Praying...
This was written by my sweet friend Lindsey, mother of three girls (two of which are twins). Love to hear ideas like this!
One thing that we almost always do with Emma (the twins aren't quite old enough yet) is to share prayer requests with her. They usually come from our SS class or from family members or old friends that have asked for prayer. This accomplishes several things. You have probably noticed that kids don't forget anything (even when you wish they would), so Emma always remembers our prayer requests and we pray for them together each night. It also opens up discussion when a prayer request is answered. For example, there was a guy in our SS class whose sister delivered a baby at 25 weeks. She was born on a Sunday and we prayed for baby Sarah every day that week. She died the following Sunday. Now, this was a hard one to explain that sometimes God doesn't answer our prayers the way we hoped, but as we adults know, that is how He works sometimes, so I don't think it is bad to learn it from the get-go. As a mom who pleads with the Father for the souls of my daughters, losing that child to death opened a window to talk about heaven and eternity and even death. Another example is that Emma gets really nervous when we start new things. So last year, leading up to the first day of kindergarten, we began to pray for 1 special friend in Emma's class that she could be close with, play with outside of school,... We got that exact answer on the first day when we found out that a girl who lives 3 doors down was in her class. We prayed the same prayer this past summer, and got the exact same answer via that same child. This child's father is a minister and she comes from a precious family. It was so good to show Emma God's hand in her life. Another tool we've used is Scripture memory. Our church is extremely Scripture oriented and Emma participates in Awana and our VBS focuses on Scripture memory. This summer's big verse was Joshua 1:9, which came in handy for a fearful child such as mine. We sort of tweaked it a little when we were in a new situation. At Emma's track meet, she was getting nervous so we said, "Be strong and courageous. Don't be terrified, don't be discouraged. For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you RUN or JUMP." We used that same verse at the beginning of the school year and said, "...wherever you sit in the cafeteria", etc.
