Category: Ages 0–3 (page 1 of 14)

Seek and Find: The First Christmas, by Sarah Parker | Little Book, Big Story

December 16, 2022 / 0 Comments

Seek & Find: The First Christmas

I am about to reveal one of my top-tier parenting secrets. Are you ready?

I never leave home without a deck of cards and a tiny tin of thinking putty. (And at least six different kinds of lip balm, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Many mid-sermon fidgets have been averted by that tin of putty, and many a restaurant tantrum has been defused by an impromptu game of War. For a full decade, we had either a baby or a toddler (occasionally both at once), so I became adept at keeping small hands busy whenever we encountered a lull.

For car rides or waiting rooms, here is my other secret: seek-and-find books. I Spy, Where’s Waldo, Things to Spot books—these are crisis-averters, road-trip-savers, Makers of Happy Hands and Calm Hearts. Though my daughters can manage most car rides without diversions these days, I still like to keep a few of these around, just in case.

So, how wonderful to discover a seek-and-find book for Christmas!

Each spread in Sarah Parker’s The First Christmas features a short, paraphrased passage from the Christmas story, accompanied by brilliant illustrations filled with things to find. From hanging baskets to the charming Ruth Wren, there are treasures tucked into these pages that draw our attention into the story and invite us to pause and reflect on what’s happening.

This book moves at a different speed than the typical picture book does: “Here is the story,” it says. “Let’s sit and study it together for a while.” I think that’s part of why these treasure-trove books keep appealing to my kids even after they outgrow other books meant for young readers. Seek and Find: The First Christmas invites them to pause and consider; to stop fidgeting for a moment, to settle. To meditate again on the humility of Christ, the God born as a baby.

Seek and Find: The First Christmas
Sarah Parker; Andre Parker (2022)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this for review, but I was not obligated to review this book or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

Easter is Coming, by Tama Fortner | Little Book, Big Story

March 25, 2022 / 0 Comments

6 Easter Books for Toddlers

As part of my “Hooray! We’re launching a book!” series—which celebrates the imminent release of Wild Things & Castles in the Sky—I’m pleased to invite you over to the Square Halo blog, where I got to share about some of my favorite Easter books for toddlers. Why toddlers? Because one of the chapters I wrote for Wild Things was all about toddler books. Maybe I took the assignment because my girls are all big now and I needed an excuse to break out the Sandra Boynton books again? It’s possible.

It’s likely.

That’s exactly why I did it.

But please, join me over at Square Halo today. You’ll find that post right here. May you find some exuberant and indestructible Easter books that will bless a toddler near you!

The Gospel Story Bible, by Jared Kennedy | Little Book, Big Story

July 16, 2021 / 0 Comments

The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible

In February I had the sort of realization I hate having: I had forgotten something. Last year swallowed up a lot of things, and as it passed, we noted and mourned a lot of those losses. But this loss bobbed to the surface one morning, as startling as a shark fin in a smooth sea: This was supposed to be Josie’s preschool year.

Preschool, in our house, is a small affair. But for each of our girls so far, this year before kindergarten has been the one where I make playdough from scratch at least once, introduce them to the alphabet, collect snails with them, read all those picture books I want to read with them, and occasionally break out the super-messy art supplies with nary a thought for our floor.

But we were well into February by the time I thought of this. All the upheaval of starting a new school year under Covid protocols and, well, just surviving and tending to everyone’s needs—it had shunted this thought so far to the back of my mind that I’d noticed its absence, something felt off, but I hadn’t been able to name it. That morning I got out my giant binder of preschool magic, assembled a bag full of books to read together that month, and I began making lists.

I am utterly, profoundly, abundantly grateful that God brought this to mind when he did. Josie and I still had four months together to read and play and make messes in the garden while the older girls were at school; she still had hours each day when she knew she had me to herself. And every school-day lunchtime we had our routine—not, as formerly, she eats at the table while I tidy the dining room around her or something, but: we sat down together; we read a Bible story and a picture book. We took our time over them. It was delightful.

And so Jared Kennedy’s The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible became the stem of our time together, with everything else branching off it. The readings in this book are short but honest and deep, and they ask great questions of us. Trish Mahoney’s illustrations (have I mentioned yet how much I love her illustrations?) represent some fairly abstract ideas in ways that make sense to young readers. They’re symbolic and beautiful.

A friend described this book as “The Jesus Storybook Bible for even younger readers” and I think there’s something to that. But though it works wonderfully for toddlers, it doesn’t work only for toddlers: Josie, at five, picked up on big questions and mulled them over as she finished her peanut butter and honey sandwich. As we read, I saw her putting down roots in the truths of our faith and learning to know God a little better for herself.

School is out now and our house is full again with the daily bustle of sisters. But those mornings with Josie still feel like a gift—one we savored then, and one we’ll continue to savor in the years ahead.

The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible
Jared Kennedy; Trish Mahoney (2017)

Courageous World Changers, by Shirley Raye Redmond | Little Book, Big Story

April 16, 2021 / 0 Comments

The Bright Light & the Super Scary Darkness

Last week we took a trip to a tiny fishing town on the coast of Washington. That first night in our borrowed beach house, my husband and I settled the girls into bed and, once they were asleep, reminisced a bit about the trips of our childhood: “Remember how when you’re a kid, you don’t know what any of the weird sounds in a new place are?” We laughed. “You don’t think, Oh, that’s just the refrigerator. That’s probably a branch of the apple tree against the siding.” Every sound is new and alarming. But we’re adults now; we know better.

The next night, we woke to an ominous hissing, popping, percolating sound, so loud it woke us from two rooms away. It came from the laundry room—from a gray tank in the laundry room, which looked very much like it was under pressure and could possibly, probably, at any moment explode. Had we known what the tank was or what the noise meant, we might have been dignified about it. Perfectly calm. But for about fifteen minutes, I drafted exit strategies in my head. How would I get the girls out of the house? Where was the nearest exit? Had we seen a fire station when we drove through town? Did this town even have a fire station?

The Bright Light and the Super Scary Darkness, by Dan DeWitt | Little Book, Big Story

We prayed for wisdom and, mid-prayer, the tank simmered down. And we went back to bed feeling all the unpleasant nostalgia of being a kid in a world where home appliances are hostile and every twitching shadow might belong to a mutant spider.

So much of our fear seems to spring from what we don’t know, and the night is filled with things we don’t know. In The Bright Light and the Super Scary Darkness, Dan DeWitt (The Friend Who Forgives) acknowledges that fear and explores the way that the Bible talks about light and darkness. “The whole Bible is really one big story about the light and the dark,” the young narrator explains.

Within that context, DeWitt shares the whole story of Scripture—the times when it seemed like the dark was winning, and the times that the light won. The book ends with a fun twist that reminds readers that though the darkness can be scary, it doesn’t have to be: after all, we know the One who is the Light of the World. Whatever darkness we face, whatever uncertainty, he has already vanquished it. And he will never leave us truly alone in the dark.

The Bright Light and the Super Scary Darkness
Dan DeWitt; Rea Zhai (2020)

Disclosure: I did receive a copy of this book for review, but I was not obligated to review this book or compensated for my review in any way. I share this book with you because I love it, not because I was paid to do so.

April 2, 2021 / 0 Comments

Jesus Rose for Me

In the decade or so since we bought our house, I have planted many things: rhubarb, periwinkle, strawberries, summer after summer of vegetables, even a few forsythia bushes. But a few weeks ago, I planted our first tree—the first living thing that may outgrow and outlive us.

I named him Pevensie, in honor of the apple orchard in Prince Caspian, and settled him into a pit in our backyard while two houses away roofers cussed theatrically over the thock, thock, thock of their hammers. It was all very romantic.

But planting a seed is always an act of hope, or at the very least of wishful thinking. We scatter wildflower seeds each year for the bees, and every fall we shake the poppy seed pods all over our flower beds (and driveway—our little ones mean well). We plant seeds in the hope that they will emerge in the spring, having bided their time and done battle with birds and rocks and frost. We plant an apple tree—which is, at this point, basically a large stick harvested from a very kind friend’s yard—and hope that it will weather not one winter but dozens. May it survive not a handful of birds but a hundred, coming year after year to bear its fruit away.

And so it is with Easter: a season of hope, in which all creation seems to participate, when the brambles and bare branches that seemed dead only a few weeks ago start running with sap and putting on buds. Outside and in, this is a time of transformation. So it is, also, with parenting: all these little conversations are like seeds sown in our children’s hearts that will, Lord willing, blossom and bear fruit years from now.

Jared Kennedy’s Jesus Rose For Me is an excellent little Easter-seed, meant for the soil of the tiniest hearts. Kennedy has slowly and quietly become one of my favorite current authors for children, as he writes in a way that explains tricky concepts so beautifully (more on his Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible in a separate post!). But this book is the Easter book I was looking for, all those Easters I spent years searching for a great book about the Resurrection for toddlers—not too graphic, you know, but not too fluffy either.

Jesus Rose For Me begins with Palm Sunday and ends with the Resurrection, and invites readers into the story of Holy Week. Trish Mahoney’s illustrations, too, are rapidly filling our bookshelves, as she brings a bright simplicity to each story and captures so beautifully some of the more abstract portions of Scripture with symbols that just make sense to toddlers. I believe this book is comprised of excepts from Kennedy’s story Bible, and each one ends with a discussion question. Those questions are, I think, where the tilling comes in: Josie loves these questions, and I love hearing her answers. As she talks, I can almost see the seedlings sprout.

Jesus Rose for Me
Jared Kennedy; Trish Mahoney (2020)

Category: Ages 0–3 (page 1 of 14)

Seek & Find: The First Christmas

6 Easter Books for Toddlers

The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible

The Bright Light & the Super Scary Darkness

Jesus Rose for Me

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