A first devotional

"You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise." Deuteronomy 11:18-19

I love this Old Testament instruction on how to teach our children about God. We should be in constant communication with our children about who God is, what He is doing in our lives and world around us. Through the book I'm reading, Treasuring God in Our Traditions, I'm realizing that this takes planning. If I do not plan these discussions with our children, the result will be the same as unplanned alone time with God.....a series of forgetfulness, busyness, then a realization of my lacking and a cramming session to make up for lost time. This is not what I want to teach Adler. I want him to see God as a part of our every day life and I want to be better at having this mindset too.

This morning, instead of turning on the news, I decided to try a short devotional for Adler while he ate his breakfast. I have found this is usually Adler's best time to learn new things like "touch down", "how old are you?", "where's your hair?". I did a search online to try to find a toddler geared devotional. I was surprised to discover there isn't much available on the subject. I'm sure there are books in stores and such, but I didn't see anything geared specifically for parents who want to lead young children (under the age of 6) in daily devotion. (if you know of anything, let me know) However, I did come across this website Bible Study Planet which had a long list of Old and New Testament devotionals on different study topics. They were definitely geared towards older children (scripture followed by questions and activities like crossword puzzles). Yet the on the first page was drawing depicting what was happening in the study scripture (which could probably be printed off and colored by older kids). We started with the first study which was Creation. There was a scenic picture of mountains, sun in the sky, trees, water, and birds. The correlating scripture was "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind,
and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good." Genesis 1:25 Adler felt like a big boy looking at my computer and discussing what was happening in the picture. He quacked when we talked about the bird. Afterward, we said a short prayer thanking God for all He has made. It was a quick, but I think that is probably the best place to start at this point.

Anyways, still feeling this out, but thought I would share my first "real" attempt at devotional structure in our home. Let me know if you have something that works for your kiddos!

The picture is from a doctor's office visit from yesterday. As you can see, he wasn't too happy about it: