Handbrake, Me and Elevate

There are few things that make me happier in children’s ministry than a streamlined system. It was taking me forever to convert files to Mp4 for Media Shout until our good friend Handbrake came along.

If you do anything in children’s ministry with video you should download Handbrake. It works best in Mac OS and is easiest to use, but can used in PC. Elevate doesn’t offer Mp4 so we convert each lesson in Mp4 and load the files in Media Shout. The whole service runs extremely smooth. Instead of relying on a DVD player we can use the cues of Media Shout and can easily go back to a previous cue.

Thanks to Carolyn Mejia for making this process work. I had been working on it, but couldn’t get it quite down. It takes between 10-15 min to convert 1 lesson to Mp4.

Real Life

If you came to my house right now this is what you would find:

• 3 baskets of folded laundry waiting to be put away
• full laundry hampers in every bedroom waiting to be washed
• a very full trashcan in my bathroom
• bills that I need to pay
• countertops that need to be straightened and wiped off
• a dog that needs to be bathed
• two refrigerators that need to be cleaned out

This is just what you can see. I am sure if you opened closets and really started looking you would think I needed to do more. 

On the weekend we play catch up with laundry and other things, but I don’t want to spend every minute of my time with my kids cleaning. I used to be uptight about my house and I had to let go. I may have let go a little too much, but I am much happier and so is my family.

Graduating from velcro

Sometimes in teaching our children a skill we need a little extra help. I am a method person. If you give me a list of instructions I can follow them, but since there isn’t an instruction book for parenting it  often feels like being thrown out of a plane without a parachute.

Each of my children needs to be parented differently and they learn differently. When Adam was in kindergarten, it was time for him to learn to tie his shoes. I used all the tricks in my bag, and we were getting no where but frustrated. We even enlisted the help of his big brothers, but still no success.

I decided I needed to look for other resources to help him and found these books. I bought both books and let him decide which one he liked best. We carried the book with us in the car and he would practice constantly. In a couple days he was tying his shoes.

Maybe these resources will help your child graduate from Velcro.