Well, everyone, as our slow pace of blog posts might suggest, it’s been quite the busy semester here in Dublin so far! We’ve seen lots of exciting changes to our day-to-day schedule since we first told you what it is we do here in Teach Bhride’s newest community, so we thought we’d get back in the blogging game with an updated look at our typical week.
A “typical week” in our lives is, of course, no easy thing to describe – because there’s basically no such thing as typical around here! In the past month, our work weeks have included chaperoning a Notre Dame field trip to Northern Ireland, taking time off for holidays to London (for Sarah) and Cologne (for Angie), attending a concert with our national school’s sixth class, and even meeting over coffee with a founding member of one of our favorite bands, Celtic Woman. But, essentially, our week does follow a set schedule – and that schedule looks a bit different these days than it did in the fall!
Our Mondays still find us in O’Connell House from start to finish. We sit in on the OCH staff meeting in the morning, work in our House of Brigid office in the house during the afternoon – a new office this semester, above the chapel with freshly rearranged furniture and a brand-new House of Brigid nameplate on the door – and finish the day with coffee hour and weekly announcements with our Notre Dame students.
We’ve added one of our favorite new ministries to our schedule on Tuesday nights. After daily mass at Harold’s Cross in the morning and an afternoon of catechesis and sacrament prep at Harold’s Cross National School, we return to O’Connell House for Tuesday Time-Out with our Notre Dame students. This started at the end of last semester as a weekly night prayer for the students to opt into, and it has evolved this semester into a vibrant evening of Campus Ministry time, led on different nights by Sarah, Angie, our Campus Ministry intern Jack, and the students themselves. So far, we’ve had night prayer, guided meditation, a Lenten preparation session, and more. Tomorrow’s TTO, as we call it, will be particularly special – Fr. Gerry (our parish priest at Harold’s Cross) is coming to OCH to celebrate Mass for our Notre Dame students and the St. Mary’s women studying at Maynooth for the semester, who we’ve invited in for the night. Tuesdays are a late night for us, but they’re always fun!
Wednesdays and Thursdays look largely the same as they always have – mass, school visits, and choir rehearsal at Harold’s Cross on Wednesdays and full office days at O’Connell House on Thursdays. Thursdays this semester are particularly dedicated to the community-based learning (CBL) component of the Dublin Programme and often see us collecting journals from our CBLers or holding reflective sessions with them. Thursdays are our one day a week with normal 9-to-5 hours, and from the amount of 19 Kids and Counting watched in our apartment on Thursdays after 5 PM, we clearly take advantage of those nights! Fridays, too, are the same as ever: with the exception of ACE mass days, our dedicated day off.
The weekends have seen the biggest change to our schedule – we’ve taken charge of the music at a new-to-us mass on Saturday nights! We sing at the 10:30 and 12:00 masses on Sunday as always, but now we also sing at the 7:00 PM vigil mass on Saturday nights. This one is particularly fun for us, as we plan and provide the music on our own and invite our Notre Dame students to join us. At the moment, the leaving-something-to-be-desired collective piano skills of Angie and me mean that we do this mass a capella. But a great group of our students comes every week, and a few of them even sing along with us, making for a lovely little choir. After this mass, we take the students out for milkshakes at Eddie Rockets or, last week, when Eddie Rockets had a half-hour wait, to french fries at Burger King.
So, did you catch all that? If not, no worries: here’s a new and updated version of the Teach Bhride Dublin week at a glance.
