Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. For real this time.

Only one more round of turkey to go :) (...apart from the leftovers)

Let the week-long Thanksgiving celebrations begin. I will have a total of 5 Thanksgiving dinners this year: Friday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and, of course, Thursday (with my family!!). Each of the afterschool sites hosts a dinner for the kids and their families. My camp's dinner is tonight. We're combining with camp Saved (one of the little kids' camp), so we're expecting close to 150 people. It's gonna be a hectic week, since all the interns have to prepare and help out at all of the dinners, but I'm really looking forward to tonite.

My mom and Dave are coming tonight to help out, so I'm excited they'll get to meet all of my kids. We told the kids that they must bring an adult to come, because we're trying to stress that this is a dinner for their whole family. I barely have met any of the kids parents, so I'm interested to meet all of them and get a bit more of a glimps into their lives apart from what I see at camp every day.

We have off from Wednesday to Monday, so it will be really nice to spend time at home and relax...oh, and recover from so many turkey dinners. I better start loosening the notches on my belt now! ha.

This has been a pretty good week. On Wednesday, the kids didn't have school, so we decided to take 11 of them on a trip to Philly for the afternoon. We were planning on playing "red light, green light" on the art museum steps, or going into the Comcast building to let them see the massive screen thing in there. But it was a MISERABLE day, so we thought that going bowling might be better. I was happy we were going bowling, since I haven't been in a long time, and it would be fun to brush up on my skills from when I was in the Nickelodeon league with David (ha!). But after we picked up all of the kids, half wanted to go bowling, and half skating, so we took a vote. I don't know who really won, but we ended up in Millennium Skate World for the second Wednesday in a row. Although I had my heart set on bowling, and I had a skirt on which i thought might make skating difficult, it was a really fun afternoon. More kids seemed to get into it then the kids we took last week. And a lot of the kids who had never been skating before persevered the whole time. I have twin boys in my class who went, and every time i turned around, one of them would be pushing forward slowly, flailing limbs, and if he didn't recover well enough, would end out sprawled on the ground. But neither gave up...they would get right back up and try again. I think about all the times I used to go skating as a kid and realize that where I take these memories for granted, most of these kids wouldn't be able to go skating if it weren't for Urban. It still amazes me every day how many opportunities Urban provides for these kids that they otherwise wouldn't have.

Last night we had our weekly intern class. This week was on conflict resolution. Thankfully, by God's grace, there haven't been any major conflicts in either of the intern houses in the 2 months that we've been living here (that I know of). But Dana, the StreetLeader director, came and gave us really good pointers in how to manage conflicts with people, especially in our houses. I'm not really one who is good at resolving conflicts. I guess maybe I thought I was, but I' definitely more prone to be passive-aggressive towards a person over telling them what they are doing that upsets me. This is something I've realized I really need to work on this year. My stubbornness and passive-aggression has caused too many problems (and conflicts of their own) in living situations in the past, and so hopefully I will be able to work on being open with people, with misinterpretations and miscommunication, so that we all can continue to live together and love each other as brothers and sisters. I really value the housemates God has blessed me with this year and pray that we will all strive to live in a loving an open community with each other.

And now for some pictures!




Ashley, Kelly, Angelica, Moochie, and Dariana in opening program


James doing a flip in the pool at the hotel during the Messiah College trip


Me and my housemates


Moochie, Kelly, and Arlenne at camp


Playing games downstairs before snack time

Man, I've been busy lately. We had our first normal day of camp today in what seems like forever! It was really nice to be back. Last week was the annual summit, where staff from all the different UrbanPromises (Wilmington, Toronto, Vancouver, Honduras, Malawi) get together and have a 2 day long conference. The summit was really good and it was awesome to get to meet so many people doing similar things in other parts of the world, but 2 days of meetings and workshops from 8am-6pm takes its toll.

Since we didn't have camp on Thurs or Friday because of the summit, we had a "special week" for the kids. We got to take some of them to a park in Collinswood on Tuesday which was fun. I taught some of the girls "Pooh Sticks"- where you pick a stick and drop it in the water on one side of a bridge, and whoever's stick comes out the other side first wins. They seemed to enjoy it, but we were all quickly distracted by the urge to want to climb some nearby trees.
On Wednesday we got to take our 6th graders roller skating, since they didn't go on our trip to the haunted house or the weekend to Messiah College. Some of them had never roller skated before and weren't too fond of it, but all the kids seemed to have a good time, even if it was just to hang out and eat lots of nachos. I hadn't been roller skating in sooo long, and it reminded me of the days when we would go skating with AWANA, and I would win the limbo competition (and therefore a free soda!) every year. I didn't do so well on the skates this time around, but when i switched to blades it was like going back to when Sarah, David and I would roller blade around our neighborhood all the time.

So as I said, today was a normal day of camp. Since it was nice out, we got to take the kids to the park down the street, where i helped some of the girls make a giant pile of leaves at the bottom of a slide. The kids took turns barreling down into the pile, which was entertaining to watch. The rest of camp went as smoothly as could be expected...there were the usual kids who claimed they didn't have homework, and refused to do a worksheet, and the kid who sits at the girls table and annoys them the whole time, and me trying to get him to focus on his own work (and failing). But overall it was good. We also had camp night, where about 10 or so kids stay after, hang out, and we make them some dinner. I like camp night because I feel like I can hang out with the kids more easily without feeling like I'm always telling them not to do "this" or "that".

I'm sorry I haven't really posted much lately. As I said before, I don't have internet at home, and I'm usually too lazy to write a post when I'm at Urban. I'll try to be better! I just wrote my 2nd news letter, and I think I'm gonna start posting them on here regularly. That way, those of you over-seas can get them without me having to mail them to you!

I hope everyone's doing well and enjoying this beautiful autumn!!