This is a guest post by the fabulous Alicia from Alicia’s Homemaking.

My 15 month old has started frequently copying what I say and do.

I smile at his silly antics and half-formed words, but part of me is sobered at having a little someone watching everything I do. Learning from my every action, response, and attitude.

I’m sure I’m right there with the rest of you when I say that my deepest heart desire for my children is that they grow up as Jesus-followers. I want to train them in Biblical truth using every resource I can–but I know that who I am and how I act speaks the loudest. Every day my son watches what it looks like as mommy “walks with Jesus.” Am I the gospel in action to him?


My parents, I’m sure, asked themselves the same question when I was little. Now I know that their love for God has been the single most influencing factor in my life. How did I see the truth of Jesus most clearly portrayed in their lives as a child?

A few key memories:

Prayer. Honest, repentant, needy prayers. My mom prayed with my siblings and I daily as part of our homeschool routine, and my dad would randomly pray out loud as we went about our activities (which is very in keeping with his personality!). I watched my parents reach out to God for perspective and wisdom in the mundane and stressful parts of daily life. My mind also pictures my mom, dancing in the living room in worship to God…something only our child eyes saw.

They apologized. This was huge. Kids can sense when you have a bad attitude! The point of correction can be lost if it’s loaded with frustration. I remember multiple times when my mom would apologize for her attitude or for hurting us. It cleared the air and caused resentment to dissipate. Children are well-acquainted with their parent’s faults, so it spoke volumes when my wonderful, imperfect parents were genuine about their shortcomings. Jesus shone in their weakness (isn’t that encouraging?)!

They let themselves be inconvenienced to love others. We were watching and saw the behind the scenes sacrifices. As kids, we were oblivious to some of the cost, but not all of it was lost on us.

They loved each other. I always felt safe in the fact that my parents were together for always. Marriage is the living picture of God’s love!

My parents were not perfect. But it’s impossible for me to look at their lives and deny the reality of Jesus that they lived out in front of me.

Most people see the polished side of your life, but your children see the exposed underside.  Because they know you so well, your life lived honestly in joy and in struggle for God can be one of the most powerful truths they witness.

:: :: ::

Alicia is a tea-drinking, book-reading, sushi-eating, bread-baking, Jesus-serving gal who loves her family and all things domestic. She is a stay-at-home-mom to one squishy little boy, wife to her sweet Andrew, and she blogs regularly at Alicia’s Homemaking.

photo by Alicia

Vanessa is a regular contributor to Impress Your Kids. She is a stay-at-home mom to an energetic three-year-old, Juliet. They spend their days together reading books, attempting crafts, and occasionally beating tree trunks with large sticks. You can read more about their adventures at Silly Eagle Books

With Father’s Day approaching, I have been trying to get “ahead of the game” and have Juliet make a few homemade gifts for her daddy. (My usual trend is to wait until the night before and hastily throw something together!)

She can’t write yet, but she sure can talk. I decided to record some of her thoughts one afternoon in a “Thank You God for Daddy” poem.

I envisioned her sitting down with me and listening as I explained to her that God made a special daddy just for her. She would immediately be grateful and join me in a prayer of thankfulness for daddies…

That is not what happened at all.

Instead, she sat for about 2 seconds before jumping up and running away.

I yelled to her, “Why are you thankful for your daddy?”

“Huh?”

“How can we thank God for daddy?”

“Look! An airplane!”

Okay. Let’s try this a different way: “What do you like about daddy?”

“Oh. I like when he lifts me up!”

So, for the following ten minutes, as she raced around the backyard, I kept asking her what she liked about her daddy. She got more and more into it and gave me some memorable Juliet phrases. I scribbled them down on my piece of paper to be used later.

After she was in bed, I got on the computer and went to Wordle.net to create the card. If you’ve never used this site, it’s really easy. You just type in whatever words and phrases you would like to appear on your page and then it scrambles it and gives you different font combinations.

Since I wanted my card to read a certain way, I had to do a few things.

1. Words that you want to appear the largest need to be typed in multiple times. I typed in Thank You God for My Daddy at least ten times. (The words will only appear once, but the more “Daddy” s you have, the bigger it will be.)

2. Phrases had to be pushed together. I chose to separate the words with periods, but you could use dashes or some other symbol or even just let the words all run together without spaces.

3. After typing in my words and phrases, I hit the “submit” button and it gave me my first option. I didn’t like it because it read “My Daddy Thank You God” . I kept hitting randomize until I came to the option that I liked the best. You can print out as many pages as you like and even save your creation to a public page if you want to share it with the world.

Try it out! It’s really easy and you can play around with it until you get the look you want. It’s a fun (and free!) way to preserve your kids’ thoughts and cute phrases.

You could use it as a card or even frame it to make it look even more fancy–and hopefully, your gratitude/thankfulness discussion will go better than mine did!

(If you are looking for some good children’s books about daddies, I’ve compiled a Father’s Day Booklist that features our favorites!)

We’ve been praying with Juliet ever since she was a tiny baby. Every night before she goes to bed, all three of us get together and have a family prayer time. And although, we have made a habit out of this, the actual process we go through has evolved over the years.

When she was an infant, Ben would hold her in his arms and we would stand together and pray with her before placing her in her crib at night. Our prayers would always be about her and about how grateful we were to God for sending her into our lives.

As she began to understand and speak herself, we added praying for others to our prayer time–for our family members, friends, and Compassion children.

To help her get involved in the praying, I decided to borrow an idea from Ben’s family and also from some missionary friends of ours.

Ben grew up with the tradition of placing all the Christmas cards his family received into a basket and then choosing one card at every mealtime. The family would then pray specifically for the family on the Christmas card. Our missionary friends do something similar. They have family photos of all of their supporters and then choose one a day to pray for. My friend Kristi tells me that her kids really connect to the photos and are able to pray more specifically when they can see who they are praying for.

I wanted to make our prayer time more concrete for Juliet and also give her a way to feel like she was part of the process, so I searched for a box that would be our “prayer box.”

It’s an old cigar box that I had picked up awhile back and didn’t know what to do with it. It said “Julieta”, so I couldn’t resist! I thought it was beautiful and it is the perfect size for holding pictures.

Inside, you can see we keep photos of our family members, friends, and Compassion children. Every night, Juliet reaches in selects who we are praying for and then holds it in her hands as we pray. She LOVES it!

We have a lot of Christmas cards in the box and also a few birth announcements. For our family members, I tried to print out pictures of them with Juliet in the picture as well. This always makes her smile when she sees herself with Mimi or Poppy or one of her cousins.

Lately, our process has changed again. Instead of drawing a picture from the prayer box, we simply ask Juliet who we should pray for tonight. Each night, she comes up with someone new! She has grown out of the prayer box–as she no longer needs a visual cue to help her decide who to pray for. And she has even begun to chime in and add her own thoughts to our prayers!

And even though I am kind of sad to see it fall into disuse, I am happy to see my daughter growing and able to take an active role in our nightly prayer time. And I’m sure I’ll be able to find another use for that beautiful box.

What about you? How do you get your children to pray with you? Do you have any family routines or traditions?