Have you ever seen a Thanking God butterfly?

I hadn’t either until yesterday afternoon.

At school during quiet time, Alec usually draws, and then he brings his drawings home with him.

When I pulled this one out of his backpack, I had no idea what I was looking at. A hand with pictures drawn on it?

“What’s this?” I asked him.

“That’s a Thanking God butterfly!” he said.

Then he proceeded to point at each picture and tell me what it was, starting with the middle, colored section.

“That’s thanking God for the blood He shed. That’s thanking God for the sun, and water.” Then to the right. “That’s thanking God for our house.” Then to the left, bottom up. “That’s thanking God for flowers, and the fire pit, and food to grow. And that’s the cross Jesus died on.”

How sweet, not only the idea of it but what all he thought of to be thankful for. He’d drawn another Thanking God butterfly on the back of the first one, and it had most of the same things but actually looked like a butterfly this time.

I love how the fire pit featured on each butterfly. There’s a reason it’s in the forefront of his mind these days. He’s been making stew in an old tin can.He cuts up carrots and lettuce and meat sticks and steals a bit of onion that I already have chopped up in the fridge, and he loads up his can and sets it on a board over the fire till it boils. Then he and his brother and his dad eat it together out on the front porch in the cold and sometimes the dark.Thanking God butterflies and tin can soup aren’t the only things Alec has been creating. Yesterday afternoon, after the Thanking God butterfly discussion, I went back to the green room and found him diligently making a train out of cardboard, empty toilet paper rolls, tape, and some wide glittery ribbon. Sitting on the couch was a cardboard box with birds hanging in it, birds that he’d drawn and colored from a bird chart I printed off for him.I praised him for his busyness (nothing to keep a boy calm and good like being occupied) and for his creativity, and he said, “That’s because my heart doesn’t just overflow with God’s love. One side of my heart overflows with God’s love, and the other side of my heart overflows with all of my imaginations.”

Somehow I think that probably made God just as happy as it made me. 😊You’ve heard of gratitude journals. Maybe you should try a Thanking God butterfly next time!

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I just have to include a funny Sebastian quote here at the end as well.

The other day Sebastian was looking at an old picture, and he asked, “Was that when we were married?”

I said, “Yes, Mom and Dad were married, and you boys are our children. You’re not married. You won’t be married till you grow up and find a lady to make your wife, and then you’ll be married.”

Sebastian pointed at Emmett. “But he will be part of my family. That way there will be someone I know. Then we’ll have two dads and one mom. But I will find another girl soon.”

“So Emmett can marry the other girl?”

“Yeah,” Sebastian said. “So there can be two dads and two moms.”

Later, when Sebastian was reiterating this idea to his big brother, Alec apparently knew something was a little off with the whole thing and told Sebastian he wouldn’t need to take Emmett with him when he got married, and Sebastian yelled angrily, “Why, are you going to take him?!”Oh, Sebastian . . . 😊