I am taking a break from posting about our weekly family Bible time to share with you what we do each weekday morning.
Each morning {for many months now}, we sit together in our living room promptly at 8:30am. We begin with Daddy reading from the Bible to us, and end with family prayer time. Although it rarely takes more than 10-20 minutes, I am so thankful for this time together and that I have a husband leading us like this. Yes it is wonderful, yes it is amazing, and yes it is difficult. I must be honest and keep it real, sharing with you the difficulties of doing this, while also sharing the great rewards.
If you notice in the shot below, you will see a few things…
- K’s less-than-enthusiastic face
- the boys sitting on pillows beneath Daddy’s feet.
These things are part of what I want to share with you. You see, keeping a daily Bible reading time with young children is HARD. I think the enemy sets out to just destroy this time {or at least drive us parents whacko in the process}. We have determined to not let the enemy win and remove this time, but oh it is tempting to just give up sometimes as it can be such a battle and often looks nothing like the dreamy picture I like to envision in my mind.
The pillows are there because of two highly distractible boys, especially in the morning, especially when being read to with no pictures to look at out of a big person book ;-). After many weeks of naughty morning behavior I began daily afternoon training with the boys to train them how to behave during our family reading time. During this training time, I had them sit on pillows {to give them a clearly defined space of their own}. They must criss-cross their legs and keep their hands on their lap. I set a visual timer {we have that exact one and I love it} for 5 minutes and they SIT. Each time they move drastically or make a noise, I move the timer back one minute. I made sure to do this right before lunch, snack, recess or some other thing they really wanted to ensure that the moving backward would be painful for them ;-). Within a few days it worked and they were able to sit still MUCH better.
For training time, I also read to them from Proverbs for 5 minutes too. We are still trying our best to remember to do this every day-I have yet to make this a concrete habit, although I am trying. When we began, we did 5 minutes sitting silently and then 5 minutes paying attention to me even if they had no clue what I was reading ;-). I also did lots of teaching and explaining to them about why this is all important. I certainly didn’t just do the training!
Morning Bible reading time has improved greatly but is still a struggle sometimes. Daddy does a good job of keeping the stories real for the boys, like he is doing here showing Krash how Moses lifted his arms up. He was sharing the part about how they would begin losing the war when Moses put his arms down.
Even below, you can see that Pac Man was a little done with all of this arm raising stuff.
Me having the camera out on this morning certainly did not help any. I did it so I could share with you here, but I will not be letting the camera distract this time again.
We know there will soon come a day when we all sit around the living room for morning devotion/prayer time and everyone is behaving, because they are older. We will remember these chaotic times with a smile-I am sure of it. We are trying our best to enjoy the moments each and every day-even the imperfect ones.
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