Oct 02, 2007 - Tue: Heidi
We had a very full and fun weekend! Today is my birthday but we celebrated over the weekend. Joey and I traveled the Lynchburg, VA (about 3 hours southwest) early Saturday morning to visit friends from church that are Seniors at Liberty University. James, Katie and Dan invited us to hang out with them and go to a Liberty football game. When we weren't making a run to Sonic we were watching James and Dan play in their softball tournament. It was really nice spending time outdoors in the beautiful weather. The football game ended up being a complete blowout - Liberty won 68 to 10! We spent the night and left early Sunday morning (after a final stop to Sonic, of course!) to make it back home at 11:00 for my birthday celebration with my family. This year we all met at Cox Farms in Centreville for their Fall Festival. The place was huge and had so much to do and see: free cidar and apples, and everyone gets to take a mini pumpkin on the way out! After the farm everyone came back to our place to hang out, eat great Fall inspired foods, open presents, and play games. It was such a nice day and I felt so special! We'll have lots of pictures to show of our day soon.

Monday night my birthday celebrating continued when I got together with one of my girls from the youth group and she had gotten me a birthday gift. It was so sweet of her and so unexpected. She was so proud of her card and I will say it was the funniest part! Christine and I went to the mall to wander around, do a little shopping and have dinner together. It was so fun getting to spend time with her.
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Sep 22, 2007 - Sat: Heidi
We had a rare thing happen for us this past Thursday night that I thought is worthy of an update...we had two friends from church come over to hang out! Why is that "update worthy" you ask? Because no one (at least no one we know of) from our church lives out in our area and it's a pretty big trek for someone to make so RARELY does it ever occur. But, Thursday night we got to hang out with two of the Shulls, Josh and Bethany, some of our favorite people! For those who might not remember...Bob Shull is the youth pastor at our church and he has 9 great kids that we don't often enough get to hang out with. Josh and Bethany are no longer in the youth group, they've both graduated and moved on to college life so we were thrilled when they called and said they wanted to come over. Somehow we ended up busting out my old Winnie the Pooh costume from days past at the Disney Store, which they loved and gave us a good laugh. You can see a couple pictures on our Pictures page. We love being able to share our home with people! Oh yeah, and Josh got his long awaited Heidi smoothie that he's heard so much about. Hopefully it was as good as he'd anticipated!
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Sep 05, 2007 - Wed: Joe
Here's my third update ever. I'm sure you've been dying to read it. We had an awesome time at the RBC summer camp in WV. We both had a great group of kids and can't wait to go again next year. I'm taking three classes this semester and I plan to finish my degree in the Spring. Work is still going well and holding my interest. I'm participating in my first fantasy football season so we'll see how I do. As as you can see, not much is new.
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Sep 04, 2007 - Tue: Heidi
Where did summer go? We realized this weekend that we hadn't even gone swimming once this summer so we enjoyed our Labor Day vacation at the water parks! On Saturday Joey and I went to Splashdown right near our house and had a great time together in the lazy river and tubing down the waterslides. On Monday, my family finally decided how we would spend the day and ended up at another water park in Alexandria. It was such a blast! We packed a huge picnic lunch and enjoyed so much being outdoors in the beautiful weather. Of course, anytime you're with my family there are tons of pictures taken, so we'll have those soon to post and share with everyone!
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Aug 29, 2007 - Wed: Heidi
Today was such a fun day! I got to spend a good portion of the day with one of my girls from the youth group, Miss Dominique! She actually drove all the way out to Manassas on her own, which I think was a little scary for her mom since she hasn't had her license real long and it's a ways from her area. Anyway, she made it safely after a little help from her handy GPS navigation thing! We first went to a little dairy shack nearby and messily ate soft serve ice cream cones outside. I think they melted on us more than we ate them. After we cleaned up from our ice cream we headed to a naked pottery place right nearby in Manassas that Joey and I have gone to a couple times. You pick a piece of plain, unfired pottery, paint it, leave it for them to fire and then pick up your finished pottery a week later. Dominique painted a cute little box and put a small hippo on top (the box could be used as a little jewelry holder or just something to put smaller things in). I painted a mug covered with big polka dots. They both turned out very cute! After pottery we headed to the Shull's house for the '07 seniors cookout. It was a fun night spending time with the new senior class. I can hardly believe my girls are now seniors! Thanks for such a fun day Dominique!
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Aug 10, 2007 - Fri: Heidi
We've been back from summer camp about a week. Both of us had such an awesome time with all the teens and found ourselves asking, "Would we want to do fulltime camp ministry?" I was COMPLETELY shocked to hear Joe say, "I'd give up computers to do something like that." You have no idea how huge that comment was coming from him. He is someone that at age 6 was drawing pictures of computers and writing papers for his teacher that said "I like to do computers." We have no idea what was sparked in us during camp or if it will lead to anything other than a week each summer with the youth group, but it's neat that we both felt like we were where the Lord wanted us.

Highlights of the week for me were: white water rafting (despite the lily pad game), tubing, having an awesome group of girls for my small group (Yeah Ashlyn, Bethany, Elizabeth, Emily, Kara and Victoria!), slumber parties in our room, sand volleyball, connecting one on one with several girls, and learning that I am an angry, greedy and jealous person (Thanks Frank!).

We didn't take a single picture (didn't even bring the camera) so hopefully we'll get some from friends and can post them at some point.

Hard to get back into work again.

Oh and for those of you wondering about the bus ride...Our bus was the one that broke and we had to turn back, unload everything and get a new bus. We were only 1 1/2 hours late though. Apparently buses just aren't my thing.
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Jul 27, 2007 - Fri: Heidi
Well, we leave for summer camp in about two days. I'm looking forward to it especially since Joey will be there this time. I was recounting to my mom one of last year's biggest summer camp memories and figure it might be a good read for the rest of you.

The morning we were set to leave camp to return home, I went to our charter bus to put my stuff on the front seat where I always sit (mainly because I get motion sick almost anywhere else on the bus). Almost as soon as I entered the bus I knew something was wrong. Now, Joey always kids me about having super heightened senses, especially hearing and smelling, but even a normal sensory person could have noticed this. It was quite unpleasant. I mentioned the smell to a few different leaders, none seemed too concerned. So, we load the kids on the bus (my super ears) hearing murmurs from the back about the smell. Again, I mention to the youth assistant sitting next to me that it smelled horrible. She said it would get better as we move. Well, that theory flew right out the window as we traveled about a mile down the road and began hearing the boys on the bus instruct the girls that this would be a great time for them to get out and use their perfumes. Just what we wanted...flowers and fruit mixed with poop.

We begin to question the driver. She enlightens us...apparently our bus came directly from another week-long trip when it first picked us up to take us to camp and the toilet tank (whatever you call those?!) did not have time to be emptied. We added to the already full tank and THEN our bus was the only bus left at the camp all week (not sure why), thus meaning our bus was now loaded to capacity with 2 full weeks of poops and pees that had been left in the hot sun the entire time we were at camp. You cannot even imagine. All I can think of is the FIVE hour bus ride ahead of us. As soon as I realize that, I'm of course thinking, "This cannot be healthy or sanitary for us to be breathing." After making my statement numerous times to the youth assistant (Oh Lanie!), she replies..."We were made to smell our poop. We smell it all the time when we go to the bathroom." "Lanie, we're not meant to be breathing in 2 week old poop and when we go to the bathroom we aren't locked in an airtight container with it for a long period of time."

Our driver radios to the other bus drivers (we have 4 buses altogether) and mentions our smell problem. We all pull over so that one of the male drivers can try packing the tank down and pour enzymes in it to help the smell. A heavyset man enters our bus wearing latex gloves, a surgeon mask, carrying a large stick and a box of something that looked like a milk carton, which I'm assuming were the enzymes. After a few minutes he returns and informs us that there was no room, the tank was completely full and almost overflowing. Seriously. I'm thinking, "Let's just pull over and empty the sucker on the side of the road." That, however, wasn't an option unless we wanted to pay thousands of dollars for committing a crime of improperly disposing of human waste.

At this point the search begins for either a sewage plant or a campground. Lanie and I disembark from the bus in a business park shopping center to begin asking anyone we can find for directions to a sewage plant. We start at a bank drive-thru (the only thing open there). Remember we are on foot - two blond girls walk up push the 'talk' button and have a conversation with the teller standing in a drive-thru lane. No help. At this point we've sent two vans also traveling with us ahead to drive around and scout out any campground possibilities. No such luck.

After a couple dead ends our fruitless search comes to end when we get word of a truck stop nearby that we can dump at. We travel to the truck stop only to discover it was right down the road from the camp we had left almost THREE hours earlier. We unloaded all the kids and made them each lunch while the bus drivers took care of business.

Here's to a poopless busride...
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Jun 22, 2007 - Fri: Joe
Well it's time for another update. I finished two more graduate courses this Spring and decided to take one over the summer. That was a mistake. It's taking up too much time, I'm not enjoying it, and I still have another 4 weeks. Work is going pretty good. We're not doing a ton of cool/new stuff but enough to keep me interested. We finally finished staining how new bed that James built for us. We're still working with the high school youth group and will be leaders at summer camp at the end of July. That's all for now.
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Jun 22, 2007 - Fri: Heidi
WOW! I am pathetic at updates! I didn't realize my last update was exactly a year ago. Horrible! And yet, I feel like I don't have too much to even update.

I guess I should start with...Not much has happened in the past YEAR. Except of course, our great caribbean cruise in November! I don't think a day goes by that we don't either talk about our cruise or daydream (out loud) about our next one. And those cruise commercials don't make things any easier!

Heth Design has been so good. God has really been blessing my business. The summer wedding season is definitely keeping me busy and I'm looking forward to having a little breathing room soon. It's also been fun (and a little bittersweet) doing more baby designs. Not real sure why God is growing my business so much, but I'm thankful for something to keep me busy. I think if I didn't have my work right now I don't know what I'd do. Our plan to "have kids in about 2-3 years after we're married" has turned out to be not true at all. We're still not sure what God is doing but we trust it will eventually make sense to us.

No vacation plans this summer except Summer Camp with the youth group again at the end of July. Joey actually gets to go this year so I'm excited he'll be there with me.
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