Our spring fund raising project was making homemade baklava to sell at the Annual Chocolate Festival which is held at the Washington Avenue Armory. Whereas some events are rained out or snowed out, this year’s festival was "sunned out". The event was held on Saturday, March 20th. Now, the middle of March is usually blustery and cold and often snowy. This year it was 70 degrees outside. People were wearing shorts, riding bikes, and cooking out on the grill. Attendance at the festival was down almost 75% from last year. Needless to say, we had baklava left over. So we sold it for Easter as well. Our thanks to the great baking crew who made over 1400 pieces of baklava, to Felia Kondoprias for her tutelage, and especially to chair person Tina Karlaftis and her trusty sidekick Dean, for all their hard work. Everyone who purchased the pastry raved about it. (The instructor for our senior exercise class bought a six-pack which her husband devoured. He praised it as heavenly, but left not even a crumb, so she had to come back for more.) Good work, girls!

Many thanks to our women who helped with the many special Lenten and Easter preparation: Dolores Bachandouris and Maria Patelos for chairing the Epitaphio collection; Maria Sokaris and crew for dying the Easter eggs; Angeline Thomas and Pia Lascaris for chairing the decorating of the beautiful Epitaphio for Good Friday; and Colleen Nelligan and Maria Patelos for the Agape Fellowship.

The month of May is a busy month with Festival preparations, outdoor events, and college graduations. It is also the month where we set aside one day of the year to honor mothers. It is important to recognize that there are two meanings for the word mother. There is the noun which describes a woman who has given birth to a child. Then there is the verb "to mother" which describes the act of nurturing and caring. A beautiful example of this action verb was Mother Theresa, whose hard, gritty commitment and caring for orphaned children in Calcutta is to be admired and emulated. We, in our St. Sophia community, have the best of both worlds. We have women, who as mothers, have loved deeply and cared for their children. We also have women who as a nouna, an aunt, a sister, a friend, a teacher or a mentor, have also loved deeply and cared for children. This caring for children and this love for children constitute part of the foundation of our religious and ethnic background. It is love we observed and learned as we were growing up. It is agape in practice. This kind of love is more than pretty words. It involves work. It involves hard work, selflessness, frustrations, and even mistakes along the way. But, there are many joys and the reward comes from seeing the "child in progress" growing into adulthood and becoming a person of substance and worth in world at large.