Family Pics and Brayden

On Saturday we went ot Griffith Park which is like New York's Central Park, only this one is way bigger! There is tons of stuff to do like horseback riding, playgrounds, cookout areas, tennis, golf, volleyball, a carousel, the LA zoo, and the Gene Autry Western History museum. But this picture is of the three of us (Luke took it!) riding on the little train ride for preschoolers. It was so fun for Sterling. It goes on this little track that goes past the ponies as well as some other little old "western towns" they made to look like the old west. There is also one tunnel and Sterling just looked at us and smiled and laughed really big when we went through it. It was a fun morning.

In the afternoon on Saturday we went up to Northridge so that Luke could watch football all day with Mike. So Erin and I took the boys and let them play at the mall. Sterling and Brayden actually play together really well, and Sterling has started trying to say his name- he calls him "Bay bay"...pretty close.

And this was Sunday at the beach. Ashley took our picture and Sterling actually stood there and smiled for it. We were proud of him for being so good.

Beach pictures

We went to the beach with Sterling on Sunday. He really loves the beach! He hates it when we have to leave. It was really funny watching him chase the birds; he thought they were pretty cool.

Life in California

Lately we've been busy, but it's just our usual routine. Sterling goes to play with Colette and Owen while we have our meetings, so this picture is of the three of them holding hands-- isn't that cute?! They all love each other, but of course also spend a lot of their time fighting over toys and yelling at one another.

Sometimes if we arrive a little early for our morning meetings, we go to this Coffee Bean coffee shop and Sterling has a little bit of chocolate milk. It's a pretty special treat for him. He thinks he's big stuff sitting in the chairs like we do.

Luke and Sterling still go to the park most mornings to play. Sterling has never liked the swings before, but the other day he saw other kids swinging and decided to give it another try. He loved it and stayed on the swing for a long time.

This was just when Sterling and I were messing around and playing yesterday. We got a little bored in the evening so I just started taking pictures of him :) But after this, we decided to go out in the courtyard and walk around. We had baked cookies and were looking for someone to give them to. While we were walking we got to meet one of our neighbors across the way and they have a little boy that is close to Sterling's age. We were excited to make some new friends and hopefully the boys can play together. The other cool thing about that was that the dad of the family works at DisneyLand, and they gave us free park hopper tickets!! We couldn't believe it when she brought them over to us! Now we just have to figure out a day that we can make it to DisneyLand- how exciting!

Sterling's Typical Week

Sterling is borrowing a little booster chair from our friends Mike and Erin, so now he is starting to feed himself a little more- although he still prefers to have us do it! He's kind of lazy that way :) He's sporting his Taylor University t-shirt in this picture to support his aunt Kayla--Good luck at school!

3 or 4 mornings a week Sterling and Luke go to the park to play while I go to the gym. They have lots of fun sliding and playing. It's great father/son time, and I enjoy getting to have time to work out! Sterling loves his time outside--he's always been an outdoorsy kind of kid.

Sterling also got a new pair of flip flops a couple of days ago and he looks so cute trying to walk in them! He actually does a pretty good job for such a little guy. He usually just kind of scoots along. This picture was taken in the elevator we have to take to go to our parking garage. He really likes riding the elevator a couple of times a day, he thinks it's pretty fun.

This picture was also taken at the park one morning when they were playing. Sterling has been experimenting with all kinds of new words. Here he was telling Luke that the cow pictured on the swing set says "MOOOO" It's really cute when he says it!

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.

Getting Ready to Leave

Well, Sterling and I getting ready to leave in the morning, so I wanted to do one more post before we move to CA because I don't know about getting the internet there. Luke just arrived last night and he's starting to get unpacked and settled in. These pictures are from this last week. We got to see Nathan and Jayme Rector, and the picture is of Sterling with their daughter Cameryn. The other pictures are from swimming on Sunday, petting the goats at the fair, and playing cards at the fair. We've been having fun, and now we're looking forward to our next adventure in California!

Fair Week 2007

These are just some random pictures from the Putnam County Fair, the highlight of my family's summer! Sterling has gotten lots of close up encounters with the cows and he loves it. He has been petting the goats and running around everywhere. One of the pictures is my sisters showing their cows, another is my dad and Sterling in their flannel shirts together, another is me and Kara reluctantly posing for a picture and this first picture is Luke and Sterling enjoying an ear of corn from the garden together.