Like Father Like Son

I've started calling Jesse my little Bible scholar because one of his favorite things to do these days is flip through all the pages of his Bibles and "read" them out loud. It has been a daily occurence for him to inform me that he is going to his room and is going to shut his door and study his Bibles (just fyi in case you were wondering, James does not go in our room and shut the door and study the Bible...Jesse came up with that on his own). Sometimes he "sings" them out loud, too.  I think it all started when I began letting him listen to an audio version of the Big Picture Story Bible at naptime and bedtime instead of music.  I didn't know if he would really enjoy listening to it or not, but he has loved it.  Oftentimes I think he is asleep because he is so quiet, but then I go back to his room to find him just lying there and listening.

It is so amazing how much kids this age pick up from what they listen to. When I was reading his Big Picture Bible with him the other day I realized he had memorized quite a bit of it.  Last night James was reading to him out of it and was letting Jesse finish the sentences in the Bible.  When it came time for the list of Jacob's 12 sons, James stopped (thinking maybe he might get the first one) and Jesse quickly rattled off all 12 in the correct order.  We had no clue he was getting so much out of it.

If you haven't heard of the Big Picture Story Bible, I'll just put in a quick plug for it (it was written by our pastor and illustrated by a member of our congregation here).  While some of the bigger ideas are still over Jesse's head, I think it is simple enough for toddlers and preschoolers to understand and it does a great job of making the entire Bible one coherent narrative (instead of a lot of disjointed stories).  We also have children's Bibles that are mostly just individual stories, and those are great, too, for learning some of the basics, but this one really is wonderful about tying them all together.

One drawback to all this is that Jesse has picked up some not-so-nice phrases that I don't want him running around saying to people, so we are going to have to be more careful as we read. Some of the stuff you can't easily avoid unless you want to cut out entire stories from the Bible (like Jesse telling James that he wanted to put him in a pit and make him a slave...he did say it to be funny and was not angry, but still, it's not what we want him saying), but other things we will be trying to paraphrase in the future (like the part in the Jesus Storybook Bible where Goliath tells David that he wants to "rip off his head and have it on toast"...also something that Jesse decided would be funny to say to us but not something we want him to continue!).

Here Jesse is reading from "A Child's First Bible" but the words are from the Big Picture Bible.  Please excuse the nose-picking at the end.  Apparently we need to work on this. Oh, and the crazy voice at the end is the voice he uses when he pretends to be Goliath (he's kinda obsessed with that story right now and giants in general).



Here's Jesse saying the 12 sons.  Sorry his head is cut off in most of it.  I don't think James meant to do that :)



Here is some of Jesse's (monotone) singing of the Jesus Storybook Bible. For some reason everything he was singing began with "the day you...", as in "the day you built the ark" or "the day you find a tower", etc.