Toddler Tuesday - with Courtney

 

Ladies! I am so excited to have Courtney here to guest post today. We "met" each other a while ago and I have to say she is one of my best blog friends.  She is such an inspiration and I love reading and learning all about how she is raising her adorable daughter Abigail.  What I would really like to do is move in with her for a while and be taking notes all day on how she is raising such a great little girl! She has so much wisdom and we can all learn a lot from her.

 Well enough of my blubbering: here she is!

Hello Life On The Parsons Farm readers! My name is Courtney and I blog over at A + Life. Ashley and I "met" last fall after I read a guest post she published on Erinn's blog. We've been emailing each other ever since! I'm so honored that she invited me to participate in her new series Toddler Tuesdays and I hope that my post can be a blessing to you today!

  As I wracked my brain over things that I could share with y'all today, my thoughts bounced around to all sorts of topics. Food, sleeping patterns, homeschooling, discipline, etc, etc. But finally, I landed on this topic. Abigail is 3.5 right now and rapidly blazing past toddlerhood{does 3.5 still qualify as a toddler anyway?} so some of the toddler milestones we have already passed and truthfully, I can't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday let alone what I fed her 2 years ago. SO! Here we are. Something that we are 100% into right now.   I wanted to share with you some easy ways that you can incorporate Jesus into daily life with your little ones. I don't know about you, but I always feel like I need a guidebook to navigate the waters of teaching my daughter everything she needs to know. And while we have the Bible, there are some really big words that are just too far above her little head right now{goodness, and even sometimes above my own}. So here are a few ways that I've found to bring Jesus down to her level, to give her a chance to know Him personally, and for us to be able to worship together.   Jesus StoryBook bible  

The Jesus Storybook Bible is my all time favorite book that we own. It is amazing. It includes all of the best Bible stories and it brings them down to her level, but it doesn't edit anything out. I love that. But the best part? Every. Single. Story. points to Jesus at the end. There aren't any stand alone stories that are just...over. They all point to Jesus and spell it out for her so that she can understand where it is all heading.

This is a favorite for us to read while she is eating her lunch or before bedtime. She'll ask, "can we read my Jesus story??"

Youversion app and Sproutville app

Both of these apps are SO fun to play together and are absolutely free! I love that they are interactive and help her absorb a bit more of the stories she is listening to. The Sproutville app also has games and songs as well.   You'll be singing "I am the good shepherd" until kingdom come.     Christian Music   We love, love, love music in this house. There is almost always something playing during the day. Jim plays the piano and leads the worship at our small PCA church and I play the viola and play on the worship team. On top of that we usually have a radio station going. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I love almost any sort of music and we don't exclusively listen to Christian music in our house, but on particularly hard days or when we just need to get refocused and recharged, there is no better way than to put some of God's truth to music.   Pandora works okay for this, but I'm pretty picky when it comes to my Christian music. That being said, here are two of our favorites:   Sovereign Grace Music   Indelible Grace Music   You can stream most of their music for free straight off of their website or you can buy all of the albums{worth the money, for sure!} There isn't much that warms my heart more than listening to Abigail sing praises to the One who created her.     Weekly Chalkboard Verse

I made this chalkboard last year{you can read my DIY post here!} and have been using it to help us both memorize bible verses together. My hope was to learn a new verse every week, but eh, it's turned more into a new verse every month. Anyway, it's right by our kitchen table so we are able to read and recite our new verse at every meal time, which I love!     Letting Them Pray  

   There are lots of ways that you can teach your little one to pray. When we first started having Abigail pray, we began with memorization. The Lord's Prayer was where we started and then we incorporated songs of prayer: the doxology and To God the Father{the Christian doxology 1}. Then as she started talking more and more we have taught her to pray like this: "Dear Heavenly Father, [thank Him for at least one thing, request at least one thing], In Jesus name, Amen" We take turns praying throughout a day, with our meals, before bed, as a need arises.   We want Abigail to understand and learn that her greatest need in this world is the saving grace of Jesus. While we know that there isn't anything we or she can do to save herself, we pray daily that Jesus will continue to draw her to Himself and that by the groundwork we are laying of God's truth now, that it will prove to be essential to her salvation and Christian walk someday.  

Thanks again for having me, Ashley! I would love for you all to stop by my blog and say hello!

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Isn't she just the bee's knees?

 ♥ Ashley