Good Morning!

For 5 weeks now, I have worked hard to have breakfast with the kiddos on the weekday mornings. We are diligently trying to stay in a routine and this school year was finally the year that I broke down and started waking the kiddos up at a regular time and having breakfast together. It has made a huge difference in my motivation to continue the routine and set aside some special time for devotions and scripture reading. For many years, we did a regular "journal time" in the evenings where we would sing together, do a scripture reading, and have a story time. Now that Garratt is involved in evening activities a couple of nights a week, we have just moved most of the stuff to breakfast time. I miss the journal part (where the kiddos draw a picture of something from their day and write about it), but we'll just have to squeak it in somewhere!
After realizing how terribly expensive breakfast cereal is, I've been trying to prepare something for breakfast a couple of times a week. It has been rewarding to listen to their comments of how nice it is to wake up to the smell of scrambled eggs and toast. This particular morning, it was a bit nippy in the addition and so hot chocolate sounded good and poppyseed muffins are always a hit around here.... some apple slices added to the mix and voila, a satisfying breakfast! Each child gets their "day" during the week to sit next to me (I'm thrilled that that is somehow a privilege and not a punishment!) and to pray before breakfast and to pick out which story we will read out of the devotional book. Mondays = Garratt, Tuesdays = Shaeanne, and so on. On Friday (if we didn't have to make up a day that we got off the routine and ate breakfast whenever we woke up), the person that helps the most before breakfast gets to have the honors. It works for us and adds a little bit of fun to the mix.
For the devotion time, we have been reading from "Five-Minute Devotions for Children...Celebrating God's World as a Family" and they have been excellent. We were blessed with 2 copies of this quite durable, spiral-bound book, so the person of honor for the day was also able to hold their own copy of the book and read aloud parts of the story (or in Weston's case, get first crack at the questions at the end of the story). We enjoyed learning about the patient penguin, the teacher Mama bear, and the selfish cuckoo bird. We just finished the book on Friday, so we will begin "More Five-Minute Devotions for Children" on Monday. If you live nearby and want to borrow one or both of our copies of the first book, you're welcome to. We've had many days when we'd encourage each other on how they were acting like the animals that we had studied that morning.
Have a great day, y'all! :)