Sterling is Hilarious

We've caught Sterling in many hilarious moments lately and luckily caught them on film. This first one was the other day at our team leader's apartment (Mike and Erin Ackerman). They have a one year old son and Sterling decided to climb into his bouncer toy. It looked so funny because he's way too big for it, but he just jumped and bounced happily :)

On Friday night we got to have dinner with a Japanese man named Tom who lives in our apartment building. His condo belongs to Paula, who also owns ours. He is a Christian and studying for his PhD at USC in mechanical engineering. He made us rice balls and egg for an appetizer, then we had oyster spaghetti and salmon fillets-- it was really good! We had a very interesting group of people eating together. Paula is the older lady who owns our condos, the other man is Ricky and his son Victor who are from Brazil. We were a multi-cultural group all connected through Paula, but we had a lot of fun together!

We didn't get a very good picture of Sterling in his cowboy outfit, but he wore his boots to church on Sunday. We went to Steve and Stacey's church, which is Real Life Church. Everyone in Los Angeles seems so trendy and fashionable and it was really funny and cute to see Sterling in his boots and tucked in shirt. The church meets at a movie theater, so Sterling was just wandering around checking everything out.

So I had to put this on here, even though it is going to be very embarrassing to Sterling one of these days! He loves to try on our shoes and on Sunday I had on my dress shoes so he started walking around in them! We were at Steve and Stacey's, so of course Steve thought it was hilarious...He's getting back at my dad for taking a similar picture of Jake a long time ago!

Also on Sunday we celebrated our friend Beth Defazio's birthday. For dessert we had Mochi, the Japanese ice cream, and Sterling thoroughly enjoyed it. Needless to say he was mad at us when we took it away and stripped him down :)

Little Tokyo

This weekend we went to Little Tokyo, which is only a couple of miles from our house. We went with our whole team and it was really cool. We had a formal walking tour with a Japanese man explaining all the historic sites around the area. It was interesting that their used to be 30,000 Japanese people living in the area, now there are only about 1500, although many of the shops and stores remain. We ate Japanese food for lunch (chicken terryaki, sushi, miso soup, rice) and even got to have a traditional Japanese dessert called mochi (pronounced MO-Chee). It is rice and beans ground into a paste and wrapped around ice cream- it was actually pretty good and even Luke gave it a try!

This is a huge parade float that cost over $250,000 to create and send to America from Japan. It is a Samurai warrior and at night it was completely lit up.

This is a fire tower that stands right at the front of little Tokyo and is a replica of ones they had in Japan a long time ago.

This is a Buddhist temple we got to go into. The tour guide explained that in Japan, people only go to the temple for weddings, funerals, births, and other special days, unlike Christianity, where we go every Sunday to church.

Sterling playing.

Here are some of the latest pictures of Sterling playing: a couple are with his friends Owen and Brayden, riding a carousel with his mom at the mall, playing with some random kid in the mall play area, and building a tower at home. What you don't see is the very next second he was knocking that tower over, which he thought was great fun! Sterling continues to be a very exciting, loud, aggressive, stubborn (I know that is hard for most of you to believe); but he is a delight and a joy each and every day! He also continues to be full of energy and life; which we love (most of the time). He does have a few words that he is working on: shoe, eat, more please, ball, dog, tree, banana; of course most of these are some form or another of the word, but he's getting there. It's fun to listen to him, because he totally gets what he is saying and so do we.

Leadership Summit

This past weekend I, Luke, was able to attend the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. For those of you who don't know Willow Creek Community Church is in South Barrington, IL; which is pretty close to Chicago. It's a huge church with lots of awesome things happening. Bill Hybels is the senior pastor and I'm convinced he is one of the coolest guys in the world, as well as Willow Creek being one of the coolest churches in the world! It was an awesome weekend. I was with some of the guys from MSGF, our new team, and we viewed the conference vai satellite here in LA. This conference is designed to help leaders lead; "this event is dedicated to raising the value of leadership on behalf of the local church." This was the 12th Summit, and I'm sorry to say this was only my 1st. I hope to attend many more in the future. There were literally tens of thousands of people, or leaders, in more than 200 locations and some of those locations were overseas. We heard from people from very different professions; pastors from some of the most influential churches in America, a professor from the Harvard Business School who is also considered one of the world's foremost authorities on competitive strategy, a businesswoman who successfully led one of the world's largest and most revered technology companies through a severe industry downturn, a film director who is more concerned with eradicating poverty worldwide than he is making films, an expert on leadership/management practices, an x-president who did a pretty good job while in office and is still working hard to help communities all across the world, a man who is one of the most admired public leaders in the world who has served this country as U.S. Secretary of State, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There names are Bill Hybels, Carly Fiorina, Floyd Flake, Marcus Buckingham, Michael Porter, Colin Powell, John Ortberg, Richard Curtis, and Jimmy Carter. It was a great time of learning and being challenged to new levels of leadership. I hope we are always learning more and growing into better and more effective leaders for God and his glory.

Weekend pictures

As you can see, Sterling had a big weekend. He was able to play with his friend Cade. Cade is about 3 years older than Sterling but he's great with Sterling. Sterling was also able to dance with his mom, which is pretty special; plus he was able to try Jamba Juice, which is an all fruit smoothie place. It's a signature California style drink, and it's pretty good.

Cool Sterling

We took this last night when we were walking on Hollywood Blvd. We put these on Sterling and he actually liked them! :) I think he thought he looked pretty cool. He cried when we put them back on the cart!

Exploring Los Angeles

This is Sterling and Luke playing on our porch one morning. We've realized that Sterling can fit through the little spaces between the bars of the gates, so we have to watch him closely or he'll end up on the neighbor's porch! We all like sitting out there and enjoying the fresh morning air (as fresh as is possible in downtown LA).

We have sliding door closets in our house and Sterling thinks it is so much fun to open and close them constantly, as well as take things out and try them on. So here he is in one of his favorite things- Luke's basketball shoes. Cute!

We got to go to the ocean on Saturday and Sterling loved it! We all did actually, but we weren't sure what STering would think. At first he cried when the waves hit him because it was SOOO cold, but then he got used to it and never wanted to leave. We went to Zuma beach, which was about 45 min from our house, but Santa Monica beach is only about 20 minutes away also.

The other morning we wondered why Sterling was being so quiet, so we peaked out and saw him reading his books all by himself! He was talking and laughing and it was really cute. He was being so good!

Last night we went to Hollywood Blvd with our teammates, Jay and Caitlin. This picture is in front of Grauman's Chinese theater, where all the stars put their hand and foot prints. (And this is where they talk about going in "That thing You do!") It was pretty fun. And a little peice of trivia for Zack- Did you know that Gene Autry is the ONLY person on the walk of fame that has a star for all five categories of radio, TV, movies, records, and directing? He was pretty amazing evidently! They even have a whole museum out here for him!

Our Apartment in CA

We have settled nicely into our apartment here in Los Angeles-- we live in the downtown area, pretty close to West Hollywood. Our apartment is nice, it's really small, but perfect for what we need. We live in between the hispanic area and the asian area, so there is very little English spoken anywhere! We have a pool on the top of our roof (yeah!) and from there on a clear day we can see the "Hollywood" sign up on the hills. We have two kind of not pretty couches :) that someone gave us, which aren't my favorite, but they were free. And Sterling's bed is in the dining room area between the kitchen and the living room. We are all doing well and liking everything so far- we've joked that we're going to be going through culture shock as much living here as we did living in Bangkok- it's so different from Indiana! Love you all.