open the gates and seize the day

Lately I've been on a Newsies kick. You know, that Disney movie from the early nineties about kids selling newspapers on the streets of New York.

Most girls were obsessed with this movie when I was in middle school, and I vividly remember watching it a lot of times over at Rebecca Wamble's house.

A couple weeks ago I was "babysitting" the Gager kids (from Ben down to Bryan), and since I had been telling Beth about Newsies, we decided we should watch it. We watched it on Friday night, and then watched all the good parts again on Saturday. And ever since then, I have not stopped singing the songs.

So I'm currently watching Newsies with Sophie and I just figured out that the movie came out when I was in 4th grade and she was 4 months old. Awesome.

My Newsies soundtrack is on the way.

Today I went snowboarding. First time for the season. Now ever since the whole dislocated elbow incident, I've been absolutely TERRIFIED of snowboarding again. I did go back a few times last year after I was healed, but I was still so scared today.

However, I feel like the fear will not last forever. We only did 5 pretty pathetic runs down the mountain today, and for the first three I was so frustratingly scared. It was like every time I turned I got this overwhelming fear that I was gonna fall again and hurt myself.

For the last two runs though, the fear started going away, and I actually started really having fun again. Here's me on the last run of the day:

Psych! That's definitely not me. I can barely go from toe edge to heel edge. I may never actually jump off things, but it's okay, I still have fun.

It will take a little more time before I'm really confident, but I am now officially excited about snow-riding season.

This past weekend our youth staff all got to take a little field trip to St. Louis for a youth worker conference.

Here's some of us by the glorious arch. It was pretty fun, but a really long ride in the church van. I did learn a lot, and it's always good to be refreshed and encouraged to remember why I do what I do. Gotta love those kids.

Also, in order to get even better at my job as a "youth leader" or whatever, it's very possible I'm going to start taking classes at Denver Seminary next semester. Stay tuned. We'll see what happens.

Ok I really gotta get back to watching the Newsies. Peace.