Congratulations!

Congratulations to Heidi Snyder (Noel's younger sister...not his wife) and Brian Wolfe who are engaged and plan to be married in June 2009! Welcome to the family, Brian! We're so excited for the 2 of you.

Noel's Life

Do gnomes bring you good luck and help you finish faster? I hope so, because he received one yesterday as part of a white elephant gift exchange at the church staff Christmas luncheon. It's a good thing we have a white elephant gift exchange to go to next week; we can pass the lovely thing to someone else!


Noel says: Whew! I'm done! Plowed through that stack of books, wrote my first doctoral-level research paper, and finally had a good night's sleep. The gnome definitely helped me push through to the end. Quite a little task master.

Go Hope (and Cornerstone)!

We are so fortunate to know Bob and Carole Bos. They are both Hope alum and attend our church in San Marino. They invited us over for dinner on Friday for a Hope gathering. Tony and Christen, Katie, Noel and I enjoyed a great dinner, game time, and conversation with Bob and Carole. They are such a blessing to us.

Katie is married to Joey, who we have made an honorary Hope alum, but he went to Cornerstone. I guess that's an okay school as well...at least he didn't go to Calvin! We try not to only talk about Hope when we're together so he doesn't feel left out, but its very hard!
It's neat to be able to make so many connections here just from attending Hope. We are very proud to have attended such a great institution!

Thanksgiving

We had a fantastic Thanksgiving celebration this year. We've spent the past 3 Thanksgivings with large groups of people, which ended up being mostly people we didn't know. We felt like doing something a lot simpler this year and just had dinner with Tony and Christen. It was a really fun day. Tony and Christen brought a few dishes and I made a few dishes. We spent the day watching the Lions (quite depressing!), eating, playing Canasta, and watching Christmas vacation.

Sitting down to the feast.
Showing off both my new baking dish and my totally from scratch stuffing (it was an experiment, but turned out pretty well!).
We're so thankful the Bordenkircher's are here. We love hanging out with them and getting to know them better. Yea for fellow Hope grads!