Birthday Updates!

When Brad whispered in my sleeping ear this morning "you should look out the window - it's white white white" I thought to myself, "now that's a birthday first."

I have truly had the most wonderful birthday. It all started last night when Brad came home with the fixins to make the most amazing stuffed shells I've ever tasted. He even beat Buco di Beppo, which is tough to do! Then, I went to my door this morning to find most beautiful arrangement of flowers from my sweet sister, Casey, and Jasper! Then, with the combination of sweet phone calls, cards, and email messages, I have just been overwhelmed with love! Thank you everyone!

Now to change the subject, I realize that I have been a very bad blogger recently, so I thought I'd post some non-birthday-related updates!

Basically, life is happy and full here. Brad and I have been blessed to have lots of time together lately, and we have also had time to continue developing friendships both together and independently that we are really thankful for.

One of those friendships has developed into the possibility of us moving to a different house next year, which is also exciting. Some new friends are planning to rent out their house here in the city, and we are hoping to rent from them. Imagine it: we'll have ROOM! A big kitchen, a back yard, a front porch! And, we won't have to tiptoe around between 11-8 as we do here just to be respectful to our upstairs and downstairs neighbors. The house is closer to everything, and the BEST news is, they are just moving 4 doors up the street, so we'll be able to develop a closer relationship with their family. We are still in the discussion stages, but we really hope it will work out.

Another big thing going on with us is that we are in the process of joining our church, City Reformed, and I am beginning to coordinate our church's involvement with an international student ministry in the city. This is actually my 9th goal for 09, which I have been slacking on posting about, so I'll talk more about it later. But, we are very excited to become an official part of the church, and after having been through a few membership classes and meetings with our pastor (the PCA has a rigorous membership process we learned!), we have a deeper respect and love for the vision of our church and we are very excited to become part of it in an official way.

As far as work goes, things are going well. Brad is still enjoying his work with Tetra Tech, and in his free time, he's been working and learning like crazy to take pictures with me, too. We've been having SO much fun working together. We have been booking weddings as far in advance as June 2010, and we are also doing lots of kid and family portraits in the coming months! So, we are very, very excited about how things are going, and we are very hopeful about the future of the business. This weekend, we did a total-website-makeover (that could be a TV show!) and updated many things to better reflect our vision for the business. You can read about it in my photography blog here.

I guess that's really about all here. We are doing well, and the dogs are spoiled and happy. I promise to do better about posting so I don't have long rambling posts like this one in the future!