What's going on?!

A blog update - yaaaaay! Just wanted to give a holiday shout-out to all our friends and family, and provide some quick updatage. We have returned home after spending some quality time with Beth's family in Greenville, Pennsylvania, and mine in Grand Rapids, MI. It was a relaxing time overall... we watched some movies, opened presents, made food, ate at Yesterdog, Maeby played in the snow, all the good stuff. We only had a couple days in each place, but it was great to hang with our parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephew again.

We headed home from GR this past Thursday night, to prepare ourselves and our home for the (hopefully first annual) Wild Goose Creative New Year's Festival. We've been planning this since early 2007, and it's exciting to see all of our plans come to fruition. The idea for the Festival originated with New Year's last year, when a small party blossomed into a semi-reunion of friends from high school and Calvin. Our thought: why not add some structure to it and show off some of our (and our friends'!) many skills?

You can view the full details of the Festival at our (new!) website: http://www.wildgoosecreative.com. Also, keep an eye on our blog. We opened the Festival with dinner and an improv show last night. The team consisted of myself, Micah Green, Terry Schoone-Jongen, Rachel Zylstra, and Brian Risselada. In other words, it was an amazing reunion of sorts. The Festival will also feature workshops on swing dance, screen printing, puppetry, sushi lessons, jewelry making, and Shakespeare performance, in addition to a chocolate tasting, jazz and poetry, a short play by myself, an art gallery, and performances by our friends Rachel Zylstra and Common Shiner. We're very much looking forward to the Festival, as well as the relief that the new year will bring.

And our most important news is that we're expecting a baby next year! Beth is due July 1st, and so far she's been feeling well. New Year's Day marks the beginning of Beth's second trimester. Below you can see the first ultrasound we got of Baby D. It's a rather early image, because we spent a few months at a fertility clinic in Columbus. So we knew pretty much right away when Beth was pregnant. The top part of the image shows tiny Baby D, the bottom part shows a readout of the baby's heartbeat (the heartbeat!).To answer a couple questions... it'll be about 8 weeks before we can find out the sex, and yes, we will most definitely find out and, yes, we will tell people. And, yes, we have some names picked out, but we'll share them when Baby D comes along.

We hope everyone has had a blessed Christmas, and we wish you a very Happy New Year! Look for pictures of the New Year's Festival and other updates soon!