Karen & Brent

Just thought i’d share a little story with all you, as Helena and Sara both just posted and since I love reading about whats going on for everyone so I thought i’d share a great little suprise that my friends did for me!

I went to try this dress on with a couple girls from school and it fit me perfectly, didn’t need to be altered or anything, just cleaned. The girls and I all loved it but it was way too expensive.
So one of the girls got on the phone pretending to be me and tried to get the price lowered. All the while, they were talking to Brent and trying to figure out how they could get this dress for me without me knowing.
Then they went and started a facebook thread with everyone from my program and just asked if anyone would be willing to chip in a couple bucks to help me get it. In the end, they paid for $200 of the dress and had $400 for me and Brent for stuff like getting it cleaned and whatever else!
Yesterday at school at the end of our first class two of my friends left the room and came back in carrying the dress…I was totally suprised and of course started balling! But it was so nice and just the thing to make someone feel completly special!

Well, for those of you who don’t already know, Brent and I have a date for our wedding. Its gonna be on June  14th of next year. We have the main things booked, such as the hall, caterer, pastor and church but now the plannings somewhat slowing down. I’m back in school and trying to get back into teh school mode…its been tough between work, practicum and school…I think I enjoyed my four months off a little too much. But its geting better and I think that I should get back in the mode in not too long.
Hope all is well for all you folks in BC and Ontario, and where ever else you may be!
Talk to you later, Karen!

Just a quick little reminder to everyone that if you could go into the Vander Veen forums and put your adress’ in there it would be great and muchly appreciated i’m sure from me, Brent, Tony and Jess. No huge hurry on it, but if you think about it and feel like doing it real quick it’d be great!

I just thought that I’d let you all know that last week Brent proposed to me and we’ve decided to get married sometime next spring. After hearing that Tony is also getting married, we’ll try and see when he’s planning to get married so we don’t overlap! But we are both very excited and can’t wait for the day to come!

I’ve also started a new “forum” on this site where everyone can put their adress’ on as it would make things easier for wedding invitations! Please take a look.

Karen

I just thought that I’d let you all know that last week Brent proposed to me and we’ve decided to get married sometime next spring. After hearing that Tony is also getting married, we’ll try and see when he’s planning to get married so we don’t overlap! But we are both very excited and can’t wait for the day to come!

I’ve also started a new “forum” on this site where everyone can put their adress’ on as it would make things easier for wedding invitations! Please take a look.

Karen

Since I don’t have any adorable kids to post pictures of on here, I thought I’d post a couple pictures of Sara and Lances beautiful children. Those of you who have facebook may have already seen them but those who don’t can now also see them.

 Myself with the two Jarvis children

  Uncle Heine playing “Eeyore”

   Just after Avi went swimming in her little pool

    Brent and Qhay

Anyways, we had a great time those couple of days spent at mom and dads cabin and it was so great that Sara braved the drive up alone with two little guys just to see us! Those eeyore and tigger costumes were just a hit with Avi and none of us knew of the hidden talent that Brent had of playing Tigger and Eeyore. I think that Avi would have done whatever he said as long as he made it seem as though Eeyore was saying it. She truly believed that he was there!

  Brent being Pooh Bear!

The couple days before spending some time with mom and dad, we were at a little reunion on the other side of the lake for Brents moms side of the family. This too was a lot of fun and I have to say that I’ve never celebrated a Canada Day as patriotic as this Canada day!

   Brent and I in our gettups!

  Canada Day Pancakes

Well, its been a while since i’ve posted anything on here, although I love reading other peoples so I figured I should do my share! Things have been going out here in Edmonton… we have a pretty busy summer ahead of us. Right now I’m typing this post on my brand new laptop which I bought for myself this summer. Quite an exciting purchase for me! Other then that, pretty much I’m just working alot…I have three jobs for the summer, cleaning twice a week, working in the group home that I did my practicum in (which is turning out to be quite the challenging job!) and then on any other days that I need some extra hours I do some gardening for a lady that I clean with. The last two jobs are just teaching me so much every day! For Canada day long weekend, Brent and I are going down to the cabin for just under a week. For the actual holiday weekend we’ll be at Brents cabin for a little family reunion and then the rest of the time we’ll probably be going back and forth as we always seem to do! Really looking forward to laying on the beach, going wakeboarding and not thinking about work! We’re gonna be doing it again in August but for over a week that time…makes the working overtime a little easier to bear when theres that to look forward to! Of course as you’ve seen in Helenas pictures we’ve also done some camping, and hopefully we’ll get to do that again at least once more! But I hope all is well and hope to hear news from everyone soon!

So things have been going good out here in Edmonton! In some ways busy but in some ways not at all. As you all probably know already, mom and dad were out two weekends ago which was a lot of fun although because of work I didn’t get to see them too much.

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And then last weekend Brents parents were out in Canmore and so we took a couple days off and went out to see them there and do a little more snowboarding. I was pretty excited to have four days off in a row, and we had a lot of fun during it. I’m having some issues posting these pictures so you’ll just have to bear with me if you can’t see them too well.

And then when we got back to Edmonton I realized that this weekend is Easter so I get another four day weekend…and I only had to work on the Saturday! It was quite exciting. We had a huge Easter dinner at my place with my roomates family and friends and Brent, Theresa and Shaun, so it was pretty nice and we spent the rest of the weekend relaxing!

I don’t know if anyones gotten around to reading Sara’s posting on her other site recently, but if you haven’t you should…it has quite the exciting news on it!

And now I have one more favor to ask of the Vander Veen siblings…for this genogram that I’ve been working on, I now have to write a paper on our family and different traits our family has. So if anyone has any info on things like what pake and beps parents did for a living, what year they immigrated, pretty much anything you can think of that might be interesting I’d really appreciate it! And I promise this’ll be the last time I ask! Sorry for being so long winded! Hope you all had a great weekend!

Well, I’m in the last few weeks of my first year of my program. I’m still not sure how I feel about being a student, but I guess I’ve kinda commited to a couple years of this and I might as well go through with it. At least its somewhat enjoyable!
This weekend me and Brent are going to Canmore to join his parents at their time share cabin. We’ll probably go boarding a couple days and I’d tell you all about mom and dads trip out, but it seems you’ve all heard about most of it already. Unfortunatly, I had to work alot of the time they were out here, but you guys out in Ontario are all gonna have a blast when they head out your way! Hope everyones having a good one…Karen

So we finally got off our butts and planned a time when we could all get together and Nick could come down. Just thought I’d quickly post a picture of our huge brunch that we had

…made by Shaun and Theresa! It was delicious and we all had a lot of fun. The night before we all went out and went to a comedy club.