Verses

           Much to the pleasure of the children my family devotional arrived recently and this week we have started our weekly family bible study.  Growing up, my Mom lead a family bible study a few times a week when we were young. Though as we got older, we phased out of "family" bible studies and became more involved with church group bible studies, I feel like that planting of the seed at home both opened up the doors for deeper family discussions later in life and encouraged a special closeness in my family. I hope to do the same for the mini Brandts. I did a bit of research and selected the Josh McDowell devotional. It's a 365 devotional, but we're just starting from the beginning and going forward. Some of the messages are a bit too "pre teen" for the kiddos but for the most part, they seem to be spot on.

           This week, we took turns reading verses and then each read the short story. This proved to be a mistake, as though  Branditos are great readers, they are not great understanders of punctuation pauses and such. Annabelle read the story aloud first, and when we got to the QA answers at the bottom, even I was a loss to exactly what I'd just heard. Heaven wanted to reread the story a loud and Gavin was forced to. In the end, I reread it aloud so everyone could be on the same page. Lesson learned.  Next week, Me or the Hubs will read the story aloud and the mini's will all take a turn reading the Q & A questions at the bottom aloud as well as the verses.

       Our lesson this week was from Joshua and had to do with making choices that please God even if they don't line up with the choices you'd like to make and not making choices just because of the choices someone else makes. Our verse for the week is a shortened version of Joshua 24:15. We will be reciting it before dessert nightly. I'm hoping reciting them nightly will help them to "stick" and hopefully by the end of the week they will be able to recite it totally from memory.