#ScriptureDoodle

My 6 year old loves to color and draw.  She's always asking me to sit down and color with her.  As a working mother with three children, sitting and coloring is a luxury I rarely afford myself.

There's laundry and supper and essays to grade and diapers to change and an entire house to pick up.

And naps to be had.  I have to be honest.  I often choose napping over coloring with my oldest, as I'm just so tired from the week and need some rest.  Naps are the "me time" I give myself after nearly 6 solid years of no sleep and needy children.

In this new year I have decided to actually sit and color with my oldest.  How much longer do I have when she wants me to color with her?  It seems like a cruel joke that my kids all want and need me now when I have no time, but later in their lives when they're more independent and I actually have time, they won't want me to be with them at all.

They all want me to play with them, but they also need me to take care of 100% of their food, hygiene, cleaning, school work, laundry, lunches and everything else.  I just need someone, anyone, to be independent.  In my dreams, I could just say "Go color something beautiful" to my children and they (or maybe one of them?) would head independently to the table to color without complaining or whining.

That's just not how it works though.  If I tell any one of them to go color, they (or some of them) will demolish the arts station (5 minutes of Mama clean up work), accidentally drop all the crayons on the floor and under the couch (5 more minutes of clean up and crawling on the ground), and then begin to fight with each other (5 more minutes of refereeing), and then run with markers and sharpened pencils down the hallway attempting to shank each other (10 minutes of timeout).

My kids can find a way to ruin everything.  Seriously.  I tried to do the hokey-pokey with them the other day, and it turned into a gang fight between the three of them.

We are slowly reaching a better point, but it is taking a century.  Everyone who tells me that this time goes by so fast must not have been nearly as overwhelmed with life as I am.

Anyway, the new, more energetic and loving me of 2015 has decided to start all sorts of new things.  I'm going to play with my children more.  I'm going to color with my daughter.  I'm going to start sewing and blogging again.  Big plans, people.  I'm going to take the overwhelmed me and immerse myself in more efficiently overwhelming activities.  I will overcome these monster children and make them normal.

So task one is to color with my daughter.  To combine multiple of my dozens of resolutions this year, I bought a Scripture Doodle pack for kids.

This package contains colored pencils, Bible verse ideas, erasers, and a notebook to color in.  

 Ainsley and I immediately got to work.  We chose the Bible verse that was used for her Christian basketball program this week.  We talked about what it meant and which word within the verse was the most important.  It was so sweet.

Wrenn screamed the whole time because Mama was paying attention to someone else. 

We spent some time talking about capital and lowercase letters, spacing in sentences, and the intricacies of Bible verse notation.  It was just educational enough to make this multitasking Mama feel great about the fact that I wasn't finishing the giant pile of laundry or the 130 student essays waiting to be graded.  

I decided I had to do one as well even though I am not an artist.  I love crafts, but art and drawing are utterly out of my range.  We discussed what type of pictures would best show the sentiment of the verse and got going.  

Jesus knows if you just judged my artistic talent.  It's about the devotional, not the art people!  

 Durham did well playing on his own while this was happening.  Wrenn?  Not so much.

She thought her art supplies were substandard as was the level of attention being paid her.   

Here's her final project.  "Strength" was the most important word.  We covered the words in red to represent the blood of the cross and the strength Jesus must have had to die for us.  She added a person flexing muscles, a fist, and the Bible.  

Both final papers.  

 Our goal this year is to do one a week.  I look forward to discussing the verses and spending quality time with my artsy girl.

And don't worry about Wrenn.  She got quality time with Mama later.  Stinker.