Click on the Image above to watch the sweetest video you ever saw. BabyLukeEaster2006.mp4 (25.6 MB MP4 file) NOW ALSO AVAILALE as an MOV QuickTime file. (16.7MB) Tech Note: Created simply with iPhoto. Choose your images – hit slide show – choose song – click ‘export’ as video – share. Done. ENJOY! (Another Beautiful Mac Thing)
Most Useless Household Applicance: The Alarm Clock! On April 1st my life radically changed forever. Not only have I never needed an alarm clock since, but I am a Dad now. That’s right. I now am up very early every morning to feed, change and love on a little baby boy named Luke Given Bastian. Didn’t know we were pregnant? We weren’t! We became parents overnight with no warning or preparation time. I waited to blog it here for two weeks while we worked out the details and made sure it was going to happen. But to make a long story short, we found ourselves on April 1st temporary guardians of a little boy in need of a home. By April 5th we were legal guardians, and on Easter Sunday the mother gave us her final decision to allow us to adopt him. While the adoption won’t be final for some time due to the legal process and some significant challenges there that need prayer, with the birth mother’s consent this week we are officially “Mom and Dad” of this precious little boy. Humor us by enjoying some pictures… Luke, the day we took him home.Happy dad with new baby!…
As many of you know (from past bragging), my brother is the MLB.com beat writer for the Toronto Blue Jays. Well, tonight was his first time in Chicago covering an enemy team, and from a different country at that!! (How did Canada even get into the All-American sport of baseball?!) Yes, it was the World Series CHAMPION (blogged here) Chicago White Sox against the Foreigners, aka, the Toronto Blue Jays. I was bummed to miss our Good Friday Service, but I really wanted to support my brother and be there for his first Chicago game as an MLB.com writer… and what better way to support this die hard Chicago fan than to show up dressed to the hilt as a Blue Jays fan?!??! (thanks to someone at church who loaned me the gear) My sister Melissa tried not to walked tooooo close to me as I entered Sox territory dressed as a Blue Jays fan! I was very curious what the reaction would be from the Sox fans to my shirt, jacket and waving flag! Here I am in my Blue Jays disguise! I really look the part, huh? I had people singing ‘Oh Canada’ when I walked by, but…
Well, I’m sure most people are bloggin’ abou the Super Bowl this evening – we watched and enjoyed a good game and food with friends over – but since I was a fan of neither team, nothing much to say about it, (other than that one guy on the Steelers needs a haircut really bad, maybe now he can afford one.) While the Bears let us down this season (but made it to playoffs at least) – they are not the only football team in town! That’s right, there is always the AFL (Arena Football League) which I’m more a fan of now than the NFL – since I’ve been to twice as many games as NFL. (AFL-2, NFL-0) The Chicago Rush are our team. (though at the time of this posting, their site is down!) Their opening is a lot of fun – flames! fireworks! cheerleaders! (ok, forget the cheerleaders, sharp elbow from Sara) but they do a great job at setting the tone for the game… I mean, how can they possibly lose after that intro! Shhhhh! Don’t tell the fire marshall the flames nearly reach the roof! If you aren’t familiar with Arean Football – it is…
After a very full day at two WDW parks, today I was in the mood to chill out a bit. Sara was off to visit family, the Tanners were back to conquer another park (Magic Kingdom today, Steve’s third consecutive Magic Kingdom/Disneyland visit with rain!) while I slept in and then strolled the grounds. It’s a really nice place. Except for the Opryland in TN (2001?), this is probably the nicest place a CPC conference has been hosted. (and maybe nicer since it is outdoors and is in WDW) The grounds are absolutely beautiful. All the buildings are around a huge lagoon that you can even rent boats to go out on. I almost rented a bike, but it was sprinkling a bit and I didn’t know if it was going to get worse, so I stayed on foot. One of the things I have always appreciated about INCM and the CPCs, is that they enable Children’s pastors and workers the opportunity to go to places they might otherwise not get to go. Why should only secular businesses get to take their employees to nice locations for training? After all, we are in the most important field and occupation: REACHING…
Well, once again we left a day early for CPC so that we could take a bit of the local culture. Since the conference is at the Walt Disney World, we grabbed a park hopper and took in Animal Kingdom and Epcot, neither of which I’d ever been to. For the most part, everyone got along just great. This is Steve and Amy Tanner. For those who don’t know, Steve is the Director of Web Operations for Kidology.org. If you want a great write up of what Kidology is doing at CPC, his blog has a great description, I couldn’t do better, so read his. First stop was the Animal Safari… and I was pretty impressed. There were a lot of animals and ride was a lot longer than I expected. We saw a bunch of animals you normally wouldn’t see in your own neighborhood, and the jeep ride made it a lot more fun than a trip to the zoo. (Where the animals are always indoors sleeping anyway.) I won’t bog the blog with too many animal pictures, (I know its always better in person), but it was pretty cool so see so many animals up so close. Here…
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Kidology.org - Resources for Children's Ministry Leaders (This page is hosted on this site, just click around!)
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