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!)

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, everyone!  I have not one lick of Irish in me, but green is my favorite color, and I love the story of the real Saint Patrick, so let’s celebrate!

First of all, you need to know the story of the real Saint Patrick.  I’m sad to say I did not know a thing until I watched Lutfi’s Fanciful Flannelgraph from the VeggieTales – Sumo Of The Opera DVD.  I love Lufti and his little flannelgraph – you need to see this!  It gives you a nice synopsis of Saint Patrick’s story in about 5 entertaining minutes that you and your kids will love!

Once you see it, go grab some paint and some potatoes, because we’re going to make shamrock potato stamps that will help illustrate the Trinity for our children – the same way Saint Patrick used shamrocks to illustrate the Trinity to the Irish.

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Using a pencil, outline a shamrock shape (3 leaves only for the illustration!  a 4 leaf clover won’t do!) onto half of a cut potato.  Then use a paring knife to carefully carve away the outline – I only cut about a quarter of an inch away below the design, and it was plenty.  Give the kids some paper, some paint, and let them stamp away.

Did you know that Saint Patrick used to be associated with the color blue?  Since blue’s a favorite in our house, we used it as well as the traditional green.

As the boys stamped, I sang a simple little song that I remember from way back – sung to the tune of “Are You Sleeping”/”Frere Jacques”:

By the time we finished stamping, Elias was singing along with me.  I used the shamrock to show him how God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are three different things, like the leaves on the shamrock, but they are all a part of the one God, like the whole shamrock.

What a wonderful example Saint Patrick has given us – not only the illustration of the shamrock for the Trinity, but also of his heart for those who do not know the Lord!  I pray that we all might follow his example.

How about you – are you and your kids doing anything fun this Saint Patrick’s Day?

Disclaimer:  I am a part of Amazon.com’s affiliate program, so if you purchase items from Amazon.comthrough the links in this post, I will receive a small affiliate payment at no additional cost to you.

Submitted to We are THAT Family’s Work For Me Wednesday!

With Valentine’s Day approaching, I have been trying to choose books about love for my daughter, Juliet, and I to read together each night. I want her to know how deeply and unconditionally I love her and also how God’s love for her far surpasses my own great love.

As I looked at our shelves the other night, The Runaway Bunnyby Margaret Wise Brown jumped out at me. “That’s perfect!” I thought to myself. We’ve read this book a million times before, but we’ve never had a conversation about how God loves us as unwaveringly and as fiercely as the mother bunny loves her little bunny.

If you’ve never read the book, it begins like this:

“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.”

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.” If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

The story continues in this way with the little bunny coming up with another and yet another thing to turn into and his mother responding with how she will chase after him and find him NO MATTER WHAT. It’s a beautiful story of unconditional love.

As I thought about the picture of love presented in this book, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the love stories of the Bible such as the book of Hosea, the story of the prodigal son, and the greatest love story of all: Jesus coming to earth and becoming human just because He loved us so much. No matter how far we ran from him, and no matter what we became, He was willing to leave heaven behind and give up His life because we are His children and He loves us.

I thought to myself, “This is going to be great! We’re going to read a great book together AND have a meaningful spiritual conversation!”

It didn’t exactly turn out that way. Here’s what happened:

As we began reading the story together, Juliet asked me, “Mommy, why is that bunny running away? and I said, “Why do you think he is running away?” and she said, “To join the circus!” (Towards the end of the book, the bunny tells his mother he will join the circus.)

I took this moment to tell her that I was like the mother bunny and that if she ever ran away, I would always go after her because she was my little bunny. She just sort of nodded and then we continued reading.

A few pages later, Juliet suddenly jumped up, and exclaimed, “I’m the little bunny!” and ran away. I put the book down and proceeded to chase her down the hall and tackle her in my room.

I again reminded her that I would always catch her because she was my little bunny. She smiled, giggled, and then announced, “I’m a butterfly, I’m going to fly away from you!” and ran down the hall. I responded with, “I’m a net and I will catch you!”

We played this spontaneous little game over and over again—she was a little bird; I was a nest. She was a lady bug; I was a little girl with a bug-catcher. She was a roley poley, and I was a pile of dirt. Again and again, she ran away from me, and again and again I caught her.

Then we sat down, finished reading the book, and got ready for bed. As I tucked her in, I said, “God is like the mother bunny, too. No matter what you do, no matter how far you run away from Him, He will always come after you because you are His little bunny and He loves you.”

And she said, “Hey. You have hair in your nose.”

So maybe we didn’t get the meaningful spiritual conversation in, (we did have a discussion about the benefits and purposes of nose hair) but we did make some memories and invented a fun, new game! Even though she wasn’t really ready to talk about God’s love for her, I think the seed was planted.

And like that mother bunny, I’ll keep chasing her down and telling her tirelessly about God’s love, over and over again. And the best part is, I don’t have to do it on my own. He won’t stop His pursuit of her either.

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.