I promise I am not teaching her Jesus was a blonde princess, but my daughter says: “It’s a Jesus pull-up!”
Here she is, with her Jesus pull-up in hand:
Tag: fathering
The Joys of a 7-Year-Old with a LEGO Store Gift Card
Grandma and Grandpa, this post is mostly for you. (Others: feel free to keep reading if you want.)
My seven-year-old son received a LEGO Store gift card from his grandparents. So we went on a Saturday morning to the LEGO Store to pick out a couple of sets. I’ve always been an indecisive shopper, and he showed some signs of that (how could you not?), but made a good decision that he stuck by.
One of the sets he got includes Batman and the Flash. Here’s his build of the Batmobile:
The best part is he’s been sharing quite nicely with his brother!
Here, by the way, is the set. Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!
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The LEGO Movie: The Essential Guide
We are big fans around here of The LEGO Movie. My then-six-year-old offered a review of The Official Movie Handbook and the Junior Novel. My favorite two parts of that interaction were: “Emmet…falls out of a tower that, like, goes past heaven,” and his description of Bad Cop as “a bad police.” (No, I’m the only one who watches The Wire around here.)
DK’s Essential Guide does a great job of covering the movie. It has colorful two-page spreads of the main characters (Emmet, Wyldstyle, Benny, and more), as well as sections like “Emmet’s Big Idea” and “Everything is Awesome,” so you can learn all the lyrics to the movie’s catchy tune. “To the Kraglizer” shows both Benny’s Spaceship and Emmet’s Construction Mech–you get to see not just scenes of the movie, but the sets as they are currently packaged and offered by LEGO now.
A two-page “Behind the Scenes” section closes the book with Q and A, including such questions as “How much of The LEGO Movie set was developed as real LEGO models?”
The book is a bedtime (and daytime) favorite with my four-year-old and seven-year-old. They keep coming back to it. It’s great for bedtime reading, because, although we can’t read all 64 pages before bed, I can tell the kids we’ll read three characters, which can easily keep us engaged for 10 minutes. There’s a lot to pore over here. (MetalBeard’s short “Guide to Pirate Speak” on page 47 was fun.)
Here’s a look inside The Essential Guide, from the publisher’s UK page:
Lots of entertainment is waiting to be had here–our DK Essential Guide to the Cars movie is a well-loved household item, now missing its fold-out insert (from so much love). The LEGO Movie: The Essential Guide is already similarly appreciated around here, though all the pages are so far still in tact!
Thanks to DK Publishing for the review copy, given with no expectation as to the content of the review. Find The Lego Movie: The Essential Guide here at Amazon (affiliate link) or here at DK’s site.
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From Scratch and Sniff Chip ‘N’ Dale to Jacob’s Travels
I had a “scratch and sniff” Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers Spanish-language comic book when I first learned Spanish in high school.
I know–I can’t believe I just started a post with that sentence, either.
Silly as it was, the comic was an enjoyable way for me to practice reading a new language. I kept it for way too long and only in the last couple years threw it out. (The “sniff” of the front cover had long since stopped working.)
I’ve tried to step up my efforts lately in improving my biblical Hebrew reading, especially as I preach through Genesis in church. My now seven-year-old son has at times joined me in our Hebrew-learning adventures, always at his request. Most recently we worked together to review EKS Publishing’s enjoyable and accessible First Hebrew Primer.
Og the Terrible may be the more apt Hebrew-learning comparison to my Spanish-language Chip ‘N’ Dale comic. Og appears in a series of adventures featuring Prayerbook Hebrew and a dragon. (Might the Jewish/Christian apostle Paul have said Og helped the Scripture to be fire-breathed?)
I’ve not read Og (yet!), but EKS Publishing has a series of Hebrew and English children’s books revolving around biblical characters.
The one at left–Jacob’s Travels–has been on our bookshelf for some time. We return to it on a fairly regular basis, sometimes reading the Hebrew text slowly, sometimes just reading the book in its English translation.
The back cover describes the book:
Jacob’s Travels begins and ends with Jacob encountering the Divine. This retelling of the story from Genesis, told in Hebrew and English, is a reminder of God’s constant presence in our lives. At a time when he feels most alone, this realization brings Jacob great comfort, inspiring one of the most memorable lines in the Bible: “Surely God is in this place and I did not know it!”
The translation is smooth and readable, with a more “literal” translation in the back of the book for those learning Hebrew. There’s also a glossary at the back for those who want to steer clear of the English and see how well they can do with just the Hebrew.
The book is probably better geared toward older children or even Hebrew-learning adults, as there is a high text-to-picture ratio.
It’s fun to read, though, and certainly more edifying than (no offense) the Rescue Rangers.
You can find the book here (Amazon) or here (EKS Publishing). EKS’s other children’s books are here.
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I Built Them a Sandbox
I built my kids a sandbox. 5 feet by 6 feet!
Here it is, before we filled it with sand.
The finished product:
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“Our Father,” As Prayed by My 4-Year-Old
Here is a recent recording of my four-year-old son praying the Lord’s Prayer. Gets me every time.
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How My 2-Year-Old Helped Me Practice What I Preach (or, Saying Psalm 23 Through Gritted Teeth)
My two-year-old gave me an unexpected opportunity yesterday to practice what I just preached Sunday. I noted in my sermon that I had been understanding Psalm 23 as a “counter-circumstantial prayer of defiance,” a “subversive prayer when you compare it to what you see around you.”
I mentioned some potential circumstances which make us feel far from the idyllic pastoral imagery of the Psalm, and then suggested that those are some of the best times to (defiantly) pray Psalm 23:
When you hear about wars and rumors of wars, say this Psalm.
When your best friend gets sick, say this Psalm.
When someone in your family grieves you by their seeming lack of care for you, say this Psalm.
When you don’t know what the next year of your life holds, say this Psalm.
An instance I didn’t think to include was:
When your two-year-old daughter draws with permanent marker all over the brand-new cork floor that the church graciously put in last year in the parsonage kitchen… say this Psalm.
When I noticed the damage, this image is about the opposite of how I was feeling:
I was feeling more like this:
For at least 10 minutes as I frantically scrubbed, I didn’t even remember there was a Psalm 23, let alone think to say it.
But then I took a step back (by God’s grace) and began to quietly say–through gritted teeth:
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he restores my soul….
And when my gracious and patient wife came home, she gently reminded me of the “magic sponge” we have under the sink that takes permanent marker off of everything. Within minutes, the green marker drawing on the floor was gone. Gone. The cork floor is good as new.
True, there are much darker valleys in life to walk through, but I think sometimes in parenting those little mini-valleys of frustration and exasperation can add up pretty quickly. And for us parents, they can be the regular “stuff” of our everyday existence. We need good Psalms to pray for the big valleys, and good Psalms to pray for the little valleys.
For those moments–should my two-year-old again somehow elude my watch like she has been so eager to do lately–I will try again (and again) to remember to “say this Psalm.”
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Consider the Snapping Turtles in My Road…
… how your heavenly Father provides for them!
We saw a snapping turtle crawling up our street this morning. We’d seen deer and turkeys in the yard (e.g., the turkey who was trying to make a nest in our raised bed tomato plants earlier this week), but this oversized turtle was a first.
After marveling at the creature with our kids and taking some family/turtle photos, my wife and I realized we had three options:
1. Leave it.
2. Call Animal Control to come rescue it.
3. Pick it up, put it into our wheelbarrow, and take it back into swampy, woodsy safety.
We ruled out Option 1. The backside of our house connects to a huge construction site, and even a large snapping turtle wouldn’t have stood a chance against a Link-Belt excavator.
Option 2 was easy—we called and left a message, but then realized a snapper was probably not super-high on the city’s priority list of things with which to be concerned.
So we were left with Option 3.
There’s a fine line between wise caution and being a chicken, and I had planted myself squarely between the two. It took me five minutes (maybe more?) before I could finally psych myself up enough to pick up the turtle to put it in the wheelbarrow. To help me over my caution/fear, my wife graciously offered to put a stick in front of the snapper’s mouth, so that it could be biting the stick while I picked it up, rather than biting me.
She gave him the stick. He bit it. Then I chickened out and lost my chance. (Or was being smart by trying to preserve all 10 fingers?) The stick was out of his mouth now. So my wife gently tapped him on the shell with the stick and… SNAP! All K-J fingers were still in place, but I jumped back. If I was going to do this, it had to be now.
So my fearless spouse tried the stick routine again, got it in the snapper’s mouth, and (with kitchen gloves on) I reached down and started to pick it up from the sides of its shell. SNAP! He missed me, but I knew he was going for me that time. I couldn’t even see his face when he snapped—he was all neck and mouth.
At this point we decided to stick with the aforementioned options 1 and 2. I was especially concerned that if I picked the turtle up and it snapped in/at my hands, I might jump away and drop him on the pavement. We didn’t want to hurt him.
But we had to get on with our morning, so, leaving the snapper where he was, I went to the assistant foreman in his trailer office behind the parsonage and told him about the turtle, so that he could tell his equipment operators to BE SURE NOT TO RUN HIM OVER (please).
His face lit up: “I have a guy who loves reptiles!” (He used a few additional adjectives and adverbs to make that clear.) Then he called across the worksite to someone in one of the new duplex units: “Bird!” A fitting nickname, I suppose.
With cigarettes and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in hand, “Bird” and a couple others came over to where the turtle had now settled itself. Without batting an eye, he gently lifted it up by the tail to see that she (I had had the snapper’s gender wrong) was settling into a leaf pile in our yard to lay eggs. The turtle must have known Bird was a “reptile guy.” There was no snapping this time.
Animal Control still had not come, but Bird said he knew a place where the snapper would be safe. Minutes later, Bird and his co-worker were driving away from the site with the turtle in their pickup truck—taking it now (presumably… hopefully!) to safety.
This all began between 8:30 and 8:45. I don’t know what mornings are like in your house, O reader, but that tends to be crunch time for the K-Js. We have to make sure everyone is dressed, fed, and pottied, and we have to make our eldest son a lunch and drive him to the bus stop. Then my wife and I each have various responsibilities and places to get to. So the morning routine can be stress-filled, try as we might to make it not be so.
This morning wasn’t too bad, but I was already thinking about all that I had to get done this morning… and then we saw the snapper in the road. As we finally got into the car with the kids to drive to our different destinations, it was 9:45, a full hour later.
But I can tell you—whatever had been concerning us at 8:45 was far from our minds at 9:45!
It hasn’t been that long since I read through, studied, and preached on the passage from Matthew 6 where Jesus tells his disciples to “consider the birds of the air.” If God feeds them and cares for them—animals that presumably have no souls and have not the spiritual and emotional capacity that we have to experience God’s love—how much more will he care for us!
And if God can somehow be overseeing a process whereby a snapping turtle is brought to safety by our new construction working “friend,” how much more can he make sure we have all we need?
Or, as a college friend used to say: “Everything is going to be alright forever.”
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A Frog as Big as a Dog
When my wife was reading to the kids tonight (from Ranger Rick, Jr.), she read, “A cane toad can be as big as a small dog.”
My response, from the other room was: “Gross!”
My six-year-old promptly corrected me: “No… that’s awesome!”
I suppose he’s right. The photo above is of a cane toad, which I have not had the privilege of seeing in person. (They’re not around these here parts.)
National Geographic has more here.
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First Ice Cream and Lyle the Crocodile
Yesterday was a momentous occasion: the first all-family ice cream outing of the summer. (Shhh… it’s summer in my mind.) We did the almost-impossible-to-beat triumvirate of
ice cream
park
used bookstore
At the used bookstore, we got a hardcover edition of four Lyle the Crocodile books bound together (sewn binding, mind you!) for a mere $5.
Tonight we read the first one:
In The House on East 88th Street, Mr. Primm, Mrs. Primm, and their son Joshua move into a new house, only to find a crocodile in the bathtub. They’re even more shocked when–as they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of it–it saunters down the stairs and starts doing tricks for them.
It’s a funny and well-written book. We’re looking forward to reading the rest. Highly recommended #kidlit!
Words on the Word 