Week of July 22nd

On Monday Shawn and I we're invited to attend the opening session of a YSA conference for the Nordic countries called "Festinord". Each year it is held in different locations in northern Europe and this year Copenhagen had the privilege of holding it just 15 minutes from our house. Hilary and Joel, a friend of hers from Brick Oven, were lucky enough to be participants of this conference all week long. Brad Wilcox a professor at BYU, Tomas Koford who portrayed Jesus Christ in the movie "The Testament", Brother Mathew Richardson from the Sunday School General Presidency and Elder Olsen an Area Seventy from Sweden were all in attendance. Brad Wilcox was the perfect person to open the conference. He spoke about dating and had everyone rolling in laughter.
On Friday, we celebrated Heather's 14th birthday. I can't believe our children are getting so old. Pretty soon they are going to catch Shawn in age because we all know I stopped aging after 21. As a special birthday present we took Heather to the temple to do baptism with her brother. The temple is beautiful. While we were there a temple worker explained the paintings that are located in the baptistery. One of the paintings has some prominent people from Denmark depicted in it. After the temple we returned home for birthday cake and got more of a surprise than was expected. Elder Bailey and Elder Pierson (assistants to the president) showed up to bring Heather a little gift for her birthday and joined us for cake and ice cream. It is wonderful to have such good missionaries that our children consider good friends.