Archives for August 2008

Every once in a while I have some day in San Diego where I truly can’t believe God lets me live here. It is really beautiful. This morning was one of those times. We went to La Jolla shores for breakfast on this walk along the coast we like to do. You know I brought my camera!!!!

The tide was in so Shannon snapped this pic of me and the boys. Who needs a professional photographer when you live in San Diego? Look at this pic! (as always, click it and it will go full size for you.)

I also ran across a blog the other day where the guy had embedded a slideshow of pics from his google picasso web album account. I did a little research and found out that I could download this nifty add on to iphoto for free that lets me publish directly from iphoto to google and then instantly create a slideshow that is live on my blog. If you have a mac, you can find that doodad and lots of others right here on the web.

But anyway, here’s my first one. Let me know if you like it! Be sure to watch it through the part where I’m taking my boys pics in front of the water splash and note how Jake is sitting proud and ready to get wet while my other two are so showing their girl side. So funny. It’s like 43 pics total. Hope you enjoy it.

Last night we had our small group leader training. This time we combined the leadership of high school and middle school small groups. We put together a small packet of things we thought would be helpful and gave everyone a stack of postcards with several copies of 3 they could use for their small group: A happy birthday one, a “you rock” one, and we missed you one.

We ate dinner and had about 35 adults for our training. It was good and helpful and I heard encouraging things from those there. I posted two of the documents we used for our training on another blog I sometimes contribute to: PDYM community.

You can find our small group leader expectations here.

And a few thoughts for those who write their own small group material here.

While celebrating my 14 year anniversary with Shannon, I decided to do 2 things this school year.

#1. Walk by boys to school all year on Mondays. (maybe even rain or shine- we’ll see)
#2. Have breakfast with TJ on Wednesdays.

Since TJ starts middle school an hour after his brothers, I decided to use it for breakfast with TJ. He loves to read, so Monday we picked up some books at the YS office by Mark Oestreicher and Kurt Johnston written directly for middle school kids. We decided to start with one called, “My School“. We are also reading the one minute Bible for students together.

It was good food, good times, and good conversation. I had the breakfast bagel on wheat with provolone. He had the breakfast bagel on plain with cheddar. We’ll see if that becomes our “regular”. We’re going to go to the same place all year- maybe in a few months we’ll just be able to walk up and say, “the usual please.” How cool would that be?!

Here’s a pic of what I hope to be a middle school tradition for all my boys.

I’ve had to come to some tough realizations this last 4 months or so about friends and this post is more vulnerable than feels safe to me… but here goes:

My U12 soccer team is mostly middle school boys.  I guess you could say it’s my boys small group.  I love to clown with them and challenge them to give me their best all at the same time.   Today I had a few conversations at practice I thought I’d share.