I subscribe to Family Fun magazine. And love it. I read each page with oh-my-goodness-why-didn’t-i-think-of-that and always say, “We are SO going to do that.” And then we never do. So. I have decided to challenge myself to do at least one craft or activity from Family Fun every month.

Today we made this adorable Curly Bird. I wouldn’t say it was exactly a quick craft as we had to measure each piece of paper before we rolled it. But it turned out so cute that Lydia has been making nests and food for her new little pet. She wants to make a whole flock.

Plus, our little curly bird is a good reminder that God has his eye on the tiny sparrow and each one of us, too!

“Aren’t two sparrows sold for only a penny? But not one of them falls to the ground without your Father knowing it.  He even counts every hair on your head! So don’t be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows. Matthew 10:29-31

PS: Don’t forget about our Alphabet Crafts ebook giveaway!!

Let’s join in the DIFO Project #3 World’s Largest NERF Party! {I’m going to look for some more age-appropriate Nerf Toys that my boys can use to join in the fun!}

Valentine’s Day is for the Birds at Today’s Housewife {really late for Valentine’s Day – but you could use any shape for these fun bird seed biscuits!}

Rag Bracelet…all grown up! from It’s a HodgePodge Life {something fun for us moms!}

Creamy Tomato Soup with Asiago Croutons from A Virtuous Woman {I just had to share this – yum!}

At the Heart of Homeschooling from Simple Homeschool {a wonderful, centering post for those who homeschool/are thinking about it}

Easy Recipes for Natural Homemade Cleaners from Simple Organics

Our Imperishable Wreath by Tsh at (In)Courage {Tsh was also inspired by the Olympics this week!}

Have you found Positive Parenting 365 yet? {I went back and read all the posts I missed from the beginning of the year – fabulous!}

Photo from We Are THAT Family

Lately Lydia and I have been cooking while Asa takes his first nap. I am not a cook by nature. My dad and brother are the chefs in the family. They love food and understand how it works together. I just follow recipes. I was recently introduced to once a month cooking (also called batch cooking) and since then I have started cooking dinner during breakfast or lunch, making hundreds of pancakes at a time or cooking 12 chicken breasts at once just so I can freeze them and have easy meals for the rest of the week!

So the last few days Lydia and I have made a shepherd’s pie, crustless mini-quiche and meatballs. As we’ve spent this time together I’ve learned a few things…

1. Matching aprons are best. Lydia and I have several different aprons but Lydia’s favorite are the matching “Mommy and Me” aprons. I love that Lydia wants to match me. It’s such a reminder to be worthy of imitation.

2. Cooking teaches obedience. Lydia wonders if she can stir a certain way, pour as much as she wants or handle a knife. She’s learning to obey the recipe, trust my knowledge and be meticulous in following the rules. This is a double lesson because the results are always good!

3. I’m turning my daughter into a homemaker. Making quiche and browning ground beef doesn’t seem too exciting. But I’m planting small seeds of being a home manager, a caregiver and a woman who loves her family. Yesterday we were at a bakery and she said, “Mommy, you could learn to make bread. Then you could teach me and I wouldn’t have to come here [the bakery] to buy bread when I’m big!”.

4. Cooking teaches confidence. Lydia may only be breaking eggs or stirring something that doesn’t even need to be stirred, but when we pull a delicious meal out of the oven, Lydia believes she made it by herself! When we eat that meal and her Daddy and I rave about it, she glows! I could just cook by myself and tell her she’s too young to help. But instead, I’m giving her confidence and showing her that she can do anything!

I want to be purposeful in every area of my parenting. Cooking with Lydia has brought another dimension. It’s helped me realize that everything I do with her makes a lasting impression. I’m determined to lead my daughter on a path that will honor God—be it with a craft, a story or a crustless mini quiche.

Respectfully submitted to the fabulous Finer Thing Friday by Amy.

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?

Sewing and Embroidery For Kids With Dollar Store Shelf Liner from Filth Wizards {how easy, frugal AND super cute!}

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Cupcake Party Train at Coco Cake {makes me want to have a book party!}

Flat Emelie and Matt by Moda Bakeshop {oh. my. cuteness.}

Making Shirts {more} Girly by Casa Camancho {what a great idea for all those too big t-shirts we have!

Pancake Recipes: Carrot Cake Pancakes and Whole Wheat Blueberry {pancakes are the new breakfast of choice around  here! i bake a double batch and freeze them for the rest of the week!}

Adventures In Odyssey {listen online for free!}

Exhort: to incite by argument or advice : urge strongly : to give warnings or advice : make urgent appeals.

If you were to start a new series on your blog that you would hope to use to encourage yourself and others, I would exhort you to start with a simple word or idea – I do not recommend starting with teaching a 4 year old and a 2 year old about exhortation.

… let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds (Hebrews 10:24). As parents, we are continually exhorting our children – encouraging, urging forward, teaching our little ones how to love and do good deeds.  Even if we don’t think we are exhorting, we are – I think it’s a natural part of teaching those we love.  We love them, and we want them to love and to do well and to do good things, so we exhort!

Teaching our little ones to be exhorters themselves can be difficult.  I think Elias has a gift of encouragement – he is always telling people how well they are doing and exclaiming over their abilities/attempts/activities.  But I think the natural self, even if gifted with encouragement, has a hard time exhorting.  I mentioned last time how Elias encourages Donovan towards trouble instead of away… wanting to do “fun” things that are not allowed (jumping on beds, throwing balls in the house, etc.), so he delights in Donovan’s lack of self control as he does those things Elias knows he shouldn’t.  Tattling is also a part of this…  when a child comes to “tattle” on another, he is missing his chance to exhort the other to do good.

We have punished Elias for egging his little brother on and for tattling, but we have not exhorted him to exhort Donovan on to good deeds.  That has been our first step.  I think I will also be making a chart (see Amanda’s posts here and here) to help him see when he has the chance to exhort to good deeds or disobedience.

And after starting off with a quiet bang, we quickly fizzled out on exhortation crafts.  That’s OK, though.  Mulling over it for a while and continuing to talk to the boys about it has helped me to come up with something that I think is really fun, and we’ll add to it with each character trait we study…

Introducing “God Wants Me To Be… a book about Christian character traits,” by Elias and Donovan!

I cut out a LOT of pictures of people from magazines, and with each trait we work on, we will copy the trait, definition, and Bible verse into our book, and the boys will select what picture(s) they think illustrate the character trait.

Here is a picture of a little girl telling her friend how to love and do good deeds!

At the end of The List we will have a book of 51 verses that tell us how God wants us to be.  These are similar to the other verse “posters” we’ve made in the past, and I’ve wanted to bind them all up into a “book,” too – perhaps we’ll have a couple of volumes of verses that the boys will be able to look back upon for years to come.

What do you think about your role as exhorter?  How do you help your children encourage others?

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.

Amanda really spoke to me with her post about making time to craft and play with your kids….  Unfortunately, it has taken me almost a month since her post to make the time!  Sickness, birthdays, more snow, and everyday living took over here for a while.  I wasn’t picking times or topics – I did pick some brains, though, and I sure did pick up!  Spring cleaning got started with the putting away of Christmas decorations and hasn’t stopped.

Look at what I found while picking up!  My fridge – hey, it’s white!  Buried under the family pictures, children’s drawings, delivery menus, and football schedules were some wonderful resources that I forgot I had (Wise Words for Moms found here).

How could I have forgotten this sheet of paper?  It was just given to us during our parenting class last fall….

I remember thinking that it would be awesome if my sons had all of these “Christian Character Traits,” but wow, that seems like a lot of work!

Ehem.  Remembering again why I am here with my sons, the paper was moved to the front of a clean(er) fridge, and has been staring at me for a couple of weeks until a light bulb went off in my head.  Here is my topic!  Granted, it’s huge… and intimidating, but so is parenting, if you really think about it {{shudder}}.

The List is 51 character traits with simple definitions and Bible references to help… It’s in alphabetical order, but I’m going to jump around a bit.  I hope to get really creative (hey – that’s one of the traits!), and sometimes I might do two traits together (“neat” and “orderly” seem like they go hand in hand to me!).

We start with “Exhorter – Definition: Urge others towards love and good deeds.” Hebrews 10:24 (NIrV) says, “Let us consider how we can stir up one another to love. Let us help one another to do good works.”

In our house right now, we have a lot of exhorting going on… to jump on beds, throw toys in the house, disobey in whatever way a 4 year old big brother wants his 2 year old little brother to get in trouble…

So I drew a simple picture for each of the boys – one boy running to do “something” while the other speaks LOVE to him.

While we colored, we did a bit of role playing (Elias and I did… Donovan colored away while I prayed that this is soaking into his heart, too)… “What is your brother going to do?” “Run away!”  “What are you telling him in this picture?” “Go away, Donovan!”  “Well, look at the ‘words’ coming out of your mouth? Are you saying nice things or mean things to him?” “…nice things.”  “Great! What kind of nice things are you saying?” “I love you, Donovan!”  “Wow, that is nice!  Now, Donovan is pulling all of Mommy’s books off of the bookcase… now what nice things can you say to him to help him do good things?” “Donovan, don’t do that – you’ll get in trouble!”

We colored and talked some more… we hadn’t done any role playing yet with Elias, but I think it did work really well.  I also substituted some words in and out to help explain what “exhort” means.  The Bible versions I used (NASB and NIrV) use the words “stimulate,” “stir,” and “help” – I also used “urge,” “encourage,” “tell…” all interchangeably.

So this is a start.  Not the most creative start, but sometimes we just need a start of some kind…

My friend Christine from Dates to Diapers is challenging herself to make a craft every day this week with her kids. (And this is quite a feat considering she has six kids and she homeschools and runs a hugely popular blog!) To help her out, I’m guest posting about a fun winter craft Lydia and I did this week. Your kids will love it. We have the dyed fingers to prove it!

Check it out and if you don’t already read Chrsitine’s blog make sure you click and get to know her. She’s fantastic!

I have avoided the Big Green Bear for a long long time. When Boz first came out several years ago, I said, “Honestly, Christian Companies. Can you be slightly original? Big Green Bear. Big Purple Dinosaur. Please.” I passed Boz over for Veggie Tales or well, anything.

Fast forward to Christmas. I get a big box of products* from Mom Select and the companies with which they work. They asked me to blog about any or all of it. (And I’m pretty sure they wanted me to do this BEFORE Christmas so people could buy this stuff for, you know, Christmas gifts. Alas, this is my life.) Anyway, inside this box was a set of BOZ DVD’s.

One of which was A WowieBOZowee Christmas. Already I’m rolling my eyes. But I pop it in and my TV-lovin’ daughter is spell-bound! She laughs, she sings, she interacts! Even my huh-is-the-tv-on 1 year old was watching it! And as I started watching it, I knew I was right–annoying green bear who giggles too much, little kids that love him, parents that don’t think it’s weird their kids play with a big green bear and really, not a lot of Bible stuff going on.

But as I sat through the whole show (and the second DVD: Thank You God for Bananas, Bubbles and Busy Bodies), I started to get it. Boz and the kids were just playing in the snow, or having fun exercising or making a veggie pizza—all things you’d see on Playhouse Disney or Nick Jr. any time of the day. But interspersed would be little phrases like, “God made all these fruits and vegetables to make our bodies strong!” OR “I love all the different seasons God made!”

It is exactly what we try to do here at Impress Your Kids: “talk about [God's Word] when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

The two Boz episodes we watched were examples of how to incorporate God into normal every day activities. There were a few more obvious Christian parts, of course—the kids pray before bed/dinner in every episode and Boz ends the show by saying, “God loves you!”

After watching both shows, I clicked over to the Boz website and read a little more about the philosophy behind the show. One of their main goals is to show “healthy family interactions with Mom and Dad (and even Grammie and Grampie) [as] an integral part of the kids’ everyday world”. I LOVE THIS. One of my pet peeves about kids’ programming is the lack of parents! Or if there are any parents, they are complete morons. So, this is refreshing to see a show with parents who love their kids and kids that respect their parents.

Not to mention the website is full of lots of fun online activities for the kids (including clips of the show) and printable parent-kid activities/lesson plans!  Plus, Boz is hooked up with MOPS. And last but not least, Boz is produced by Exlaim entertainment who made the best Christmas DVD ever: The Very First Noel.

So. I guess I’m eating crow. I like Boz. And I might even buy another DVD next time I’m at the Christian bookstore.

*I was given these DVDs. I was asked to blog about them. The fact that they were free to me in no way affected my post or my feelings about the product.