The Holidays

We had the most wonderful time being with family for the Christmas season. With Grandmas Ellen and Auntie Robyn we made Christmas chocolate chip cookies and had Grandma's famous turkeuy soup for Christmas Eve.  We were at Grandma Sue's house for Christmas morning.  Charlie and Gracie enjoyed opening presents and playing with all their new toys.  Charlie and Gracie helped Grandma Sue make pies for our family Christmas celebration on New Year's Day.  This year we ventured out to Pasadena to see the Rose Parade floats in person.  We were in awe of all the flowers and work that goes in to making that parade a hit!  We had our last High School camp just after the holidays.  Last weekend we had the biggest junior counselor training weekend ever.  We had 27 potential junior counselor.  It has been a wirlwind, but such a joy.  We now have a little down time to recuperate and get ready for the rest of the winter camp season.  We look forward to it!

Winter Camp

With much planning and finalizing of Winter camp details still to do, we had to quickly put our trip up north behind us. The week between


Thanksgiving and the first weekend in Decemeber was pretty hectic. It included unpaking and doing laundry, inventory at camp, cleaning, shopping, repacking, organizing, ordering, calling, emailing, calling and emailing again, fixing, reorganizing, reordering, and finally actually getting everone to camp. It was a lot. It seemed impossible and out of control, but God had everything all worked out!

The Winter Camp theme is based on the book by Robert Munger, My Heart, Christ's Home. It is about taking inventory of the rooms in our heart, making it a home for Christ and allowing Him to run it. The analogy is of each room in a house representing different areas of our life that need or should be surrendered to Christ. We are only able to cover some of the rooms over the course of a weekend. The book is great if you are looking for a good read. We were somewhat concerned that the material might be too deep for the campers, and to a degree it is. We saw the counselors bring it to the level that the campers could understand. It seemed to work well. Those who wanted to go deep could and others chose to not go deep at all. The topics reached different campers at different places. To wrap up the weekend, the campers could sign the Title Deed of their heart over to Christ if they wanted to. We saw some actually take it seriously and surrender their lives and hearts to Christ. Please pray that they would want to have Christ be the center of all they do, on or off the mountain.

The snow was an added bonus for the weekend. We didn't have a lot of it but enough to make snow-sculptures and have a few sledding times. We hope to get more snow for future camps.

We are excited for the holidays and being with family and friends again. We hope and pray your Christmas season is blessed and full of Christ's love.

Thanksgiving with Family

Our trip up north was nice.  The kids slept most of the drive as planned.  When they were awake, they were  easily able to enterain themselves. 

We enjoyed a nice trip to Tilden Park on Sunday.  It is an amazing park, almost similar to Irvine Park, but on a hillside. It was super cold and overcast.  It seemed as if the sky would open any second and pour down buckets of rain on us, but it didn't.We road the train and visited the farm.  The kids had a blast!

We had a family bowling outting!  That was fun! John was the ultimate winner, but we all had a good time. Even Charlie and Gracie gave it a try.

                                                                           

Thanksgving was a special time of traditions.  We enjoyed preparing the foods, setting a beautiful table, had a little family walk and a fun movie together!  As you can see, Gracie was the master chef for our meal!  

We played cards until the wee hours many nights, had fun playing with the kids and tried to get some family pictures.

Thank you to all who prayed for our trip.  We traveled well, no one got hurt or real sick.  We were glad to come home and we were pleasantly surprised to come home to snow.  It has been freezing here, but I guess that is what winter is all about!  Winter camp has started and we are enjoying being with the campers again.  We will get some updates for you about that soon.  Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHARLIE!

HAPPY 4th BIRTHDAY TO CHARLIE! So now you will all just have to deal with some super cute pictures! I hope you don't mind. The day began with waking Charlie up to the birthday song. As you can see, he was not happy at all! (that was sarcastic!) Charlie then took a very big sniff in and said, "I don't smell cake!" He was right, I was not making a cake at 7:30 in the morning! Actually, we didn't have cake, we had cereal... for breakfast. Again, he's not happy at all!

Later in the day, Charlie and Gracie were singing and dancing in the living room. I should have taken video, but this is what I got! Notice the cool new clothes from Grandma Sue. In the afternoon, we took a trip off the hill. Charlie was excited to play (work, as he calls it) on his new Cars Laptop. He looks so official here! We went to Toys R Us where Charlie used a special gift card and some money from Grandpa Blaine to buy a Cowboy outfit. For some reason, Charlie has been talking about dressing up and playing cowboys for about two months. I am not even sure where he got that idea from. But, as seems to be the norm lately, we got the outfit and Charlie is afraid of it! This picture was taken just before the tears started. We enjoyed a nice dinner at Red Robin. Charlie got an ice cream sundae and a loud happy birthday song from the waitresses, which he hid from. Overall it was a great day! The only exception would be that we should have had the ice cream for breakfast, maybe then the sugar high would have worn off before going to bed!!!

Just Got These Photos

Hey look! Another family photo. We just got this picture from Scott. It was taken on our vacation in September. Also, this is just a great picture of Charlie and Gracie. They were giving each other love in the middle of amphitheater time at camp. Just wanted to share!

October/November

Yes, this is the same picture that was on our newsletter, but it is a rare occasion that we actually get a family photo, so I will put it everywhere I can! I believe Van took about 100 pictures of us this day and this was the best one! Hopefully it will get easier as the kids get bigger!

It has been a busier season than usual. We spent a lot of time in OC for camp events. It was busy but good! We really enjoyed going to our home church while we were down there. It is always nice to reconnect with friends and family there.

We are looking forward to a few weeks at home with some regular routine. It sure is beautiful here. The fall colors have come and they just glow in the sunlight. Just when we think it is getting cold and might snow, the weather shifts again. Soon we will be going to my sister's house for Thanksgiving. We are looking forward to being together, playing cards, cooking, eating, laughing, Christmas shopping and more. Charlie and Gracie have not been before. Hopefully the drive up there won't ruin the entire time! We'll see. We'd love to hear from you. Please write or call. Maybe we can get together???

Fall Season

First of all forgive me for the lack of posts. I had great intentions of writing about every summer camp week. This obviously didn't happen. Needless to say, summer was awsome and we are blessed to be in our Fall season. We have plans to have Lisa take over the blog postings and me handling the Facebook side. I'm excited about this because it means that you will all get to hear from her. She has such amazing insights and perspectives. Not only that but she is the one raising our kids primarily and that means that all you people who don't read the blog you just want pictures of our kids, this will be the place.
All in all this season has been an amazing time of growing, learning, and preparing for the next year that God has for us. I am praying that as we learn how to use these cool new mediums of communication that we will all feel more connected as we serve Christ together. Looking forward to postings from Lisa!