Sunday School on Friday - Jesus and the Children

This week we read the story about Jesus receiving the children from our little Bible.

I love this story, and it's a great way to remind children of how much they are loved - by Jesus, and us too!

We sang "Jesus Loves the Little Children". And I made some quick little flannelboard figures to tell the story:

M loved this! We left them out for a few days and I found him a couple of times doing the story on his own or telling it to Daddy. So great! It probably helped that I made it sound like Jesus was really angry about the children being kept from him. "Hey you better stop that! I LOVE children, I'm NEVER too busy to tell them I love them!!" said in a gruff voice. ;)

Unfortunately when Daddy came home, M said "Leave me alone so I can think!". Oops. I think he may have gotten that from me. This story was a good reminder to me to be more patient and to always take time to let M know I love him.

He also did this little puzzle I made for him:

The tutorial for making these quick little puzzles is here.

That was all we had time for on Friday (it was my 10 year wedding anniversary!), but we did a couple more things throughout the week.

One day, I put these little clips on the flannelboard figures:

And we played with them like this:

We just basically retold the same story, but this little difference made it a big deal to M again and he had a lot of fun moving them around on the table instead of on the flannelboard.

Then we painted a cute coloring page I printed off from somewhere (sorry, I can't remember, but there are a lot of good free coloring page websites out there). The idea was to paint it, then rub the back with oil to make it transparent and then make it into a suncatcher. Well, it didn't turn out like I hoped, so I will spare you a picture of the end product. However, here M is painting it, and that was a lot of fun!

I hope this gives you some ideas of your own for bringing the love of Jesus to your little ones too!

Happy Friday! Have a beautiful day! :)

What an Honor!

Natalie at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns gave me two awards earlier this week!

I am so honored! :) I love her blog and make sure to read it every day. Her daughter and my son are very close in age and it seems we share a lot of the same parenting philosophies, which I love. I started blogging a little over a month ago and have already met so many great people.

First, this award:

The rules are I have to pass it on to 15 other blogs I have newly discovered and like to read. Well, I have a long list of blogs I enjoy reading, and I'll post the ones most newly discovered, but I'm afraid I can't come up with 15 right now. Most of the blogs I read are ones I've been reading for a long time. I'm not sure what the parameters are for "newly discovered", but I'm pretty sure it's not 2 years. :)

However, there are a few really great ones that are new (to me) that I will pass this award on to:

Learning Parade

Craft of the Day

Pink and Green Mama

The Bear Bunch

Superheroes and Princesses

My Two Happy Homeschoolers

All of these have great ideas and have been very inspiring to me as a mom of a toddler/almost preschooler. I love them!

The second award:

And the rules for this say I have to list 10 things about myself that you may or may not know. And THIS is the reason I haven't posted these awards yet. Sigh. I can not think of 10 things about myself that are even mildly interesting. However, I will give it a shot so I can mark this off my to do list. :)

1. I have been married to my husband for 10 years, and truly love him more now than I did on our wedding day (and I loved him a lot then!).

2. We suffered with infertility problems and several miscarriages for the first half of our marriage. It took us 6 1/2 years to finally have M, and even though he is almost 3 years old I still think about what a miracle it is to have him every. single. day. This is probably a little bit of "oversharing", but I'm mentioning it because I think sometimes I come across as bubbly and happy (and silly) and it can be a turn off to some people. I'm no stranger to suffering and grieving and I have grown in innumerable ways because of it. I just try to keep this blog as light as possible, but it's not the full "me".

3. I have an internet addiction. I can, and do, live without watching much TV, but I don't think I could manage if I didn't have my laptop.

4.I'm an avid reader, I'm always reading a book, usually 2 or 3 at the same time.

5. I drink a lot of Coke.

6. I left a very good, full time job to stay home with my son. And somehow I am much busier now than I've ever been before.

7. I love to play sudoku.

8. I love spicy, spicy, really spicy food!

9. I grew up in Montana, surrounded by mountains and sky. Now I live in Minnesota, where it's cold most of the year. We were cold in Montana, but somehow it wasn't so horrible to be cold there. (Can you tell I'm not a big MN fan?)

10. I'm double jointed. :)

I'm off to leave messages for the blogs I'm giving the award to. Have a good night!