23-30 April 2011

Last Sunday, Elder Matthews was walking the Fourjour baby in the halls so Kate (who will be baptized tomorrow) could stay in class. Kate is very concerned about her children being disruptive and Elder Matthews and Elder Brockbank have been fantastic at helping the parents manage the seven children.

After Sacrament Meeting I was privileged to ordain Andy Thomas an Elder. Andy is a rarity in that he is Belgian, a young adult and a convert. He was baptized last August and he will soon be submitting his papers for a mission. He's an amazing young man.

This was our last Monday lunch in the Brussels Mission Office. We had to take one last picture of the Office Elders and the Assistants on the balcony overlooking Brussels. It's transfer week so there are always changes. Elder Brockbank is staying as an Assistant but moving to Amsterdam. Elder Matthews is staying in Antwerpen as a Zone Leader. We will miss them greatly.

On Tuesday we received eight new missionaries. They are great. They're enthused and ready to go to work.

Unfortunately, with the welcoming in of new missionaries, we also have to say good-bye to some old missionaries. Elder Owens (in front of chocolate cake) was in the office when we arrived and we got really close to him. Elder Thompson is another missionary we've felt a special kinship with - he goes home to Orem and lives about 1 mile from our house. Sis Brubaker borrowed our special ward cookbook chocolate bundt cake recipe and Eveline made chocolate mousse - together they made a very delicious dessert.

We also said good-bye to our trainers, the Pankratz. We were able to share in the wonderful testimony meeting after dinner, where we were able to listen to and participate in sharing our testimonies and thoughts.

The missionaries often order these special hand painted plates from the Netherlands that have their names on it, their mission, and the cities they served in.

The movers are here! These are actually are three office elders, trying to figure out what to do. the movers packed the office up in its entirety on Thursday, taking it all up to our new office in Leiden the next morning.

Here's Loel in our new office in Leiden, wondering how we're going to make it all fit. We've probably got half the space in our new office than in our old. This is supposed to be our big conference room, but instead it's piled high with boxes from the cave (basement storage), which we don't have in the new office.

I have the biggest office but it's mainly all used for storage of all of our missionary supplies, Books of Mormon, pamphlets, DVD's, cards, etc. Loel is actually out in front behind the reception desk in a cubicle. One whole side of the office is windows from floor to ceiling facing a very busy street, right in the middle of town and a 5 minute walk from the train station.

(Loel) It's a little disconcerting to have a couple of people outside the window looking in and reading the papers on your desk. I'm still puzzling over how I'm going to manage that. Maybe I'll just leave a copy of the Liahona open on my desk for them to read.

We were there in the new office until almost 11 pm on Friday, trying to get the internet, fax machine, etc. working, as well as unpacking and organizing and trying to make things fit. We got a little punchy at end of the day. Here's E. Mueller dressed up in his orange raincoat, in preparation for Queen's Day, a holiday in the Netherlands, every April 30th.
Elder Benson is sitting in front of him. He worked with me most of the day and evening, organizing my office.

On Queen's Day in the Netherlands celebrates the Queen's birthday. I don't know what day her real birthday is. Everyone wears orange (for the House of Orange), they have big celebrations, children's parades, bands, orange balloons which they let go into the sky at a certain time, and anyone who wants can sell things on the street. This one day of the year, street selling is allowed with no permit. So it's like a giant yard sale! A lot of kids have tons of toys for sale, as well as adults selling flowers, baked goods, jewelry, and anything else they want.

In our little village of Rijnsburg, they put flags on the canals. Our apartment is right on the main city square so we enjoyed all the festivities first hand.

Here are all the orange balloons being let go into the air on the right cue. Notice the cute church in the background, which is right across the street from our apartment.

The biggest find for me at the big yard sales was a little boy's soccer jersey - bright orange with Holland across the front. I bought it from him for 2.5 euros! The office elders were so envious! They kept saying how much they wanted an orange soccer jersey. I wore it the rest of the day, Queen's Day, so I would be in style. Here I am in our old office in Brussels that we then traveled back down to on Saturday. It's completely empty now and kind of sad to go there now. We went to pick up the mail and any other stray things that were forgotten.

This really ends an era. The Mission Office has been open at this location for about 15 years. It has been the Mission Office for the Belgium Brussels Mission (French speaking), the Belgium Brussels/Netherlands Mission (French and Dutch speaking) and the Belgium/Netherlands Mission, since March 2010 (Dutch speaking).

We will write our blog from Brussels for one more week (maybe) as we will be in Brussels next weekend to pack up our apartment and finally move to the Netherlands.

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.

9-15 April 2011

With Shelly and Jonny here, we decided to head south in the French speaking part of Belgium to La Roche en Ardennes - a town with a cool old castle from the 12th century. This is a picture of the ruins and the town in front.

You can see Shelly and Jonny peeking out of one of the little doorway holes in the castle.

Loel took this picture from above.

A nice view of the city from the top of the castle.

There's a tank in every town in this area as it's where the Battle of the Bulge took place (in the area).

We had so much fun taking Shelly and Jonny to the Antwerpen ward and meeting lots of friends. They got a double bonus by getting to see a baptism we had after church. This is Mary, who was baptized by her son, Bright. Her daughter, Blessing, is beside Bright - and the Antwerpen sisters, of course.

This is Victor, a wonderful man who Loel really bonded with and he asked Loel to baptize him. The sisters are so great to include us in some of their teaching.

President and Sister Brubaker also had family visiting and attended the baptism. Here we are with both of our visiting families.

After church we headed up to the Netherlands, stopping at Kinderdijk on the way up. We met the Evertons up there to get the key to our Netherlands apartment. We've mentioned in the past that there are 19 operating windmills here.

Loel can't get enough of the windmills here. (True, true.)

We drove the 8 mins from our apt to the town of Katwijk on the North Sea to show Shelly and Jonny how close we are to the ocean. (And caught a nice sunset.)

And, guess who are next visitors were!!?? Andy's family with two sleeping, very tired boys who didn't sleep on the whole plane ride, but fell asleep in their strollers as they went through customs in Amsterdam!!! So there was no running into Grandma's arms here. It was so great to see them again!

We had to maximize our time, so headed straight from the airport to Keukenhof, the tulip gardens that the Netherlands are so famous for. It is only open for April and May and is the third most photographed site in the world. Andy's family did amazingly well with no sleep the night before.

It was Shelly and Jonny's last day here and Andy's first, so we had a fun time with all of them here in these beautiful gardens. And again, both of their trips, the weather was perfect the entire time.

You can barely see the rows or tulips in the background of this picture - the following week, they were much more in bloom and more pictures will follow.

A picture's worth a thousand words?

Maybe more.

I wish I could say this was my kitchen! It's the Brubakers and we traded houses with them for a night - they used our apt up in the Netherlands with their family visiting, and we used their beautiful, big home, with tons of bedrooms, for our family. Here is Eveline, cooking us a delicious meal of sweet and sour chicken that she's so famous for. She's their helper from the Philippines and was there taking care of their home, so made us a wonderful dinner.

Since it was Shelly's last night, she just HAD to have one more Belgium waffle at the Grand Place. Andy's family went to bed while we took her back for one more waffle. I think these were her favorite food in Belgium. (Of course, the strawberries, whipped cream and hot chocolate sauce helps.)
I vaguely remember Tyler running into our bedroom at 2:00 am exuberantly exclaiming, "It's the middle of the night, and I'm wide awake!" He went back to sleep shortly after.

Ok, so here we are in our favorite market by the Brubakers the next morning. So why are Shelly and Jonny still in the picture? Their flight was cancelled so they got one more day with us! At first Shelly cried as it was Ben's birthday and she wanted to be home for it, but Jonny said, "Yay, one more day in Europe!" Andy's family was thrilled to have another day to spend with them, as were we.

Loel loved the arrangements of flowers they sell at this market. (These are a miniature variety of daffodils. There's also a miniature tulip.)

Now we took Andy's family to the Grand Place to show them, and Shelly and Jonny got to come for their third time and get another Belgium waffle!!

Right outside the Grand Place, some store put out tons of stuff for the garbage, and you can see that lots of people, including us, were looking through it for special treasures! The boys found some things they liked.

We had a lot of fun, all 8 of us crammed into our tiny kitchen eating dinner together. We had even more fun with all 8 of us sleeping in our tiny apartment. We actually seemed to do well.

Before Shelly and Jonny left for the airport, they went for a jog in our beautiful park with Andy and Julia, and loved it.
They did get fly out the second day, but had a minor scare where the airplane still wasn't fixed and they were going to route them through Frankfurt where they would then miss their connection in Chicago and have to spend the night. We left them, only to find out later that Jonny ran the entire length of the airport to discover their original flight was leaving and so they barely made it on, only losing one bag (which was delivered 3 days later).

After leaving the airport, we took Andy's family to our mission office to see what we do, enjoy the beautiful view, and meet the office elders. We walked to our favorite lunch place and got kebops with the elders. Tyler made friends with a nice man with a big motorcycle who was so impressed with all of us, that the elders were able to make a contact with him afterwards! Tyler's already a good missionary. He's not afraid to talk to anyone.

Here we are on a boat ride on a canal in Brugge, which was our next day's activity.

Brooke and Jake, my niece and nephew in law, joined us for the day as they were also here at the same time. It was really fun to have them with us. Tyler immediately bonded with Jake and was his special friend, telling him at the end of the day, "Jake, you're a lot of fun."

Here's Tyler on a little motorcycle thing with Andy taking a picture of him. Andy took hundreds of pictures while on this trip. He LOVED Brugge.

Cute Brooke and Jake in one of the town squares.

This was actually one of the highlights of the trip for me. Andy made sure to bring a suitcase big enough to fit the boys' swords and shields, so they could have a sword fight in front of a castle. This is the castle we had stayed at the week before outside of Brugge with Shelly and Jonny, so we drove back there for the sword fight.

Here are the men in battle.

And after the battle - they were victorious, of course!

So the next day they got to do it all over again, this time in front of the Steen Castle in Antwerpen. A whole group of Japanese tourist came up and got such a kick out of them having their sword fight - they took lots of pictures and one man grabbed Tyler, picking him up and hugging him!

The famous statute in the Grote Markt in Antwerpen - Andy's getting Tyler to pose in front of it. Brabo, the hero of Antwerpen, has vanquished the giant, cut off his hand and is throwing it into the river Schelde. There's more to the story, but I can tell you that when we get home.

We had Brooke and Jake with us again today as we drove up to the Netherlands to stay in our apartment up there and to attend the Donny Osmond fireside. This is kind of a crummy picture of his family, singing a couple of primary songs (Elder Osmond is in front; Donny is on the far right). These three firesides were extremely successful with our mission receiving over 150 referrals from people who want to learn more!
Andy enjoyed visiting with one of Donny's sons who had served in Italy with him. Donny sang one song (we wish he had sung a few more) and gave a great missionary fireside, explaining his beliefs, having his son, Elder Osmond, whose in our mission, bare his testimony, and also gave a great gospel discussion. We were very pleased with the results.