Good moments at home with family

Although our time visiting Canada was very much overshadowed by my Mom's illness, there were still many great moments during our visit, most importantly simply being able to be there then to encourage and help out. And going through this hard time together made me feel closer to my family - when I live so far away, that aspect was a wonderful blessing in the midst of the pain of seeing my Mom struggle so much.

We also got to go to Grand Rapids to visit people and for me to do some research, and we also had a few days of rest with friends at St. Gregory's Monastery (Three Rivers, MI). And everywhere we went, we seemed to manage to buy books!

But the highlight was still family, as you can see by these pictures taken by Janice and Matthijs:

Babysitting Emily's kids at Mom's

The following pictures are from the Heyink-family Christmas party. There's so many people that we have to rent a hall.

As much as it was great to visit, it is also nice to come back home to normal life in Amsterdam - which looks like this a lot of the time....