16-22 April 2011

This has been a crazy two weeks. As a result, we posted last week's blog tonight also. If you're interested in maintaining continuity (big word for "if you want to stay in order"), you may want to go to the 9-15 April blog first.

This is in a little town called Monikendam close to Amsterdam - just a cool picture of a little Protestant church. These trees look like fists, but they soon bloom with tons of leaves on them. We took Andy's family here to wander around. Tyler and Bryce were fascinated with two young boys catching fish in the canal that ran through town. They liked that better than anything historical.

This is our favorite pannekoeken house or restaurant where we eat these huge Dutch pancakes with anything you want on them. Then we had dessert pannekoekens with ice-cream, fruit, chocolate, etc. Andy and Julia loved it.

A cool sunset from our Netherlands apartment's back balcony.

We took the boys out to the beach at the North Sea as it's so close to our apartment. They loved it, but we were all very cold, as you can see.

Andy discovered that our apt had a very nice vacuum and started making fancy hairdo's for the boys. Andy can find joy in just about anything!
For church on Sunday, we took a taxi to church as Loel had to be in Brussels. Andy made friends with the taxi driver and gave him a passalong card. He also made friends with an Italian investigator and enjoyed talking to him after the meeting. Andy said he felt like he was back on his mission and he loved it.


Andy and Julia took a couple of nice jogs around Rijnsburg, the town our Netherlands apartment is in. This is one of the pictures they took.
Andy's family flew home from Amsterdam last Monday. It was such a great trip, just like all the others when family have come to visit.

We had two wonderful days with our missionaries this week at our temple zone conferences. We went to the temple with half the mission one day, then had a lunch and devotional at the Leiden chapel and then went to Keukenhof together. Then we did the same exact thing the second day with the other half of our mission. It was wonderful to be in the temple with all of our missionaries and all the senior couples. Keukenhof was even more beautiful than a week ago as more flowers had bloomed. We drove the big mission van both days full of missionaries. Following are lots of pictures of Keukenhof.

The Grape Hyacinths are an intense purple. They actually took the old Hyacinths and made a picture of van Goth. Kind of a paint by number sort of thing. There are that many different colors of Hyacinths.

The gardens and water features are peaceful and beautiful.

Pres and Sister Brubaker

In the background are acres and acres of blooming tulips. They cut them and sell the blooms and then dig up the bulbs and sell them.

More gardens.

Most all of our sister missionaries were in this group on the second day. Notice the gorgeous tulip fields behind them.

More missionaries.

Tulip fields.

It's hard to take a bad picture.

Elder Sanford spent some time with us this day and we enjoyed him so much. He used to be in our zone and we miss him now, so it was good to see him again.

Several of the senior couples enjoyed a dinner out one night in Den Haag.

The Den Haag (The Hague) Temple.

And on the home front, Brad graduated Friday with his masters in biostatistics from BYU! Here's he and Emily on the happy occasion. Now they head off to North Carolina for a Ph.D program in August. Brad's the youngest of our nine kids and our last graduation until he finishes his Ph.D. and graduates again.