Category: Ages 0–3 (page 2 of 14)

Easter is Coming

I’m used to feeling like an oddball during Lent—fasting privately and aware, perhaps, of a few other friends from church who spend the weeks leading up to Easter forgoing good things and meditating on what is in us that made the cross necessary. We gather at church on Sundays and sing the “Kyrie Elieson”—”Lord, have mercy upon us”—while our neighbors go about their spring-time business.

But last spring, I saw grief, fear, and uncertainty in the eyes of our neighbors, cashiers, and teachers (as they passed my daughters’ school books through the passenger window of my van). We all felt it: This is not how it’s meant to be. Something has gone horribly wrong.

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

This spring is, already, gloriously different. Last week I took my daughter with me to the store for the first time in a year. We had dinner with vaccinated family members—indoors, not around the firepit in the driveway. The neighbor I’ve brought groceries every so often told me that she’s almost clear to do her own shopping, and I wanted to cry and hug her right there in her front yard.

Crocuses, snowdrops, chickadees—they’re all going about their usual spring business, but I want to beam when I see them. They are still going! We are still here. We aren’t finished with this pandemic, of course, but we’ve made it this far.

And Easter is coming.

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

Tama Fortner’s picture book is full of movement, color, and light—it captures all this perfectly. Beginning with the beginning, Easter is Coming follows the story of Scripture from the garden of Eden onward and shows how every chapter of the story points to Jesus’s resurrection—and how even our chapter, now, points back to it.

I am a little in awe of how she manages this—in a board book, no less!—but she succeeds beautifully in showing how Jesus’s death and resurrection is the climax of all Scripture. Wazza Pink’s illustrations give the story texture and a lovely sense of abundance.

We are not out of the woods yet, I know. I know. And it’s tempting to believe that a “return to normal” is the thing our hearts truly long for. But Easter reminds us to set our sights higher: whatever comes next, the cross is behind us, and Jesus’s resurrection is finished, for our sake. The next time we see him will be his true return; he will set all things right. Easter is coming!


Easter is Coming
Tama Fortner; Wazza Pink (2019)

The Promises of God Storybook Bible

From our house sometimes we can smell the ocean. We can’t see it—it’s a few blocks, a bluff, some train tracks, and a smattering of industrial buildings away—but when the wind hits the water just right, that salty, seaweedy smell whisks up the bluff to us. Whoever smells it first turns into the wind, smiling. The rest of us know what that means.

Those moments lift the roof off our little world and remind us that right over there, behind those houses, is an ocean. While the girls ride shrieking down the street on their bikes, and I wrestle with a stubborn weed and wish I had a sunhat and maybe a hacksaw, the ocean ebbs and flows out there, just beyond the bluff. I may not like swimming in it, but I have gone out of my way several times during quarantine to go park somewhere and just watch the water. I like to be reminded that it’s there.

The Promises of God Storybook Bible, by Jennifer Lyell | Little Book, Big Story

So it is with a good story bible: sometimes a good one zooms out to just the right distance, allowing us to enjoy a single Bible story while still whisking in that breath of salty, sea air and reminding us that God always works at something bigger even in the smallest stories.

The Promises of God Storybook Bible is just such a story bible. Jennifer Lyell has taught preschool kids for decades and knows how to tell a Bible story winsomely. But she also links each one to the promises God made his people and traces, throughout the book, the big story of God’s plan for our redemption. She arranges God’s promises like plot points and shows how God answers those promises throughout Scripture (curious, though, that his covenant with David didn’t make the cut. I wonder why?).

The Promises of God Storybook Bible, by Jennifer Lyell | Little Book, Big Story

We gave this book to Josie, our youngest, but when we read it aloud to all four girls we found that the tone was perfect for our six- and four year olds, but the discussion questions seemed to fit everybody. I was so grateful for this book during those first months of quarantine, when we needed more than ever to be reminded that God is still keeping his promises, whatever it looks like from our vantage point, in this moment. He is still present, even when we can’t see him, and sometimes he sends us small reminders and we lean into the wind, smiling.


The Promises of God Storybook Bible
Jennifer Lyell; Thanos Tsilis (2019)

Seek & Find: Old Testament Stories

We’ve read many, many picture books in our twelve years as parents. But the books our readers and pre-readers alike tend to pore over and explore most on their own are the ones with detailed illustrations filled with lots of things to find—I Spy; Where’s Waldo; the Usborne Things to Spot books. These books combine play with very short stories (sometimes shown only through the illustrations) and allow kids to see books as something to be explored as well as read.

Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories | Little Book, Big Story

Sarah Parker’s Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories combines this style of book with eight Old Testament stories, written for the youngest readers. Each double spread drops readers into a single scene in the story and gives them a key full of things to find in André Parker’s delightful illustrations: ten white dandelions, five heavy hammers, two wooden wheelbarrows, and so on. The front of the book introduces additional things to find in each story, including a little wren who appears in every single one.

Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories | Little Book, Big Story

If you’re looking for in depth re-tellings of each Old Testament story, this probably isn’t the book for you. But if you are looking for an interactive way to introduce a child to some of the Old Testament’s Greatest Hits—especially if you’re looking for a great way to discuss some of those stories with a young child—look no further! Seek and Find gives little ones plenty to explore and search for while they listen to some of the greatest adventures in the Old Testament.


Seek and Find: Old Testament Bible Stories
Sarah Parker; Andre Parker (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.

Love Made

When reading a picture book about the creation of the world, one doesn’t expect to make it a third of the way through the book before God actually creates anything. But Quina Aragon’s book Love Made spends the first part pages looking not at what God has made but at who he is. He lacks nothing, but lives in perfect joy; he is three in one.

Love Made, by Quina Aragon | Little Book, Big Story

This language banishes the Far Side image of God at a drafting table, compass in hand, and suggests a God so exuberant, so perpetually filled with delight, that his joy spilled over “into what we call creation.”

Love Made, by Quina Aragon | Little Book, Big Story

Aragon is a spoken word artist as well as an author, and her words leap and soar and spill over the page, with a rhythm as fun to read as it is to listen to. Scotty Reifsnyder (Exploring the Bible) captures that same bright energy in his illustrations, making this book a treat to read to the littlest listeners (but don’t be surprised if bigger ones drift in to listen, too).


Love Made: A Story of God’s Overflowing, Creative Heart
Quina Aragon; Scotty Reifsnyder (2019)

Little Seed: A Life

This weekend the rain stopped for two full days and the sun shone down on us and we rejoiced. All day Saturday, Mitch and I shoveled compost, and in the evening we took ibuprofen and warm baths. Sunday, again, I went back to work with my sidekicks, and I sowed flower seeds while they waged lightsaber battles among the garden beds.

February puts a spell on us: a dreary, it-will-be-like-this-forever spell. But the first sunny weekend, when the weather is warm enough to play outside without a parka, puts an end to that. No, we realize, the gray won’t last forever! Blue sky is still up there, above the clouds. The sun won’t always filter through them but will, one day, shine directly upon us.

And so, to celebrate that glimpse of the sky above the gray clouds, I want to share with you a springy book—one we’ve had for so long and that I love so much it shocked me to learn I hadn’t shared it with you yet.

Little Seed: A Life, by Callie Grant | Little Book, Big Story

Little Seed: A Life is a board book, following the life of one little seed. Gardening metaphors are some of the best I’ve found for the Christian life, and Callie Grant takes this one and tucks some profound truths into a beautiful, simple story.

The book follows Little Seed as it is plucked up and carried and dropped and buried and seems to lie still for a time. But, Grant reminds us, God gave the seed everything it needed to endure the winter and prepare for spring. Reading this story with a preschooler is great fun, because they’re two steps ahead of you: I know what’s happening! It’s growing! The mystery to them is: What kind of seed is it? What kind of plant will it become?

Little Seed: A Life, by Callie Grant | Little Book, Big Story

But as an adult, there’s much to savor, too, and that makes this the best sort of children’s story. The seed goes through death to bring life to others; even in the bleakest place, God still provides for it; the seed’s faithful growth sends out a flurry of new seeds. These are the things I love thinking about as I tuck echinachea and valerian seeds into the soil: death, for the Christian, yields life. And our long wait, beneath a closed gray sky, will one day end. The birds remember, and they sing about it. The bulbs know, and they herald spring’s coming.

During Lent, we, too, remember and wait for the Light to pierce those clouds. Little seeds, he is coming!


Little Seed: A Life
Callie Grant; Suzanne Etienne (2014)