Pictures From The Weekend

Here are a few pictures from our trip to the Post Family Farm last weekend. It was a lot of fun as you can see.

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Rebecca had fun with Brian & Tarah's daughter Johanna in the corn maze and on the hayride.

TJ & Rebecca's son Micah had fun playing in the pumpkin patch.

Chris & Heidi's daughter Molly and Mike & Nicole's son Evan had fun in the corn maze too.

Ryan & Kara's boys Andrew & Michael enjoyed a ride on the pumpkin train.

An Action Packed Weekend

Last weekend was really great as we got to relax a bit and see lots of friends too. On Friday we watched "Mr. Bean's Holiday," which is a great movie, classic Mr. Bean. It was a relaxing night and we just enjoyed spending some time together.

Saturday morning we went to a fun outing at the Post Family Farm with our LifeGroup from church. It was a beautiful sunny day and it was so refreshing to be outside with our friends. The farm has a corn maze, pumpkin patch, and lots of animals. There were hayrides and some play areas and games for the kids. The corn maze was really fun, and the corn was very tall this year. At the end we enjoyed fresh doughnuts and apple cider, it doesn't get any better than that! I will post some pictures from this in a later post.

We had the afternoon to spend together again, and we ended up watching "Iron Chef" on the computer, that was one of our favorite shows while we were dating and still is to this day. At dinnertime we went to Peppino's Ristorante and met with the group we went to Romania with last spring. Jim Sorrels, the founder of Heart 2 Heart, was up from California for the weekend so we got to visit with him. We had a great pizza and found out that his meeting with our church went really well and was very encouraging. We always enjoy getting together with our Romania group, they are so friendly and caring and are some of our best friends.

Sunday Jim came over after church and we had some Pad Thai for lunch. Then we went on a drive to see some color because it was just such a beautiful day. It was great spending time with Jim, he is a great guy and a great friend. He'll also be our boss when we become missionaries since he's the president of H2H :-) After Jim left we headed out to Mark's sister and brother-in-laws place to visit. We had a campfire which was very nice and relaxing. Mark's mom was also there. We had a great time hanging out with them.

A Very Memorable 5 Year Anniversary

Saturday October 4 was our 5 year anniversary! It doesn't seem like it's been 5 years already since we've been married, time has just been flying. We celebrated with three types of chocolates, and Rebecca made a picture collage for us both to enjoy. We wanted to do something fun and out of the ordinary but we didn't want to spend much because we'll be going to a wedding in California soon, so that will be our big 5 year anniversary vacation. So we looked at different nature preserves and came across the Saul Lake Bog Nature Preserve. Rebecca had been there before for some biology classes and had really liked it, so we decided to go there. It was a little over an hour drive but it was a beautiful day so we really enjoyed it. It was brisk outside but when the sun came out it warmed up a bit, such a nice crisp fall day.

When we got out to the bog we were surprised that there was no boardwalk through it, just a couple observation decks to look out over the entire thing. We decided to walk into the bog, because we wanted to do something fun and just looking over it wasn't what we had in mind. As we were walking around our shoes started to get wet, so we took them off and walked around barefoot.

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Mark had never been to a bog before so it was a new experience, and walking on sphagnum moss was totally wild. With each step the moss would sink in a couple inches and water would fill in the hole. When we jumped up and down we could feel the whole area around us moving up and down, it was a little freaky but really fun walking on a floating land mass.
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There were all sorts of cool plants, like this pitcher plant. We were really excited because pitcher plants are one of our favorites. There were thousands of them because we have had quite a wet year. Rebecca didn't think the bog had ever been this wet when she was there before.

A natural cranberry.

As we were making our way back to the observation deck, we had to cross a small stream that was running through the bog. As Rebecca walked through she took a step and fell in up to her hip! We both laughed so hard and then we had to figure out what to do with her mucky pants and legs. We were going to go out to eat after we were done at the bog, and going home to change would have taken two hours more of driving. So Rebecca got creative...

She used Marks socks to clean her legs off and then used his sweatshirt to make a skirt. It actually looked pretty convincing as you can see above.

We walked around some more trails after we were done in the bog, and then we headed over to Pietro's Italian Restaurant. We started out with some Bruchetta and great homemade bread. Rebecca ordered Chicken Fontina, which was a chicken breast with Fontina cheese and a sweet glaze, and Mark ordered Talapia Piccata with a white wine sauce. It was all very good and the restaurant was quite nice. We were just about done eating and the power went off. It was really weird but thankfully we were by a window so we could at least see what we were doing. We got to order our desserts since they didn't need to be cooked, so we got some Chocolate Mascarpone, which was very delicious. Anyone just coming in could only order salads or wood fired pizzas since the entire kitchen was down with the power outage. We got a hand written bill and had to use the old fashioned credit card swiping machine. Quite an experience. It turned out that someone had hit a power line or transformer so the whole area was out of power. When we left we were thankful we were going right because traffic was backed up really far going the other way.

We had a great day and had some fun adventures. We are so thankful for each other and are glad that God brought us together and has blessed our marriage. We know we will have many more wonderful years together.

Missionary Application & Selling Our House Update

Now that we have posted all the pictures and stories from camp we can start writing about what's going on in our lives right now. I had posted a while back saying that we had decided to apply to be full time missionaries in Romania, and now we are in that process. For the application we had to fill out a statement of intent where we talked about the why and how of what we want our ministry to look like. We are now waiting for some of our references to come in, and after they do then our application will be reviewed by the Heart 2 Heart board. After we are accepted we will start planning a budget and come up with a plan to raise our funds. How ever long it takes to raise our funds will be how long before we go there, so we're not really sure when that will be.

We've spent the last few weeks cleaning up our house and going through lots of stuff so that we could put it up for sale. We went through all our childhood stuff and kept only what was really meaningful, and we went through anything else we had stored or that we don't use very often. We donated lots of things to a local second hand store, including a bookcase and computer desk. It was a lot of work but it feels really good to be clutter free, and our house feels a lot more open. Last week we had a realtor come over and we listed our house with him. He is the same realtor who we bought the house with and we were very pleased when we worked with him last time. So if you know of anyone who is looking for a house in our area please let them know about ours. I put the links to the listing at the end of this post. We are really praying that God provides a buyer for our house, especially with the market the way it is.

Grand Rapids Association of Realtors (MLS Listing)

West Michigan Lakeshore Association of Realtors

Our Netherlands Misadventure

After we flew out of Romania we were delayed in Amsterdam for 2 whole days. Apparently the pilot had been sick for the last flight and for ours, so the airline wouldn't even fly us somewhere else because there were too many people delayed. So we were stuck, and the among other things, we didn't have any money. We had spent our last money in Romania thinking that we were as good as home, not even thinking of the possibility of getting stranded somewhere. We tried using our credit card but apparently you need a PIN number in Europe to use credit cards, and we didn't have one. We tried to get a cash advance from a bank but it wasn't working even though we called the credit card company twice and they said it should work.

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Also, the airline wouldn't give us our checked luggage, and we had mostly dirty clothes in our carry-ons. We were really unprepared to be delayed like this. Usually delays are a few hours, or maybe even overnight, but we'd never even heard of a two full day delay.

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Thankfully the airline put us up in a nice hotel with all meals included. The bummer was that the airport and hotel were too far outside of the city to walk and we couldn't take public transportation without money. So most of the time we relaxed, talked, watched one of the two English channels on TV, or walked around. The full day that we were there we decided to just go on a walk and see what we would find. So we took off through the field behind the hotel.

This is the view from our hotel window. Talk about the middle of nowhere.

We walked through the field and saw these pony's, I liked their haircuts. Our hotel can be seen in the background.

This was the coolest house that we saw on our walk, outstanding shudders.

This is a traditional thatched roof home.

We saw quite a few beautiful gardens like this one.

After walking for an hour we reached Burgerveen, a very nice little village on a lake.

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This horse seemed huge after seeing the Romanian horses.

This donkey was kind of crazy, we could hear him braying from our hotel room!

We were glad that we decided to walk, otherwise we wouldn't have seen anything in the Netherlands except the airport, some highways, the hotel, and lots of fields. It was still a bummer that we couldn't go into Amsterdam though, because this was like a free mini vacation. In any case, we really just wanted to get home so this delay was pretty frustrating and stressful. We survived though, and made it home OK. Next time we travel we will be sure to take some emergency money, and to plan better for a delay like this. Hopefully it never happens again, but with the airlines these days, who knows?

Back At The Orphanage After Camp

After camp was over we stayed in Romania for a few more days. When we got a chance to go to the orphanage at Peris we jumped at it, and we were so thankful for H2H's flexibility. We got to the orphanage in the morning and only stayed until lunch, but we had a lot of fun in those two hours.

We saw Claudiu first, he was very happy to see us as we had bonded with him during the first week of camp.

We met cute little Elena, who hadn't come to camp because she was too young. She was all smiles and loved to play and be held.

I got to hang out with the boys from my cabin again, Claudiu, Florin, and Petrisor.

Berke was still a jokester, just having a fun time.

What can I say other than "cute!"?

It was so nice being able to see the kids we knew again. It was so different going there when we actually knew kids, compared to our last trip where we didn't know the kids so much. It was really great spending more time with them showing them that we cared enough to come back.

More On Week 4 Camp

As we talked about before, week 4 was a lot different from the other weeks, but it really was a great week. We did more advanced activities and focused on self worth as the theme of the week. We did team building games and taught the kids job skills like interviewing and resumes. More kids could speak English so it was a bit easier to communicate, and we had more translators than before. We really learned a lot about the kids throughout their stories and we were able to share our stories with them as well.

My favorite game was the spider's web. Teams had to get everyone from one side to the other by going through the holes in the web. The rules could be changed based on what the team was doing, making them have to adapt to the situation. Each hole could only be used once and if the web was touched that hole would be closed up too. The teams that did the best worked as a team to plan ahead and figure out the best way across.

Here Spencer is the last one left and is trying to climb the tree to get through the hole.

This is what happened, ouch! The tree was wet and Spencer fell down. He just had a square bruise on his back from the brick he landed on.

The teams worked on bridge building out of Popsicle sticks and tape.

We had a whole camp scavenger hunt which the kids really enjoyed, this was one of the highlights of the week.

Some kids were pretty good at the guitar.

Gina enjoyed talking to Rebecca about her life and asked us many questions about our marriage and how we interact with each other. It was fun talking about something that she doesn't get to hear about much - a healthy, Godly marriage.

Ionut and I enjoyed hanging out and talking in English. He was one of the best English speakers out of all the orphans. He also loved to break dance and was just a really nice guy.

More On Week 3 Camp

Here are some pictures from week 3 of camp. Week 3 brought the most kids and many more English speaking kids than the previous weeks. We made lots of friends and did lots of fun things. The program was basically the same as the last two weeks so by this time it was running pretty smoothly.

Nearly the whole group went on a long hike up the mountain the first day.

Small groups formed to play different games.

Rebecca bonded with Chezy right off the bat as she was a great English speaker.

Mark enjoyed Berke's company especially since we had met him on our previous trip.

Us with Chezy, she was a lot of fun and very nice.