Happy Valentine's Day!

Mark and I don't get to celebrate V-day tomorrow night b/c I have class until 10pm, but we hope you all have a happy love day! ;)



14 months left of insanity!
(446 days til Andrea gets her MSW & resumes normal living ;)

Merry Christmas!

This year was full of many blessings! Andrea started on her Masters in Social Work at Wayne State University, Mark reunited with his former Adia co-workers at NetSmart Technologies & we celebrated our first wedding anniversary, just to name a few! Teeger had his first birthday, and Neo turned 2! We feel so lucky to have such wonderful friends and family around us, and hope the coming year will bring many more happy memories to all!

God Bless & Lots of Love!
Andrea & Mark Heimonen

This just in...

Kinko's doesn't scan anything bigger than 11x17! Oh no! How do all those scrapbook fanatics get their pages online? Do I have to scan it in halves? Weird... Oh well I guess it'll save some money, but not time : \

Scrapbooking

I've been getting back to work on our wedding scrapbook, and thus far I've got almost everything but the reception done (I've saved the biggest part for last!) I've also started using the "tools" Mark got me for Christmas, which, I think, officially puts me in the "obsessed scrapbookers" category. When you see me wield a hammer and awl to mount vellum on a page, you know I've gone crazy, right? Granted, they're miniature versions, but still.. gives me a headache when I'm putting the rivets in. Anyhoo, it's fun, and Naomi and I have been able to hang out and scrapbook together while watching movies & chatting, so it makes for a good time! There's just something about the sense of satisfaction that comes from finishing a page capturing memories from your special day :) Mark is impressed, and I'm still working... soon I'll have the professional pictures to work with - these are just the snapshots!! When I get around to going to Kinko's, I'll scan in the big 12x12 pages and you can see my hard work!

Love,
Andi

Blast from the Past

We're coming up on the 4th anniversary of the day Mark and I met at Kai's studio apartment in Huron Towers, so I thought I'd give everyone a little blast from the past with this scrapbook page highlighting our first month of dating. The pictures were both taken by Sari Jaatinen - the first one in the middle of the Kerrytown shops in Ann Arbor, and the second in downtown Detroit.

Thank-You Cards!

Ahhh!! I never thought I would be so delinquent in my appreciation letters! Our wedding was amazing, it was great to have so many of our friends & family there with us, and we were blessed with some awesome gifts! We started our t-y's in October, but then I was holding off on mailing the completed ones until we printed a wedding pic to slip into each card. Then time passed, and I ended up sending a picture Christmas card to everyone, and Mark and I switched jobs, I started classes in Graduate school, and the cards still sit half-completed in the office. I hope people aren't offended!! I'll send them soon along w/ a sticker on the outside saying something like, "the tardiness of this card is in no way correlated to the degree of our thanks! please forgive us!!" :)

Love Always,
The procrastinating Heimonens

Married Life :)

Hey all!

We've settled back into the daily grind in Ann Arbor, and yesterday we celebrated our 1 Month Anniversary - *yayy!!* :) Thanks to all of you who've been emailing, sending pictures, calling on the phone, etc... I think I'm finally ready to get started on the thank-you cards!

Mark and I had such an amazing time on our honeymoon. I think the favorite for both of us was going white-water rafting on the Merced River (outside Yosemite National Park). Even though the water was low and we only got to experience clas 3+ rapids, it was a blast! We ended up covering about 11 miles, and we got to "surf" with our boat, which involved us paddling like crazy upstream and catching a rapid that made the back end of the raft fly up and spit us back out. Hard to explain, but we did it twice, and none of the other groups would try it! (I guess you have a huge chance of flipping, though we didn't tip over either time!)

We also went *gasp* skydiving!! That was an amazing experience, though I don't think we'll become avid jumpers or anything. It was cool to see the view from that high.. but it was almost unreal. Which is probably why Mark's fear of heights didn't come into play much.. When you're up that high, the ground looks fake, and you can hardly fathom that you're actually propelling yourself toward it at 120 miles per hour. Except that it feels like a 120 mph fan is blowing against your face and your cheeks look like a stunt Jim Carrey does in The Mask... Plus, the harness gives you nasty bruises, so I'm not lining up to repeat that experience any time soon! That said, it was amazing, and I'm glad we got to do it... We got an 8 minute DVD and a roll of 35mm film to capture the memory, and we'd love to share it! :)

Other highlights of the honeymoon...

An evening ferry trip to Alcatraz w/ an audio tour... Mark got some footage inside the cell walls, and I saw a creepy time capsule cemented into the ground a bit away from the prison. It had some guy's name on it w/ the year (1926?) and "Do not open until 2026" carved under it. But none of the tour guides mentioned this.. I wonder if they'll open it up?

We also took a ferry to Vallejo and went to 6 Flags, where we got to watch a Dolphin show and a bird show, both were awesome! The roller coasters don't compare to Cedar Point's though..

Another fun thing was horseback riding in Yosemite, and taking a visit to see the Giant Sequoia trees. They're huge!!

By the time we got to Half Moon Bay for our last night, we were both exhausted and ready to come home. It was nice to be pampered by the Ritz once again before returning to Michigan, and the view of the ocean was amazing! We got upgraded from a golf course view to an ocean view since it was our honeymoon, but that was pretty much the only perk we got for being newlyweds on our entire trip! Mark did some filming out our window... and we think we spotted the local for a certain scene in American Wedding where the cake gets an unsightly makeover...

Well, that's all for now, folks! We miss you all and hope to see you/talk to you soon!

Love,
Mr. & Mrs. Mark Heimonen