We started a very simple prayer when Noah was really little. It was an easy prayer for him to start off with when he didn’t have a big vocabulary. It has since become the first prayer that all our kids learn. Here is what it is now:
Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen.
Bless Mommy, Bless Daddy, Bless Noah, Bless Caleb, Bless Ian, Bless Eli, Bless Makaela, Thank you Jesus, Love you Jesus. Amen.
Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen.
My first “to do” was to find pictures. I also decided to add to the prayer and include all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and great- grandparents. Since John’s Dad recently got married I easily had pictures of Papa, Lenora and Uncle Chris. I also had some good pictures of John’s mom and one set of grandparents.
However, I thought I would give my siblings the chance to send me recent single pictures, so I didn’t have to crop them out of photos. I wish I could put on here the texts that went back and forth between me and 5 of them. I have to say my brothers are goofs! Thank goodness for iMessaging, or my texts would have gone way over this month! (Yes, we are becoming an iFamily with only one of my brothers and my parents not having iPhones.) We found out that my sister Mary Kate is the family FB stalker. She had the majority of the pictures for the “older” kids. Thanks to Mary and pictures from Christmas I finished it up for the most part. I still need to get pictures of one John’s sets of grandparents; other than that the book is finished.
I found at Wal-Mart little photo books for $1.00. They had words on the front like “Hope”. I just added a label to cover it up.
I also set up a Word Doc that had a page size of 4x5 and started putting my pages together. One thing I kind of messed up on was the number of pages the book would hold. The books have 12 pages, but their front to back so technically that’s 24. For Eli’s book I was thinking 12, so I made the pictures smaller and had less pages. But it works, because I can add other prayers to it. Since he is older and is already learning other prayers. On Makaela’s book, since I came to my senses, I made our immediate family pictures larger- 1 person per page. I still didn’t fill the book up, so maybe I’ll add some more extended family.
I found online a PDF that actually showed a kid Making the Sign of the Cross step by step to put in the book. I love the visual.
I am pretty impressed with myself. It was such an easy project and the kids seem to love it!!! The older ones have asked when I was making them one. I’m a little hesitant to make them one just because we have all kinds of Children Prayer Books that they already use.
Since I originally wrote this blog post, Makaela and Eli took their books to church this past Sunday. It was nice to see Caleb helping Eli say his prayers before church. That is until Makaela got upset thinking they had hers. She was in a MOOD! Eli flipped through the book, through mass some. Makaela did the same and also ripped the front of the book a little as she decided to stick her hand in the pocket of the cover. She also dumped a few pages out. I tried to put the pictures back in and again she got upset, until she realized I wasn’t taking it away just trying to help. Since she was in such a mood, she didn’t spend too much time in the pew. We did have a sweet moment after communion, she pointed at the pictures as I whispered the prayer in her ear. Then we were finished and her attention was done.
On a whole, the prayer books have been worth the time it took to make them. I guess now I have to start thinking about the big boys’ books.