Naming Ceremony

The guests of honour, chatting it up before the ceremony.
I'm pretty sure I overheard Patrick saying:
"... and then I TOTALLY body slammed the guy!" 

As I said in the previous post, one of the biggest August highlights for me was the naming ceremony.  It started out as an inkling of an idea that we thought would be nice for Juniper, and grew into a wonderful event to celebrate all four little friends who have spent so much time together in the last year: Juniper, Calla, Patrick and Isabella.  Unfortunately, Isabella was sick and couldn't make it, but she was there in spirit!

A lot of work went into pulling this off (mostly because of all the little things Clark and I decided to do for it), but it was well, well worth it.  For instance, here is a dress that I made for Juniper, front and back.  

The design is, of course, a Juniper bush.
I felted it onto the front after it was made.

Check out the pigtails!
Seriously, do you get any cuter than that?

So what is a naming ceremony?  Good question!  We basically just wanted to be able to celebrate the kids; to welcome them into the world, and into this wonderful little community that they have become a part of. Each family prepared their own special "presentation" of sorts for their respective child, and then we all did a few ceremonial things for the kids, and had some readings.  Here is a look at the program:

This is a picture of me explaining all of the ceremonial things we set up on the table.  We had Juniper incense burning, as a means of cleansing, purifying and protecting the physical and spiritual bodies, and banishing negative energies. Next to that was a sweetgrass candle, used to welcome in good influences. Each child was passed through the smoke of the Juniper first, and then the sweetgrass candle. Also, all three kids had their own special blessing stones. Each stone was passed around to everybody at the ceremony, so that they could bestow blessings or well wishes or positive energy or vibes, or whatever they wanted. The idea, of course, is that the kids will have these stones for the rest of their lives.

Sidenote: Kerry and Clark and I (and of course, Juniper and Patrick), went to Crystal Crescent the day before the ceremony specifically to let the kids choose their blessing stones. Juniper, however, found it difficult to stay on task.

Juniper's final pick

The day was absolutely gorgeous - sunny and warm and green and lush.  The kids were also champs - for the ceremony itself, the potluck afterwards, and then the extended hangout after that!  Here are a few pictures from the day:

Tawnya, Jeremy and Calla

Kerry, Kenny and Patrick

Our wonderful guests: Carroll and Stephen, Jane and Mike,
Kata, Bill and Barb.  My mom couldn't make it at the last
minute, but skyped into the whole ceremony from Newfoundland!

For anyone who actually took a good look at the program, you'll see that there was a "Tara, Clark and Juniper surprise".  Out of everything we did in preparation for the ceremony, this "surprise" was far and away the most time consuming, but I'm so so so happy it came together.  For months, Clark and I had been working on a board book - a story about the four kids and the adventures they dream up. We bought blank board books, and labels to stick in them. Then I wrote the story, and Clark did the illustrations, and we both filled in the colour.  It was way way way more work than we had even anticipated, but hopefully it will be one of those things the kids will be able to look fondly back on one day.  Here is an example of one of the pages - this is the Juniper example.

And that was basically it!  We had a scrumptious potluck afterwards, and then later that evening, we celebrated Barb (and my mom)'s belated birthdays with some ice cream and cake.

Juniper, relaxing with a hand-picked carrot, post-ceremony

Stay tuned - I'll hopefully have some random videos up before long!