Loel and Paula Tibbitts

You can tell it's been a slow news week when we put pictures on our blog of the new coat I bought at the outdoor market! That was about the most exciting thing that happened on P-day. We love the outdoor market, though. We bought vegetables, and nuts, and winter coats. (It's the first week of March. Look at how green the lawn is. The forsythia is all in bloom.)

I don't think you can see how many frites we have here, but this was our lunch today. They put a ton of fries in these cone things and then we got our favorite sauce, which is curry ketchup, mayonnaise, and fresh onions. Elder Marshall went with us to clean and de-junk a missionary apartment in Leuven, a town about 20 mins away that has been empty of missionaries for a year but will soon have more missionaries there. We literally packed our car full of junk to get rid of, did a lot of good cleaning, brought lots of sheets, towels and blankets home to wash, and threw a lot of things away, too. Later we'll return and take away their old couch and chair and bring them new ones and finish the last of our cleaning. Elder Marshall is in a threesome now so could go with us as his companions stayed back at the office. He'll be leaving us next week, which makes me very sad; he's been an excellent legality secretary for the office - he's such a can-do guy, always positive, so helpful and efficient. And he's been a great District Leader, too.
Elder Marshall helped me make all the posters and fliers for the Osmond firesides and we got them distributed to all the zone leaders.

And here I am after my haircut and color in front of the little shop just a few blocks from our apartment here in Brussels. I finally found a hairdresser who is wonderful! She doesn't speak much English, but enough to communicate with as to what I want.

We had a wonderful Zone Training in Antwerpen for our zone this week. The President and Sis Brubaker do the entire training. They both spoke about gratitude and counting our blessings each day, thinking about what is going well, instead of what isn't going well, etc. It was very good advice for everyone.

Afterwards, we drove up to the Netherlands to meet the lady who's over Public Relations for the Netherlands who I have been working with a lot on the Donny Osmond firesides. She invited us to dinner - they have a beautiful home and she made us a wonderful traditional Dutch meal. Slow cooked beef and then put them in little pots by each of our plates, mashed potatoes, applesauce, red cabbage, salad, and the cutest dessert - three different kinds of custard in this darling dessert dish. I'm so mad I didn't take any pictures of the evening! It was delightful. She commented on how we need to get together more often when we move up there. Again, it's very difficult to do many things like this when we live 2 hours away in Brussels.

(Loel) It's a small world. As we talked with Marianne, we found out that they had lived in Saudi Arabia at the same time as our daughter-in-law Mia. Mia's dad was their bishop.


Here is the poster and flier we made up to put up in the chapels and to hand out to investigators. Now we're working on cutting and pasting 600 of Donny's testimonies, picture, and signature into Books of Mormon to give out to interested visitors at the firesides.