the most important story

I am very holiday minded as of late, and this week I got out Dennis' Fisher Price nativity playset and put it in the living room for him to play with when he's in there. This way, he has a nice playset in there, AND the camel and sheep and cow and donkeys that came with this set won't get lost in the toybox or end up mixed in with his farm playset, which is in his room. He knows the nativity set is in there on his table, and when he gets up in the morning he points to the door and says "go chair" and "table". He does love his table and chairs, a gift from Gran and Pop last Christmas that he has lately really grown up enough to use.

When he first sets up the nativity the way he likes it, usually the cow and camel get the stable and the other characters huddle outside. Today, though, I showed him the characters and told him their names and told him a brief version of the story. He struggled over Joseph, but can say "Mary" quite clearly, and does a decent job saying "Baby Jesus". He smiles whenever he looks at the baby. This afternoon, he was tired of my cleaning on the other side of the room, so he put Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in the creche and brought the whole thing over to me so that I'd play with him. The animals stayed behind. Usually the sheep gets top billing, but he was left on the table. And the camel and cow were on an excursion to the kitchen at the time.

Tonight at evening story time, I pulled down his Bible story book from Uncle Denny, a very nice gold-edged paper page book with beautiful illustrations that I don't keep down on the shelf where he could reach it. He's good to his books, but I don't want to take the chance of him suddenly deciding not to be. I read him the Christmas story, and he listened closely, and when we were done, I told him to go and pick out another book and I would read it to him. He went to the shelf of board books that are within his reach (after taking the first book back to the shelf--hooray!) and chose his board book of Bible stories. I read him the story of Moses, and when I finished, he grabbed the book and turned to the Christmas story. So I read it to him again, a slightly different version from the board book. I also let him spend some time 'reading' on his own, and he chose the same Bible story board book. The picture shows him really concentrating on it. I am beyond glad that he's so interested in these stories. I can't wait to take him to the live nativity this year!