No Noah for Baby

George and I are very fortunate that our cultural differences are obvious. Since we do have such obviously different pasts, we don't take for granted our backgrounds and assume that the other person has the same view or experience. We feel very blessed by this. Of course, it has led to lots of conversations about how we are going to "do life" from those first days of him being in America, to the place where we are now, how are we going to parent?

We aren't dumb enough to think that we can figure out how to be good parents and everything will just work out, especially before baby is even here. We know there will be lots of learning along the way, but we want to start somewhere and we want to be purposeful in our parenting.

We have a lot of dreams and expectations for Cocoapuff and ideas about our parenting style. However, the most important thing for us as parents is that our son (and any future children) knows the Lord. That he hears scripture regularly, that he learns who God is and who God wants him to be, and that ultimately, he makes the choice to have a relationship with our great Savior. We want him to feel comfortable asking questions about God and all the confusing things in the Bible (even if we don't have the answers). We want him to trust that God is BIG and is intimately involved in his life (especially when the day comes that he doesn't feel that way). We want him to carefully examine what people say about God and Scripture and Christian living so that he is not easily led astray. That's a big job! We aren't sure exactly how we'll do this, but with prayer and help, we have faith that we can raise kids this way....and when we put this first, everything else will fall into place.

This is why Cocoapuff won't have Noah story books. In fact, all of his Christian/Bible stories will be carefully screened. While I think it's totally sweet to try and make scripture understandable for small children, I don't think all of those stories are suitable for that audience, and I think that it leads to some great confusion. Noah is my biggest pet peeve (though the Veggie Tales about David's sin with Bathsheba being dumbed down to rubber duckies is pretty high on my list as well). I think the majority of children's books about Noah put an emphasis on the animals, a boat and rain. They make it look all sweet and cute and happy, like God had created the first zoo, or cruise vacation. What is missed however, is that this is a story about God's wrath and an amazing promise. I mean seriously, He destroyed EVERYTHING!! The difference is huge and makes God out to be a very different type of guy. I think it's tough on kids to dumb down scripture so much that they don't get the picture of who God is and then one day, hope that they will all of the sudden get it. (BTW, I don't know what books any of my bloggy friends read their kids and if yours read Noah, not a big deal! I'm not judging people who do read Baby Bible Stories, just saying why I won't.) So obviously, I think too much about this kind of thing, but it's my blog so I can put it out there.

While I search for Baby Bible Stories that I do think are appropriate, Cocoapuff will hear straight up scripture-but not the parts about sex or killing or the end of the world...he'll have plenty of time for that later.