hating it. And if you choose motherhood, you had better throw yourself into it with massive gusto, because it was your own silly decision.

 . . . . .

I refuse to fall into the trap of either fetishizing or denouncing the vocation of motherhood. I choose to be detached from the ridiculous ways people mischaracterize the Church’s teaching and those who follow it."

Do yourself a favor and read the rest.

TWO

And Simcha Fisher's piece on the Gosnell trial is a very close second.  Her research is fantastic, thorough, and utterly appalling.   It's everything the pro-life movement has been saying for years.  

Read that one, too.

THREE

This has become one of my favorite pictures since pictures were invented.

Rob was getting the baby to chat and laugh, so I grabbed the camera to get a shot when Sally photobombed them.  What I got was a beautiful picture of two of my babies and the way they adore their daddy.

Leave it to Sally to photobomb in the best way possible.


FOUR

And this photo is a close second this week.

Rob got called in for a delivery early Monday morning and he never made it home until after the kids already left for school on Tuesday.  (Everyone was fine, just a long time coming.)  He was relaxing on the couch, watching some television to unwind, and Fiver crawled up there with him.  

My favorite part of this picture is how their heads are exactly the same shape.  Genetics don't mess around, my friends.

FIVE