Weekend Re-Cap

If you read my blog last week (all 4 of you who do), you will remember that I blogged about how I was leaving Anna for the first time overnight this weekend to party in Chicago with a bunch of ladies (actually go to a Children's Ministry Conference, but partying with a bunch of ladies sounds much more exciting.) We all survived and it was a great weekend at the conference. The folks at Group Publishing really did a fantastic job with the conference.

I am still processing everything that we experienced, but here are some things I learned or came away with from the weekend:

*The Children's ministry team at LSC is amazing.....and crazy. However, I will not share any crazy stories because what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.

*Don't try to go to downtown Chicago and expect to get a seat at a restaurant on the Sunday of the Chicago marathon. I'd be hungry too if I ran 26.2 miles (who are we kidding..I'd probably be dead if I tried to run one.) :-)

*We are doing a lot of things right in Kids Kanyon....not that we can't do more and make huge improvements, but it was encouraging to realize that we on the right track.

*Giordano's Pizza is the best pizza, but it is better at an actual restaurant than when delivered to your hotel. Just sayin'!

*We should actively involve kids in ministry and give them a vision for it as opposed to just having them be helpers. There is a huge difference between USING kids for service as opposed to MENTORING them in ministry.

*Due to the acting skills and networking of a particular member of a our team, a special needs consultant is going to come to our church for FREE to help us develop and hone our special needs strategy. SUPER STOKED!!

*Speaking of FREE, I am amazed at the amount of quality "free stuff" that was distributed. (I am a sucker for free stuff, but this was really amazing the amount of stuff they gave away. I think the retail value of the stuff I brought home was probably well over $200.)

*I am going to try to tweet more. For those of you who think I just mentioned something regarding flatulence, you may not be familiar with the social networking site Twitter. I have a twitter account, but totally don't get it. So, in my spare time I am going to try to figure all that out. It seems to be a great place to network with other people and I don't want to miss out some great ideas You can follow me at AmyOsterhout

*I am no longer recruiting volunteers, but instead working on building teams (so anyone who reads this blog and serves in Kids Kanyon can breathe a sigh of relief if you were worried that I would no longer find others to serve.)

*The Skit Guys are hilarious. I haven't laughed like that in a long time.

*I have to EXTERNALIZE everything. This was great point to remember that you constantly have to share your vision, expectations and ideas because people cannot read your minds and they forget

*I am still very inspired by people with disabilities who do amazing things. Mandy Harvey was profiled in a video and then was there live to perform. She is a musician who lost her hearing while she was in college studying music.

*We need to make sure that we are one step ahead of technology and using that to our advantage as opposed to being 5 years behind.

*I loved hearing from Jim Wideman (who has been doing Children's Ministry for 30 years.) He has so much to say that I cannot even process it all.

*I was obsessed with collection flair all weekend (little buttons to pin on your conference lanyard...so goofy, but don't be surprised if you see me rocking the flair in Kids Kanyon.)

*Children's Ministry is about making life transformations and not just going through the curriculum.

*What would Kids Kanyon or any other area of the church (or our lives for that matter) look like if we all chose to make a commitment to give 100% in everything we did?

Those are my initial thoughts on the weekend. I know I have much more to process and figure out how to implement into the Children's Ministry at Living Stones Church. It was great weekend and I am so thankful that LSC allowed most of the Children's Team to miss a Sunday and provided the resources for us to go. It was a great weekend.

5 YEARS

Five years ago today, this is what we were doing.

Happy Anniversary to the best husband a girl could ask for!

I LOVE YOU MARK OSTERHOUT!

The Weekend

THIS is where I will be spending my weekend. SWEET HOME CHICAGO!! Chicago is one my favorite places in the world (aside from Disney World, of course). I am going to a Children's Ministry Conference with 5 other ladies who are on my team. I am excited to spend some time with these ladies and hopefully learn a lot from the conference...not to mention that I am hoping to eat some delicious pizza and maybe even a Chicago Dog or some Chicago Style popcorn. :-)

However, I am also a little bit anxious about this conference. This is the first time that I have left Anna overnight since she has been born. I know many of you may think this is crazy since she is almost 3, but I just haven't done it. I am not sure why I am anxious about it. I know everything will be fine. She is getting a Daddy/Daughter weekend and will probably have way more fun than she would if I were home. Mark is an amazing dad and I am not AT ALL worried about his ability to care for Anna over the weekend (except maybe in the area of fashion and hair...so if you see them in public and Anna is missing her pants or her hair is a crazy mess just remember that Daddy is doing the best he can in that area.) :-) I think it just more selfishness than anything else...I simply am going to miss her (and Mark, too.)

I just have to pray and trust that this is going to be a great weekend for everyone. I hope that it is for you too!

The Heart of a 5th Grader?!?

Wow...2 posts in the same week. My writer's block must be going away! :-)

Something happened recently that has stuck with me and I just had to share. A couple of weeks ago, we began a 12 week class for adults at our church on Wednesday nights. Because we wanted as many adults to participate as possible, we decided to offer child care for kids from Birth through 4th grade. Our intention was to hire college students who did not go to our church to handle the child care. However, we were not able to secure the number of college students needed and knew we would need some more people to help handle the number of kids. I got the crazy, I mean brilliant, idea to ask some of our Middle School kids to help out since their youth group meets on a different night. We also decided that we would offer them 5 dollars as bribe, I mean incentive, to serving and doing what they are supposed to as opposed to being another kid for the college volunteers to manage. (They are middle school kids after all.)


Once the evening was over, I was paying all the child care workers and gave one girl her $5. She didn't know that she was getting paid for helping, but took the money and walked away. About 2 minutes later, she came back to me and handed me the $5 and said, "I don't want to take this money. I just like to volunteer." At first, I thought that she had told her parents and they told her to give it back. However, I realized that she had come from the opposite direction from where her parents were located. Her parents were busy helping clean up and could not have possibly had a conversation with her in that short time. She did this from the kindness of her heart.


As I thought about this, I thought about how amazing that was, especially coming from an 5th grader. She served simply for the joy of serving, not because she was going to get something out of it.

This really made me think about how often I do things for what I am going to get out of it instead of doing something simply because it serves someone else or because it is the right thing to do. I also wonder what kind of world we would live in if everyone adopted the heart of this 5th grade girl and just did one thing everyday simply for the joy of serving and not expecting anything in return.

I think we all have a few things to learn from the heart of this 5th Grader.

Writers Block and Randomness

Hello Friends! Sorry I have been away for so long, but I cannot seem to get my thoughts together for a decent blog post. I have about 500 different blog posts in my draft folder of things I want to blog about (all right that might be a slight exaggeration, but there are several.) :-) I don't know why I have such a writer's block. Usually writing comes fairly easy to me, but for some reason I can't seem to put the thoughts I have in to words (at least coherent words that make any sense.). I am blaming it on Mommy Brain (which is a great excuse for everything that isn't going right in your world.) :-) Anyway...I hope to share many of these posts soon so hopefully my brain will get it together. Until then, here are a few of the random things going on in my head:

*My sister is awesome. She came for a visit this weekend to hang out and give Mark and I a chance to go out for our anniversary. We saw the movie THE HELP and went to dinner at CORNDANCE TAVERN. I loved the movie and I think Corndance is quickly becoming one of my favorite restaurants.

*Mark and I celebrate our 5 year wedding anniversary on Friday.

*We are celebrating our anniversary by spending the weekend apart. Great way to celebrate...huh? I am going to conference while he stays home at with Anna. I like to look at as reliving our dating days when we were living in 2 different cities. Sounds a little more romantic that way. :-)

*When I go to the conference, it will be the first time I have left Anna overnight. I know everything will be fine...just makes me a little sad that I won't see her for 2 days.

*We are considering a trip to Disney after New Years. Our original plan was to go again when Anna was 4, but I found a great deal. We do have lots of things around the house that should be done (refinishing and/or carpeting the wood floors, replacing the windows, buying new furniture, etc.) but I'd rather see Mickey Mouse. Not sure what we will do, but it is at least exciting to think about the possibilty of going back to the Happiest Place on Earth.

*My laptop is sick right now. Hoping it can be fixed, but for now I have hijacked Mark's computer. I wonder if my phone stops working Mark would let me hijack his iPhone. :-)

*I am super excited about some potential opportunities with my job at Living Stones Church and the local school down the street. More to come on this at some point.

*In a mommy brain moment, I accidentally put some grapes in the freezer a few weeks ago. Little did I know what an AMAZING snack frozen grapes can be. Now all grapes automatically go into the freezer.

*I am loving the website PINTEREST. Very cool!

*I am slowly easing back into an exercise routine after injuring my ankle 6 weeks ago (in a skydiving accident..OK so I really fell down the stairs, but skydiving sounds so much cooler.) :-) I cannot believe how much more out of shape I am now. I wasn't in great shape before, but I could carry a load of laundry up a flight of stairs without getting winded...now not so much. I have got to get back into shape.

*I have decided not to take tap class this year. I think my skills are beyond the class and should focus on my potential Broadway career. :-) Seriously, I missed the first month of class because of my ankle which would put me behind everyone else in the class and since I am not the most coordinated person in the world catching up is not easy for me. We also have a lot of other things going on in the evenings and if I were take tap there are certain weeks where I would be gone from the house every weeknight. I am kind of bummed about it, but hope to go back soon.

Well...I guess that is all the random things in my head right now. I promise to post more soon.

I'm Messed Up!

As many of you read the title of this post, I know that you are thinking something like "We already knew this Amy!!" :-) I would definitely agree...there are so many areas which I am totally messed up (and if you don't know what they are I am definitely not going to share it here.) :-) However, there has been something that is totally messing me up lately that I do want to share.

In my last post, I mentioned RECESS which was a summer day camp that we did at our church for kids who live in the Miami Hills Apartment Complex. For those of you not familiar with Miami Hills, it is a low income (actually probably no income in many cases) housing complex and you can find anything there (poverty, addictions, crime, violence, etc.) I would say that RECESS is probably one of the greatest things we have ever done as a church. It was an amazing experience!

So you may be thinking, "That sounds like a great thing...how could that be messing you up." Well, here is how. Through RECESS and the free lunch program that we offered in conjunction with RECESS, I discovered that 3 of my former students are now living in Miami Hills (who were my students in 4th, 5th and/or 6th grade). Two of them have children and one of those kids attended RECESS (and this kid was one of my favorite RECESS campers... even before I knew who his mom was who coincidentally was one of my favorite students when she was in 4th grade.) These young moms are either in late teens or early twenties and are living in Miami Hills and trying to raise children in that environment. I know the childhood stories of these young moms and know that they have tragic stories, especially involving their mothers. So as I think about these girls, I wonder what is going to happen to them and their children. They already have so many strikes against them...living in the Miami Hills environment, having an incredibly poor example of motherhood in their own lives, a lack of education and learning disabilities to boot, and who knows what else has happened in their lives since I last saw them in elementary school.

I knew these young moms as young girls and want so much more for them than their current circumstances. As I think about these young moms, I think about the kids who spent 8 weeks at RECESS and know that I definitely don't want to go to Miami Hills in 10-15 years and see the kids who were at RECESS 2010 bringing their kids to RECESS 2025. So here is what is messing me up.... Now that I know that these young moms who were my students are living in Miami Hills, what do I do about it? Do I try to make a connection with them as mom and a friend based upon our past history? Do I offer to take their children on play-dates with Anna? Would they think I was totally crazy if I offered that and ruin any connection I have with them? And...what do we do about all the kids who we spent 8 weeks with this summer? How do you break the cycle of poverty, crime, addictions, etc.? Anyway...that has what has been consuming my thoughts lately and messing me up. I think it is a good messing up...but still messing me up. :-)

The one thing I know that I can do is pray like crazy...so that is what I am going to do! I think God is especially fond of messed up people and will help this messed up person know how to best reach out to other messed up people.

Good-bye Summer

Yes...I know it is only mid-August and some of you may be thinking what am I talking about when I title my blog post GOOD-BYE SUMMER. I mean the temperature is still in 80's, the new TV season has not started and we still have to mow our lawns. It is still summer! Yes, technically it still is summer. However, our summer ended on Monday of this week because that was the day that Mark went back to school. That means we are back into a routine of getting up early, figuring out who will get in the shower first and making sure Anna has everything she needs to go to day-care/preschool for the day (which consists of about 1/4 of the items in our house). :-) It seems like this summer was a fast one, but a good one. Here are some of the highlights of summer on the Osterhout Family:

• Our Family Vacation. We went to Wisconsin Dells and South Dakota. My favorite part was visiting the Ingalls Homestead in DeSmet, SD. Here we are in front of the Ingalls Home. It made me want to read all the books again.

• Speaking of reading books, I read about 15 books this summer and that was really great...especially since I now have NOOK e-reader. Mark got it for my birthday and it is the best invention ever. I am becoming a NOOK snob and don't want to read anything that I can't get on my NOOK. :-)


• Another highlight was Family Fridays. My day off from working at the church is Friday so we made a conscious effort to do something as a family on those days. Sometimes it was simply taking time to go for a walk and other times it was something bigger like going to the Zoo or Healthworks Museum. We even did a road trip to Chicago for the day on one of the Fridays.


• HARRY POTTER! I only saw 3 movies at the movie theater this summer, but the Harry Potter movie was by far the best. Since I am huge fan of the books, it was great to see the final installment come to life on the big screen.


• RECESS-For those of you who are not Living Stoners, we had an 8 week day camp for the kids from Miami Hills (a low income apartment complex right behind our church.) It was so fun to have the activity and fun on our church property every day. Mark volunteered one day a week and I was able to be a part of at least the lunches Monday through Thursday. I am SO proud of what the people who volunteered accomplished!!


• This was also a summer of peace for us. The past two summers have kind of sucked (to put it mildly) for us since my dad was ill and passed away last summer and Mark's brother passed away in the summer of 2009 just 6 weeks after his mom died. We are VERY thankful that this summer did not have anything like that happen.

So...farewell Summer 2011! It was a good one! I am ready for fall and all the things that go with it-football, apple cider, cooler weather and Halloween Candy! :-) Bring it on!!