~Road Trip~

I was privileged to travel to a teaching conference with 13 others from church from Oct 31 to Nov 3.  The conference was for anyone leading, teaching or helping toddlers through teens.  I was so excited to be going!

Gregg sacrificed and took two days off of work and worked from home one day.  The day he worked from home a friend of mine watched our three youngest kids.  How spoiled am I!??!!?!?

Hurricane Sandy made a rough start to our trip.  I didn't want to leave my family if we lost power and thankfully we didn't.  We had rain (and some snow) all the way out to Ohio but the trip went fairly well.  We drove out in three vehicles.  My vehicle left around noon on Wednesday and stopped to see a friend on our way through the western part of the state.  We arrived at our destination at about 9:30 pm.  Some of our group was staying with a widow lady... the rest of us were staying in a house belonging to someone we knew but was not home during that time. 

We got breakfast groceries at 11 pm (my first visit to a Kroger) and finally found our home around midnight.  It was 50 degrees in the house!  We went to bed fairly quickly and enjoyed sleeping in a little Thursday morning.  We met the rest of our group and one of our college kids for lunch and then headed over to the conference.

Overwhelming!!!  We had 5 main sessions and 9 workshops in a little over two days.  There were 90 workshops to choose from!  I hit some really good ones and some really, really good ones!

The church holding the conference fed us a few meals... I enjoyed not cooking and  I also enjoyed my dessert :-)  oh, and they had sweet tea! YUM!!

The people teaching were master teachers! Like you didn't want to blink because you would miss something!  Storytellers, puppeteers, evangelists and pastors made up the group of teachers. 

Thursday night and Friday night we headed back to our house and did a bit of debriefing... what did you learn, here is what I learned kind of a thing.  I was with our Pastor's wife and three young people out of high school but still young... and they don't sleep!  Anyway, I loved hearing what they were learning and hearing how they were going to apply that to their teaching. 

The three "kids" want to serve God and now have a lot more tools to serve Him with.  We teach mostly in a way we have been taught... this really opened our eyes to other ways of teaching.  It takes a bit more work... but it is so worth it!

I came home very sleep deprived but very full.  I was privilege to give testimony at church and shared that I didn't want to necessarily tell them what I learned, but that they would see a difference in the way I minister and they would see what I learned!  I look forward to implementing some of these things in my personal life, my home life and in my out and about service.

While I would love to go again next year, I would also love to see Gregg have an opportunity to go!