Just a quick little summary before I get to the good stuff. We were able to move into our house on Wednesday and move out of the hotel. I love not being in a hotel! We somehow ended up on the executive level with access to the lounge that had unlimited snacks and drinks. I am sure the business men and women just loved us all walking through ,as they enjoyed a nice quiet cocktail, to get our chocolate or fruit milk and apples and snack mix.
We went to Madurodam this week which is really fun. They have made all of Holland’s most favorite sites and attractions into correctly scaled miniatures. It is a really cool place. I wish I had some good pictures to fully convey the coolness but the ones we took are not great.

Today we ventured on our first “out of country” trip. We went to the bi-annual Flower Carpet in Brussels,Belgium. Amazing!! In the Grand Place in front of City Hall they assemble this giant carpet of assorted flowers. For a small fee you can go up on the balcony of City Hall, kids are free–jackpot for us,and see an aerial view. Totally worth the 10€ to see it from above. On the balcony we bumped into some new friends from Church and ended up spending most of the rest of our afternoon with them.

The kids found it very amusing that as we walked the plaza some of the Asian tourists would stop taking the pictures of the carpet and take some of them instead. We tried to get the, to make funny faces or at least smile but somehow I ended up with shy kid.

We enjoyed waffles covered in assorted chocolate flavors and fruits for lunch before we found the statue Manneken Pis. He was dressed in an African outfit of some sort as far as we could tell for the Flower Carpet. Countries send him costumes all the time to wear. Pretty funny or awkward as one of the girls said.

The fun continued once we were back in the car and driving away when a biker stopped us to tell us we had a flat tire on our beast of a rental van. So since we had no spare in the rental we waited for about 2 hours for a very nice repair man to show up to fix it so we could head on our way. At least we had some yummy bread and chocolates we bought to snack on while we waited.