Blessings Book

One of my favorite things about Waldorf education is the use of little poems and verses. It's also one I haven't done especially well with. I'm great at finding them, organizing them, categorizing them, basically everything except actually using them (I know! Story of my life). I think the problem I have, is that I just forget. When I'm in the kitchen baking, I don't have my binder with verses neatly labelled and categorized, I don't have my books with pages thoughtfully marked and folded. I don't have anything to remind me.

I got the idea from a couple of different places. My mother-in-law went through training to become a Love and Logic instructor a few years ago and when she was done, she went through all of the materials with Brad and me. When we were done, she gave us a little ring with laminated papers of different colors and sizes on it, each with a little tip printed on it. And then I saw this post from the Chocolate Eyes blog, and how she used watercolor paintings as covers for her index cards for circle time. I thought that a combination of the two would be a perfect way to put together a little collection of verses to use throughout our day. It's small, it's light, it's convenient to carry around, it's beautiful, and it put a nice dent in our accumulation of watercolor papers!

I included a few centering verses for myself:

Some morning verses:

Mealtime verses:

Verses for work:

For peace:

And for bedtime:

I was going to write the verses directly on the watercolor paper, but it's not the easiest thing to write on, and I wasn't happy with how they were turning out. Instead, I printed the verses and cut them out. I debated whether to make all the papers the same size, but in the end, I decided I liked the idea of each verse being its own size and shape. I think that will help me remember what's what.

Lissie had a lot of fun matching each verse to paper. I just taped the printed paper onto the watercolor paper where I wanted it, then cut around leaving about 1/2 an inch around the edges. Then, we punched holes in the corners and put them all on a ring. The ring makes it easy to add and remove verses if we ever want to change things.

This was so much fun to put together, and I'm so happy with the results that I'm thinking about making another one for seasonal verses. I imagine it won't take me too long to memorize a lot of these and get into the habit of using them, but in the meantime, I'll be happy to have this lovely little reminder with me throughout the day.