Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

I'm sure every parent has one of these stories, so I'm sure it won't be as funny to you as it was to us. Our pride is a bit injured, but the humor is still there as well. I hope you won't take it as sacrilegious, but rather as a 3 year old's play. Elisabeth has taken to repeating after us as we pray during devotions, and I was so impressed with her desire to pray. Currently we are going through Advent devotionals that have written prayers. Yesterday the topic was the new covenant and God writing his law on our hearts (from Jeremiah). Not a very tangible concept for a 3 year old. But we were trying. When it came time to pray, Elisabeth was in a wiggly mood, but that was nothing new. I tried to get her to hold still and fold her hands and stop playing with toys. She always was very interested in repeating after us phrase by phrase, but she seemed so distracted. I finally decided to begin. Here's how it went: L: Dear God, E: Dear God, L: we ask you to wr...

Getting Elisabeth up from bed seems to be a good time to get some interesting comments from her. One morning I turned the monitor on, trying to decide if she was awake or not, and it seems that I entered in on a little conversation between Elisabeth and her fawn, a stuffed deer. “I like sleeping in my bed too. Oh, said the fawn.” I wish I could’ve heard more of it. Asking her about it brought no further information. A few afternoons later when I went into her bedroom, she sat up in bed and with earnestness in her voice said, “Mommy, I have a plan for Absalom so he wouldn’t get caught in the tree: maybe he could go around the tree.” Elisabeth has often turned to the page in her Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes and asked me to read the story of Absalom. It always makes me sad to read it and I tell her that it is a sad story. I didn’t realize that she had been thinking about how to save him. Perhaps if she knew the earlier events in the story she would have a few other solutions for his...