Our First Package!!!!

We got our first mail from home! How Fun! How Fun! Our Mission President came over here from Ljubjana, Slovenia, (where the mission home is located). He met us at the church and the first thing he said was that he had a package for us! I couldn't wait to get home to open it! How mean that I had to sit through two hours of church! It was worth the wait though!   Yummmm! Candy corns on Halloween Day! How great was THAT timing?  American gum, sugar free everything! Splenda, hot cocoa, Crystal light, mapleline, measuring cups, measuring spoons! PICKLES! I almost cried, I was so happy! Oh and we can't forget notes and  pictures from the grandchildren! Now I will have something to put on my fridge! Also our daughter, Crystal, sent DVD's for her entertainment starved parents! ALOT of them! Should keep us busy for date night for the next few months!



My kitchen art...



Yeah! Isn't it just perfect!

    Okay, this is the funny part about the box.... About a month into this mission I started doing the stupid hot flash thing...Long story short. I realized I had forgotten to bring my estrogen with me. It took me about six or seven weeks to start feeling the effects and realize what was going on. So I asked Crystal to send it to me. I also have been going nuts with nothing to do with my hands while we are in the car. I'm so used to doing Raggedy Anne hair that I felt like I was just wasting time. So I asked her to send the Raggedy Anne patterns to me as well. Soooooo, on the this HUGE box, she wrote on the customs receipt:  ESTROGEN and RAGGEDY ANN PATTERNS.  It got through! Didn't even get opened at customs! This is a new and wonderful way to get thing through customs. They must have thought "Wow that's a LOT of estrogen! Moral of the story?
Don't mess with a doll maker that needs her estrogen! I bet they are still laughing at the mission home!

Oh Thank-you all who helped put the box together.. It was wonderful! And Crystal thanks for going to all the effort.that you did to make it so amazing! And also making us laugh so hard we cried!

Today is a holiday here in Croatia, so we aren't working. It's all Saints Day. Tonight we will go to the Cemetery and try to get some pictures. The town has been a flurry of activity all last week. Selling flowers and candles for the graves. Beautiful flowers! The graveyard is pretty spectacular as it is, one of the most beautiful in all of Europe, I've been told., so we will be excited to see it all lit up tonight.

I stand corrected, I'm not working today. Jim is submitting a major initiative, wheelchair project to our Area Specialist in Frankfurt. I'm the only slug in this companionship, I blog, he works. Sounds good to me, what do ya think?  I am so grateful for our laptop, it is wonderful! Jim works on the church computer and so the laptop is essentially MINE! Thanks, Rusty, for getting it for us, I'm not sure what we would do without it. Our companionship might be seriously jeopardized if we were fighting over computer time!

This week we are meeting with our local Red Cross to set up a closing ceremony with them for the wheelchairs that just came into Zagreb. We are doing the first distribution of them here in Varazdin.
We are also working on a few other projects this week and then next Sunday we leave right after church to go to Banja Luka, Bosnia. We will be there for three days, helping with a neo-natal resuscitation training.

I made a grand purchase this last week. I bought a new apron. I found a little store in the centar that sold what Jim calls "Moo" aprons. It's his Finnish coming out. It cost me about $16.00. It's the traditional clothing of all the little old ladies here. Anytime they are doing work, inside or out, they wear these aprons. Many times when I see them out in the country on the street they have a scarf over their head tied under their chin as well. I got it just in time, because we had some Church Education Missionaries from Albania come visit us for the weekend and I broke it in, using it  to cook dinner on Sunday for them and the Mission President and his wife. The Missionaries from Albania are the parents of Jodie Kapp, a dear friend of ours that lives in our ward back home. Our grand-children, Chase and Mason, go to school with their grand-children! It was fun to meet them and spend some time with them.

It doesn't do much for making me look skinny, but it does keep me clean!

We love you all so much.  This morning, As I started into the living room, I saw Jim at our coffee table, staring down at all the pictures we have under the glass. I said to him,"do you miss them?", He quickly turn away, and muffled a "Ya, I do", before we both teared up a bit. We do miss you but we love our work and couldn't be more happy as we serve the Lord here in Croatia.

Our coffee table.  All the walls in the apartment are made of cement, so we hesitated to drill holes in them to put pictures up. Putting them under the glass on the table was our solution and we love it! Our family photos are just right where we need them!